Memories of the demos and popular Korean moving image narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper will discuss how recent popular cinema reflects upon the democratization process in South Korea since the 1980s. Films and television dramas depict the trials and travails of pro-democratic activists and the exercise of violent oppression by authoritarian dictatorship. In their appeal to the audience sentiment, popular Korean moving image narrative about democratization work within the affective and ethical constraints set out by the melodramatic mode in their mobilization of concepts of outrage, sympathy, and justice. The paper develops the term ‘affective interlude’ to highlight the aesthetics of these narratives. This paper attempts to show how melodrama’s domestication of grievance provides the exceptional conditions for the formation of authoritarian sovereign power. While popular film and dramas about democratization in Korea reiterate the sovereignty of the people and the narrative of resistance concomitant with it, they also insist on the relationship between emotion and memory as well as the importance of critique for the continued maintenance of the demos.