Identifying the Genre of The Journals of Musan as Ontological Affective Realism

ABSTRACT This article undertakes an intertextual reading of French film critic André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) and the South Korean film The Journals of Musan (2010). It identifies the genre of The Journals of Musan as ontological affective realism through the film’s symmetrical comparability with Bazin’s theory of cinema. Ontological affective realism is a label applied by this article to a typology of art denoting a film-technique of reproducing reality. It comprises an artistic subjectivity that is naturally entailed when a film’s realism objectively represents its subject. The ontology of being is dramatically revealed through this subjective objectivity in the reproduction of reality on film. Viewers can finally acknowledge the object as the subject through the process of reading an object manifested through realistic affective subjectivity and can simultaneously learn the artistic methodology of reading the other.