KJCKorea
Journal Central

Part of modernization was disenchantment. Religion replaced shamanism with a set of creeds. However, the expanding intellectualism and rationality, and technological progress, were not sufficient to fulfill our inner selves’ longings. Where politics in practice could counsel only unreliable visions, anxiety about labor conditions dared modern people to connect back to pre-modern shamanism, this time through cutting-edge technology. Hence the return of Zaubergarten. Korean films depicted shamanism through its local Korean version. Korean shamanism is depicted through three different modes: Firstly, ‘horror’ mode adopting motifs such as vindictive ghosts, revenge, shamanism. Secondly, ‘erotic’ mode where ecstasy meets primitivism. Thirdly, ‘redemption’ mode that reveals the injustices of the social structure befallen on the alienated class and resolves them on behalf of the consciousness of the base-level class and the victims. The most interesting to me is the third mode from which the films <MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits> and <Spirits’ Homecoming>. <MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits> fused shamanism with the typical characteristics of the cinematic medium to show people’s sufferings in modern Korean history as seen from the alternating perspectives between a shaman, KIM Keum Hwa, and others watching her, and between the Subjective and the Objective. The film experiments with a new method of using cameras as a ritual tool, turning the film into a cinematic ritual. <Spirits’ Homecoming> sought redemption of the Japanese comfort women issues, which have not been resolved either politically or historically, through shamanistic motifs. The film adopted shamanism as a narrative medium connecting the present with the past. Gut is a narrative tool helping the spirits of the comfort women come back home and is also performing its own original function of healing people’s dissatisfaction with the external political reality.

Zaubergarten, disenchantment, shamanism, horror, erotism, redemption, <MANSHIN: Ten Thousand Spirits>, <Spirits' Homecoming>, Gut, healing