Taehyun Baek, The Aesthetics of Memory and Resistance: Cinematic Practice of the Korean New Wave in A Single Spark - p. 41
This study examines how A Single Spark rearticulates the social realism of the Korean New Wave as a cinematic practice of memory situated at the junction of representation and mediation. The film foregrounds the labor of recording by showing how social memory acquires form and authority through the collection of traces, the arrangement of testimonies, and the editing of fragments into a coherent narrative. It also develops an affective regime in which the repressed history of labor becomes perceptible through rhythm, as registered in the cadence of work, the duration of silence, and the suspended time of witnessing. Within this sensorial field, structural violence becomes perceptible as an experience organized through perception.
The film’s self-reflexive design consists of the chronicler’s narration, the mother’s testimony, and the worker’s silence. This composition installs ethical distance as a formal principle. That distance becomes a condition for cinematic thought, shaping how the film acknowledges the limits of testimony while sustaining the demand to remember. The analysis situates this sensorial realism within the institutional discourse of the 1990s, when film festivals and critical writing reframed realism as a privileged language of national identity and cultural legitimacy. This institutionalization also preserved the reflective tension of this sensorial realism, enabling the Korean New Wave to persist as a mode through which Korean cinema continues to negotiate memory, history, and mediation.
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