Testimony Film and Archive Turn: Regarding the Legibility of Park Soo-nam's Fragmentary Outtakes

Abstract

Although literature on testimony film has traditionally cast the present-tense work of bearing witness to historical catastrophes as a counterpoint to the institutionalized mode of historiography rooted in the positivist “archive”, Claude Lanzmann’s two-pronged move to donate and re-deploy the monumental archive of 220 hours worth of “outtakes” from his film Shoah (1985) has spurred an “archival turn” in the field. Through a case study of Resident Korean (Zainichi) author Park Soo-nam’s vernacular archival practices, this article examines the critical questions that arise from the “archival turn” specifically in the context of East Asia’s unfinished work of decolonizing. By examining an ongoing project, my study calls attention to the productive slippages that lie between the archive effect and the actually-existing archives, outtakes-as-documents and outtakes-as-films-that-might-have-been, and the “slow catastrophe” of celluloid’s disintegration and the historical catastrophes it records.