Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema

3 The Female Body and Enunciation in Adada and Surrogate Mother

CHAPTER 3 The Female Body and Enunciation in Adada and Surrogate Mother A dada, Im Kwon-Taek's film about a woman who is destroyed by JL\- patriarchy, begins with a most unusual scene, a close-up on a hand using sign-language to speak silently on the topic of sick and healthy bodies and minds. As the white hand and itsfingersmove before a black background, the signifiers they set afloat in the air are simultaneously translated in subtitles: "Although I, a mute, am physically disabled, my mind is healthy. The people who lived around me had healthy bodies, but their minds were disabled." This uncanny scene conjures up many questions and an unsettling curiosity: Is this a voice-over narration of some kind? Who is "I"? Is it male or female? How is the sign-language statement related to thefilm?And, since the "I" speaks of itself in the present tense and of "the people" in the past, is the living "I" talking about people who are dead? Though the matter of the life and death of the characters is not resolved until thefilm'send, answers to the other questions are supplied after the credits, in a sequence where a mute girl breaks a honey pot. We can then identify the "I" with the mute, and understand that in THE FEMALE BODY AND ENUNCIATION 85 the opening she made comments about herself and the people who troubled her life. But there still remains an eerie impression. For even if we put aside the literal absence of a voice in the voice-over, we are still not able to localize its signifiers. We cannot attach the "voice" to a body from which it issues as in typical voice-over narrations of fiction films for, except for her hand, the narrator's body is outside the frame. Emanating from her "dismembered" body, her partially disembodied narration hovers in cinematic space without being anchored to a source. Further rupturing the typical use ofvoice-over as an initiator of narrative is the excessive gap between the mute girl's "voice-over" and the film's diegesis. Not only does the credit sequence separate her "voice-over" from the diegesis, her narration does not introduce the diegesis; rather it comments about it. Deprived of a determinate location, her "voice" drifts through the border between the inside and the outside of the frame and of the diegesis. The uncomfortable feeling evoked by the unidentifiable enunciator deepens further when the film's conclusion reveals that the dismembered body is already dead, that her signifiers can never return to their corporeal source. This mysterious posthumous voice-over discloses and illuminates the destiny of the female voice and body in Adada. On the one hand it strongly suggests that in the film the female voice is absent, that when she attempts to speak she is cut off and relegated to invisibility. Yet even though her voice is silent, her body speaks nevertheless, by whatever means—even transcending death. The voice-over becomes a "bodyover " that goes beyond an otherwise absolute limit. Women's deaths are a staple in Im Kwon-Taek's films, particularly those that have been successfully received on international film circuits, films like Surrogate Mother (Ssibaji, 1986), Adada (1988), and Sopyonje (Sopydnje, 1993)—which won awards respectively at the Venice, Montreal , and Shanghai festivals—and more recently Chunhyang (Ch'unhyangdyon , 2000), which was invited to compete in the 2000 Cannes festival. By and large these films are centered on three elements: premodern Korea as a historical setting, beautiful landscapes, and victimized women. Women are abused, humiliated, abandoned, tortured, and sometimes killed in pristine natural settings. Absorbed into the beauty of the mise-en-scene, the suffering women are aestheticized and scarcely 86 EUNSUN CHO allowed to articulate their pain. When they die, they do so in coerced silence, their trouble-ridden bodies effaced. The aesthetics of Im's films typically suppress women's agency and usurp their voices, disseminating an "imaginary signifier" of Koreanness : sacrificed but enduring and ever beautiful women. But within this oppressive cinematic space there are intermittent lapses, inconsistent moments when the aesthetic does not completely muffle women's enunciation . Sometimes, even when deprived of their voices, women speak through their bodies. And sometimes, when they are killed in filmic space, they appear in the form of a phantasmagoric body to make their suffering heard—as in the opening sequence...