MoMA Documentary Fortnight 2014 Review: Tour of Duty (2013) - NP Approved

Director: Dong-ryung Kim, Kyoung-tae Park
Country: Documentary
Genre: South Korea

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for Museum of Modern Art‘s Documentary Fortnight 2014 which runs from February 14th to February 28th. For more information visit www.moma.org and follow MoMA on Twitter at @MuseumModernArt.

The English title of Kim Dong-ryung and Park Kyoung-tae’s latest documentary effort makes one think immediately of soldiers and their time of service. In this sense, the title is painfully ironic. The film’s Korean title, The Land of Spiders, is more ambiguous and provocative with regards to its subject. ‘The Land of Spiders’ is a more appropriate entry point to the film’s opening shots of lush vegetation, shade against sunlight, a set of abandoned buildings among the growth. An interior shot follows: rays of light pierce through the window of one of the decrepit buildings. This ‘Land of Spiders’ is silent, depopulated, and seemingly left to ruin and oblivion. In actuality, the film presents the lives of three women who had been prostitutes in a now ghost American military camp town and surrounding village in Gyeonggi Province, during the decades following the Korean War (1950-1953). Filmmakers Kim and Park collaborate with Park Myo-yeon, Park In-soon, and Ahn Sung-ja to speak of scarred minds and bodies in the face of silence and remember in the face of forgetting.

 …the film presents the lives of three women who had been prostitutes in a now ghost American military camp town and surrounding village in Gyeonggi Province…

But Kim and Park opt for a more oblique approach to present the three women and their difficult pasts instead of a very direct way, which would have each of them simply sit down in front of the camera and narrate their respective histories. Kim and Park include some sit-down conversations, but for the most part they stitch together images both banal and elegiac (including maps and photographs) and oral testimonies of the three women, according to the nature of their collaboration with each of them. More specifically, they often transform the women’s oral testimonies into voiceovers for disparate, sometimes unexpected, images, resulting in striking juxtapositions and mood. In doing so, they convey the unsettling tone of these women’s present lives beneath the surface of the everyday, fly-on-the-wall footage of them. After the opening shots, the film moves from the deserted ghost American military camp town and village to an eatery front through a simple cut, and introduces the woman who opens the eatery: Myo-yeon. Static shots of her cooking or giving herself an injection maintain the film’s strictly detached stance. After several more shots of Myo-yeon that carry into another day, she speaks of her hard life and bitterness towards men; her words are unadorned and honest and so reject the reductive label of a victim.

In-soon’s presence in the film wavers between embodied and disembodied.  Her voiceover about pain, ghosts, and experiences to be told or hidden is often matched with several scenes of nocturnal, solitary walks in her neighbourhood. Her nocturnal scenes are dream-like: she in shadow and silent on the image-track while on the soundtrack is her voiceover, fragmented, uttered almost like a prayer, and addressed to her children in the U.S. Her nocturnal scenes are also like a visualisation of her dark past and subjectivity; they contrast heavily with her calmer demeanour while exercising in her room or attending prayer meetings in the daytime. Like Myo-yeon, In-soon speaks bluntly of her pain; but more than Myo-yeon, she also speaks of her anger. At one point, angry words towards a GI pierce through in a voiceover over images of her paintings of girls’ faces with distorted expressions. Through this juxtaposition, Kim and Park show how In-soon’s words and paintings alike work through her rage. The striking aural and visual juxtapositions become more frequent with each woman, culminating with the representation of Sung-ja’s experiences.

 Kim and Park show how In-soon’s words and paintings alike work through her rage. The striking aural and visual juxtapositions become more frequent with each woman…

Kim and Park gesture towards Sung-ja’s more performative mode of storytelling with the conclusion of In-soon’s segment. While walking through the woods, she performs a ritual of exorcism by throwing water and pieces of food in the air and on fences that betray the site of former military bases, and by uttering words that would rid her of disease, the memories of bad people, in short, her pain. Sung-ja’s portion constitutes the most intriguing and extended one of the film. Through her, the film obscures the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and crosses into the realm of performance art.

Sung-ja, who is half-Korean/half-African American, is initially presented in her home. Like In-soon’s voiceover addressed to her children, Sung-ja’s voiceover is addressed to her mother (whereabouts are unknown) and expresses her feelings of abandonment. A desperate, torn desire to see her mother and the anguish of her mother’s own history of prostitution haunt her. Though she shares this desire and anguish in words through voiceover (such as Sung-ja and a man’s dialogue looking for her mother in archival photos of GIs and Korean women), gradually she articulates her story through performance. The film visually and narratively shifts into an elaboration of ‘haunt’: Sung-ja not only walks around her village but also revisits the entertainment district of the former military camp town. We thus return to the sites that opened the film, only this time Sung-ja gives a voice and body that not only refers to herself but also to other women who had similar experiences.

In this regard, the film’s voiceover narrative-within-a-narrative, ‘The Story of Annie and Sera, 1969-1978,’ is very telling. The story of these orphan girls, their friendship, and Sera’s particular travails unfolds as one sees fragments of Sung-ja wearing a white dress and holding a candle to a mirror and looking at herself as if she were a ghost; or wearing the pink polka dot dress that she found in an empty room. Slowly, Sung-ja comes to embody the girls’ experiences.

Significantly, Kim and Park do not identify the three women in the film, so that they speak not only for themselves but also for other former prostitutes known and unknown.

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Rowena Santos Aquino

Sr. Staff Film Critic

Film lecturer at CSULB. Transnational, multilingual, migratory cinephilia.

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