The Subjunctive Mode, CGI, and Digital Editing: Documentaries on the Yongsan Massacre and the Sewol Ferry Disaster

Abstract

This article discusses the applications of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and digital non-linear editing to three documentaries from the 2010s on social events that profoundly impacted contemporary South Korean society, including the Yongsan Massacre of 2009 (Two Doors [Tu kae??i mun, Kim Il-ran and Hong Ji-yoo, 2012]) and the Sewol Ferry disaster of 2014 (Intention [K??nal, pada, Kim Ji-yeong, 2018] and Ghost Ship [Yury??ngs??n, Kim Ji-yeong, 2020]). It argues for two significant contributions of the films to Korean nonfiction filmmaking and its commitment to the Korean society???s contested reality and politics. First, the films attest to the formal and aesthetic expansion of documentary practice in the twenty-first century???and, by extension, to its production of reality and truth???in ways that are irreducible to the verit?? mode of the 1980s and 90s. And second, more than asserting the disavowal of the objective truth, the digital images and techniques employed in the films are used to scientifically investigate and reconstruct the events beyond the camera???s record for the sake of unveiling their truths. In order to demonstrate these two points, I examine the uses of digital imagery and technique in the three films in light of how they mobilize what Mark J. P. Wolf has called the ???subjunctive mode,??? a subgenre of the documentary ???concerned with what could be, would be, or might have been.???