ABSTRACT
With the historical fiction Jiseul, South Korean director O Meul set out to "conduct a funeral ritual". O's affective construction of cinema as ritual space has multiple spectatorial implications which the author explores, as O does, by putting aside the plotline of the historical tragedy and focusing instead on the particular moments in the film in which collective mourning could possibly erupt. Jiseul's reliance on rhythmic cinematography to construct ritual space and the audience's metatextual engagement with the film cannot be overemphasized. Throughout the film, the audience are invited to experience the undulating motion between extreme close-ups of grass and the extreme long shots of Jeju's spectacular curvy hills, filmed at a low angle. Overshadowed by the striking portrait of the landscape, nature and inanimate objects, the protagonists often enter the frame only as an afterthought. In reenacting the 1948 state campaign of massacre in a cinematic language of shamanism, Jiseul makes more than an aesthetic proposition.
