제주 4.3의 여성 기억 서사와 다큐멘터리 <목소리들>: 증언의 거부와 재현의 충동 = Women’s Memory Narratives of the Jeju 4.3 Incident and the Documentary Voices: The Refusal of Testimony and the Impulse for Representation

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper analyzes the documentary Voices, which focuses on the testimonies of female victims of the Jeju April 3 Incident, in order to examine both the predicament of women’s testimonies in the representation of traumatic events and the representational impulse of the postmemory generation. Drawing on discussions of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust—particularly those by Jacques Rancière—it critically investigates the representability of traumatic events that remain as blank spaces, as well as the representational strategies employed in Voices.
The documentary follows four female survivors of Jeju 4.3 in an effort to document their experiences of victimization; however, their testimonies remain either rejected or incomplete. To fill this void of incomplete testimony, the documentary introduces a researcher from the postmemory generation as a collective witness—serving simultaneously as the documentary’s narrator and as a translator of these fragmented testimonies. At the same time, it reenacts unrecorded events through animation and mimics the viewpoints of the event’s direct participants. Through these methods, the documentary refuses to treat the female victims’ experiences of 4.3 as an unrepresentable event.
Yet, on the other hand, this strategy of representation grounded in resemblance risks simplifying the complex and multilayered context of testimony, particularly the women’s active practice of refusing to testify. This paper thus links such an obsession with representation to the postmemory generation’s crisis consciousness, while critically examining the representability of events conventionally understood as unrepresentable.