ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

There is a decade-long production gap between Pepe Danquart’s Schwarzfahrer (Germany, 1994) and Park Chan-wook’s Believe It or Not: The Case of Chandra (South Korea, 2004). While both films depict racism in the early 1990s, they offer a compelling point of comparison in how they penetrate the “Age of Barbarism” from the perspective of the Other within markedly different historical contexts. In Germany, this period coincided with the so-called Baseballschlägerjahre—a time of violent xenophobia, especially in the former East Germany following reunification. In contrast, South Korea exhibited a broad societal ignorance of migrant workers, coupled with a lack of imagination and institutional frameworks to recognize or accommodate difference. This is tragically exemplified in the Chandra case, where a Nepalese labourer was incarcerated for six years and four months after being misidentified as an unrelated intellectually disabled person—an incident enabled by the implementation of the Industrial Technical Training Programme (1991). These divergences in historical and institutional context, particularly concerning the visibility or erasure of race, shape how each film constructs the gaze and represents the Other. Danquart explicitly frames the process of othering by juxtaposing white hate speech and black silence within the same audiovisual space. In contrast, Park Chan-wook foregrounds the exclusionary logics of Korean society as they infiltrate the senses and inner world of the racialized Other through Chandra’s first-person point of view (POV), thereby subverting the traditional subject-object relation of the gaze. Although racism is the apparent referent in these films’ gaze strategies, their deeper effect lies in provoking the viewer’s ethical awareness. Both works encourage the spectator to recognize themselves as both the gazer and the gazed-upon in the Lacanian sense. In short, while Danquart and Park Chan-wook employ distinct approaches to cinematic gaze, neither is subsumed by didacticism. Instead, they cultivate an aesthetics that invites reflection and ethical engagement.

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