문학과 지성사

Throughout his career, sociologist Kim Hong Jung has catalyzed both academic and public discourse on the collective psyche of Korean society and how to restructure the “mind” from a sociological perspective. Belief in the World is a collection of his recent essays on film, covering a wide range of auteurs from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jia Zhangke, Kelly Reichardt, Mikio Naruse, Aki Kaurismäki, the Coen brothers, Park Chan-wook, and Park Hae young. Through the cinematic lens of the works of these directors, Kim makes a careful assessment of the world in which belief no longer seems possible.

The author makes clear from the outset that the goal of this book isn’t to come up with bold interpretations or original profiles of these already internationally known directors. He doesn’t call himself a critic or a cinephile but a “cine patient,” who is at the same time a patient infected with a virus that is cinema and someone who patiently accepts the different worlds that films provide. Such an emphasis on passivity, however, is not a gesture of modesty—Kim’s search for the possibility of recognizing the world anew through cinema resonates with the concept he calls “image-breaking power,” that is incapable of promising any future, a long-time research interest of his as a sociologist.

Via works of cinema that have shown us the unstable people living in this broken world, countless nonhuman beings that have been only instrumentally understood, and the night and day of the moments beyond our comprehension, Belief in the World discusses whether it is possible to have belief in this day and age, and if it is, what that belief would look like.