Nothing New Under the Sun: Under the Sun, Vertov, and Cinematic Ethics

• In Event: Whose Gaze?: Capitulations, Compromises, and Reconstructions of Non-Hegemonic Identities in Soviet and Post-Soviet Spaces

Abstract

This paper treats the 2015 documentary Under the Sun, directed by Vitaly Mansky, a film set in North Korea whose aim is sardonically summarized in its opening onscreen text as: “showing the life of a perfectly ordinary family in the best country in the world.” Within the film, the North Korean government attempts to invent, script, manicure, and otherwise fictionalize the life of the subject family in a way that flatters the status quo of the nation. Mansky summons his own arsenal of cinematic technique - letting the film run, asking probing questions beyond the script, etc. – to overcome said political imposition. The paper highlights the similarities between Mansky’s approach and Vertov’s, both directors deploying their films to highlight and penetrate the usual fictional and fictionalizing norms of cinema to “catch life unawares,” “record life as is” and contribute to the greater emancipation of humankind in both artistic production and ideological thinking. Yet simultaneously, the paper questions the triumphalism behind the mode, examining the material effects of such a practice that would “liberate” the manipulated child actor and her family from the manipulations of the government, only to strand them after one’s own, truth-seeking, norm-breaking emancipatory cinematic project is finished, thereby ironically recreating the boundary between reality and fiction. The paper further ruminates on this phenomenon through the lens of voyeurism: is it liberation or merely its spectacle and pleasure that remain?

Author

• Youngkwang Shin, Harvard U