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Pre-Screening Discussion
The conceptual questions outlined above are complex and intended to help instructors introduce the film and lead class discussion after students have watched the film. In simplified form, they can also serve as pre-screening discussion questions that prime students to watch the film analytically:
- How is political protest represented in cinema and in the media? What recent examples of such representations can you call to mind?
- How do films about the past make claims to authenticity? Why?
- How do you deal with historical inaccuracies in movies? Do you discount them because movies are entertainment? Have you ever watched a historical film and later learned that it got something wrong? Does this change your engagement with the film?
- Why are films about historical events made and remade? What hold does the past have on us? What happens when we retell stories about the past? Might we say that movies about the past are also, in a way, about the future?
- How do you become engaged when watching a historical movie? What strategies do films use to make their content approachable to viewers?
- As you will see in the film, fake news is not a new phenomenon! What happens when the news is not true? The film is about falsified reports of an event in the 1980s and an attempted cover up. The false narratives from that time are periodically called up by right wing figures in contemporary South Korea. What false narratives have you noticed? How are they used by politicians? How do you respond to them? Can a really well-made film about a sensitive subject “set the record straight”?
- Finally, a slightly lighter question. South Korean pop culture is hugely popular—what sort of South Korean continent have you consumed? Based on your experiences, what do you expect from a popular Korean film starring a popular actor?
After a brief discussion, students will be ready to watch the film critically. Noticing details that pertain to the questions above as they watch will further equip them to analyze the film in a post-screening discussion and any related writing assignments. Some things to watch for:
- Claims to history/authenticity/truth
- Hinzpeter’s camera
- The South Korean domestic news media
- Kim’s relationship to the protest
- Excessive emotion
- Children and parents
- National iconography
- How are soldiers represented?
Suggested Sequences for Analysis
- Rooftop filming
In a crucial scene, Hinzpeter is on a rooftop with his camera. A close up shows him lift the device to his eye and start filming. In a reverse shot, we see what he is looking at. Soldiers are attacking protestors as they run away. This is not documentary footage, yet the shot-reverse shot structure suggests a certain parity between Hinzpeter’s camera and the film’s own. The perspective matches the view from the roof and the camera even moves, as if held by (Hinzpeter’s) hand. After several shots between Hinzpeter and the protest below, the film cuts to Jae-sik, showing him looking down on the protests in a low angle shot. Suddenly, when the film cuts back to the protest below, the perspective is no longer Hinzpeter’s but Jae-sik’s. It is now a South Korean looking on. There is somehow a slippage between two points of view. At another point in the sequence, the shot of the street below changes in quality, appearing blurrier, as if it was indeed Hinzpeter’s footage, but the film cuts away to an image of the same scene that was obviously filmed for A Taxi Driver. Here, there is a different slippage, a confusion between the historical record (Hinzpeter’s actual footage) and A Taxi Driver. The film seems to be commenting on its own function as a historical record in this sequence.
How can these paragraph be enriched and expanded with details and close analysis?
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- How is Hinzpeter’s perspective different from Jae-sik’s?
- What is the camera doing here? What is the relationship between Hinzpeter’s camera and the camera that is recording the film?
- What does the rooftop location do for this scene? How is a protest seen from above? What is more obvious from this perspective and what is missing?
- Who else is on the roof and what are they looking at?
Compare this sequence with other moments in A Taxi Driver when Hinzpeter is filming. How is his relationship and the camera’s relationship to the events in Gwangju represented? The Gwangju protestors are avidly watching what is going on, but when does Kim start to notice what is going on? Hinzpeter’s camera is doing important work here by exposing the truth to the world, but Kim is literally on the spot of the crime and seems not to notice it. For example, Hinzpeter records the coffins and bodies of dead students in a hospital. By the point in the film, Jae-sik has been killed and Kim Man-seob has come around to supporting the protests. How does this scene read when paired with the rooftop moment? How is the aftermath of political violence represented?
Approaches to Essays
Writing about film works most effectively when visual analysis supports the argumentation about what the film means. Close attention to specific moments in the film allows students to tease out tensions and complexities rather than regurgitate generalizations. The goal is to observe details and figure how they work together to produce meaning (as patterns, binaries, etc.). Shifting from deductive to inductive reasoning will help avoid essays that are repetitive and predictable. Even if students begin with an obvious claim, “A Taxi Driver is not accurate in its depiction of Hinzpeter’s time in Gwangju; it’s bad history.” The book Writing Analytically offers a simple framing that I’ve found to be incredibly useful in teaching writing to incoming undergraduates: “Although X appears to account for Z, Y accounts for it better” (154). This approach adds tension to the argumentation, allowing students to develop a nuanced argument that can account for contradictions and anomalies in the film that they are writing about. The tension between factual accuracy and the production of a historical narrative about Hinzpeter actually makes A Taxi Driver a rather complex film about the stakes of political representation. First discussing the conceptual questions in class and then adapting them as essay assignments that require students to expand on initial claims and mobilize textual evidence to produce an argument develops critical thinking skills. Going through such exercises especially in relation to a pop culture product can help students relate to content they consume in their everyday lives in a more critical way.
A Taxi Driver in Comparative Perspective
- The Attorney is a best-selling 2013 film inspired by a real events, a case in which a book club was accused of being North Korean spies. Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung, both future presidents of a democratic South Korea, defended the students and teachers who were ultimately convicted of being spies. It is available for free on YouTube, linked above.
- 1987: When the Day Comes is a best-selling 2017 film about the 1987 killing of a student activist and the government’s attempted cover up. Outrage at the incident contributed to the June Democracy Struggle. The film is also available on YouTube, but costs $3.99.
- Xu Yong’s photobook Negatives is a record of the Tiananmen Protests of June 1989. The book features blown up negatives of his photos of the event and asks viewers to use their cell phone cameras with colors reversed to “develop” the images and examine them. An article with images from the book is available at the lensculture website here. The book itself is available relatively cheaply on Amazon. In includes essays that help contextualize the materials.
Supplementary Materials
- There are numerous academic books about Gwangju and the Minjung Movement. Namhee Lee’s The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea is an intellectual and cultural history of the democracy movement.
- The University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings has published extensively on modern Korea, including several books that are quite accessible to popular audiences like Korea’s Place in the Sun.
- Without Leaving a Name Behind is documentary on Gwangju and Hinzpeter made by the South Korean broadcaster MBC.
- The radical left American magazineJacobin recently published “The Heroic Gwangju Uprising Sowed the Seeds of Democracy in South Korea,” an account of the uprising by the Gwangju Democratization Movement Commemoration Committee, a group that collected testimonies of the events. The testimonies were translated and published in a volume titled Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea.