Sino-NK

Jiseul (2012) | Image: International Film Festival Rotterdam.

On 3 May 1948, longtime correspondent Richard J H Johnston informed readers of The New York Times that, in the US-administered half of the Korean Peninsula, a “small-scale war” was raging on the island of Jeju.[1] Although his reporting was coloured by early Cold War bias, Johnston’s evocation of war was apt. Initiated by the local communist South Korean Labour Party (SKLP) committee on 3 April 1948, the Jeju Uprising is often situated within broader historiographical periodisations of the Korean War incorporating civil violence south of the 38th parallel preceding 1950.[2] Most immediately, the uprising emerged in response to a decision by the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) to proceed with elections establishing an independent government in the South, an initiative US officials correctly anticipated would consolidate an anti-communist regime aligned with American containment strategy in East Asia.[3]   

Following 3 April, a cycle of violence and counter-violence between SKLP guerrillas and South Korean government forces resulted in 14,028 officially recorded deaths. Typical estimates, however, place total casualties between 25,000 and 30,000, approximately 10 percent of the island’s population, the vast majority of whom were civilians.[4] The uprising subsided and Jeju’s seat in the National Assembly was filled by May 1949, though it was not until September 1954 that the last guerrilla remnants were suppressed.

While atrocities were committed by both sides, 78.1 percent of the officially recorded victims were attributed to government forces, and 12.6 percent to guerrillas.[5] Mountain villages were razed,[6] punitive collective punishment widespread,[7] and arbitrary arrests,[8] forced relocations,[9] sexual violence against women,[10]and indiscriminate killings “regardless of age or gender” documented.[11] Victims included 814 children under 10 years old, 860 seniors over 61, and 2,985 women.[12]

Following the fragile conclusion of the Korean War in 1953, memories of government-inflicted suffering on Jeju were suppressed under successive authoritarian regimes of the Republic of Korea (ROK). South Korea’s democratisation has since enabled grassroots actors to encourage the proliferation of Jeju memory into public consciousness and its recognition in the nation’s official collective memory.[13] As Korean historian Brendan Wright notes, however, the anti-communist state failed to ever achieve a “complete monopoly over the nation’s historical imagination”. Even prior to democratisation, alternative Korean War mnemonics – Hyun Ki-young’s 1978 novella Aunt Suni for the Jeju context – transcended taboo-isms obscuring the state’s past.[14]

Recent scholarship by Korean studies professor Areum Jeong reveals the necessity for the continued production, and study of, such counter-memories. There persists, Jeong argues, right-wing support in South Korea for the dominant narrative established under prior authoritarian regimes, in addition to a “state-led viewpoint” downplaying the involvement of Syngman Rhee and USAMGIK in the bloodshed on Jeju.[15]

Equally, the US has yet to acknowledge its own responsibility for the violence. Although American soldiers did not participate in the suppression, the US did supply weaponry and aircraft for counterinsurgency operations,[16] and enabled the repressive right-wing rule of Yoo Hae-jin on the island from 1947-1948.[17] Furthermore, USAMGIK proceeded with elections many feared would permanently divide the peninsula, and whose fairness was questioned by UN observers.[18] Pressed for comment in 2023, the US State Department recognised that “the Jeju Incident of 1948 was a terrible tragedy, and we should never forget the devastating loss of life”. It did not, however, offer apology or acknowledgement of US culpability.

Considering Jiseul (2012)

The most successful feature-length cinematic treatment of the Jeju Uprising – Jiseul, by South Korean director O Muel – remains largely unconsidered in English-language scholarship.[19] To date, English-language academic analysis of the film has been confined to an excellent 15-page chapter authored by South Korean art historian Sohl Lee, exploring the film’s construction of a “ritual space” of remembrance.[20]

Jiseul tells the story of a group of villagers who, amid government counterinsurgency operations, hide in one of Jeju’s mid-mountain caves. The film adopts a bifurcated structure, oscillating between the fleeing villagers and government forces stationed in a village down-mountain. At the film’s denouement, the villagers are discovered and forced from their refuge, a closing set of on-screen text informing viewers that, despite their initial escape, most were captured and massacred on 24 December 1948.

When searching for alternative mnemonics, turning to cinema often bears fruit. Cultural studies professor Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memories” offers a useful framework for understanding cinema’s role in collective remembering. Film has the capacity, Landsberg argues, to impart on viewers memories of events to which they have no personal connection, constructing a prosthetic memory capable of shaping “that person’s subjectivity and politics”, thereby suturing them “into a larger (collective) history”.[21] 

Produced during the conservative administration of former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) – which curtailed the work of Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 2005 – Jiseul functions as an alternative mnemonic via engagement with the question of responsibility. 

In the film’s opening sequence, the camera floats through a home, slowly pushing forward as it follows Master Sergeant Kim. When Kim opens a door to reveal a comrade sat beside the corpse of a naked woman, the two proceed to eat a pear beside the body, their grotesquely amplified slurping continuing as the camera cuts to a bare tree amid winter snow. A further cut shifts focus to the sea, the crashing of waves accompanied by an increasingly tense score. Text then appears:

“November 1948: American troops along with newly formed Korean troops declare martial law on Jeju Island. They also declared that they would kill anyone not living within a five-kilometre distance of the shore. This was the start of so-called ‘scorched earth’ military operations.”

American culpability in the preceding imagery, and the acts of violence that follow, is underscored. The concluding set of on-screen text similarly informs viewers:

“It is estimated that more than 30,000 people died due to the 4.3 incident … The US government was involved in ordering this civilian massacre, but to this day it has stayed silent about this matter.” 

Although no Americans are depicted in the film, US influence is referenced dialogically, and alluded to in the film’s soundscape. Early on, viewers are introduced to a group of male villagers huddled in a cramped cave, one – Man-chul – having just acquired a gun. When an elderly villager – the father of female villager Soon-duk – cites his experience handling arms during the Japanese occupation to convince Man-chul to let him hold the weapon, Man-chul responds:

“That was the Japanese occupation. Now it’s an American occupation! This gun is much better than Japanese guns. Don’t you know that the Americans got the Japanese to surrender?”

Regimes of Occupation

Here, in a semantically rich passagethatsubsequently acknowledges the realities of collaboration, Jiseul establishes historical continuity between regimes of occupation. As they speak, a plane flies overhead. A cut to a low-high shot of a tree does not show the aircraft – presumably an American spotter plane – but the upper canopy of the forest slowly comes into focus, an engine’s whir audible.

One may read such allusions within the framework of Minjung ideology, the broad movement in South Korea of the 1970s and 1980s centered on ‘the people’, that associates the failings of modern Korean history with the importation of US values and its political system.[22] The focus on the sea as the initial indictment of culpability, as well as the aircraft’s spectral presence beyond the canopy, implies the imposition of an external force upon the island. Moreover, as Lee identifies, Jiseul constructs a shamanistic ritual space in line with Korean tradition, opposing the suppression of “traditional (pre-capitalist) practices” in the latter half of the twentieth century, and instead recalling a time before US occupation.[23]

It is with South Korean government forces that the film places primary responsibility, however. Government responsibility is personified in the figure of Master Sergeant Kim, who commits the film’s most brutal acts in a state of near-demonic anti-communist fervour. That most islanders would fail to comprehend the ideological basis of his hatred is emphasised in the aftermath of him having stabbed the elderly mother of villager Moo-dong, who refused to abandon her home and flee with her son. When Kim declares, “My mum also went to the communist side. I hate communists with all my heart”, she can only respond, “What is a communist?”

As Korean studies scholar Sonia Ryang notes, even those who partook in the initial attacks on police stations on 3 April were largely “peasants and fishermen who were not particularly familiar with communism or leftist ideologies, but simply opposed national partition on one hand and increasing foreign domination of Korea on the other”.[24]  

Perpetrators as Victims

Not all government soldiers are presented demonically, however, and caricatured villains such as Kim coexist alongside characters unwillingly embedded within a machinery of oppression. Two young soldiers ­– Sang-duk and Dong-soo – express clear doubt about the morality of suppression operations. The former’s reluctance to participate in violence is illustrated when he fails to shoot Soon-duk, allowing her to flee before she is eventually captured by pursuing soldiers. For his hesitation, Sang-duk is deprived of rations.

The line between perpetrator and victim is further complicated through the character of Joo Jung-gil, a child soldier. In one scene, Jung-gil is made to stand guard outside a house and pass Sergeant Kim water as he rapes Soon-duk. After viewers bear witness to Kim’s horrific abuse of Soon-duk, the camera cuts to a shot outside the house, with muffled sounds of sexual violence as the camera focuses on Jung-gil. As it does, Jung-gil looks directly into the camera, creating a Brechtian fourth wall break that prompts the viewer to recognise their positionality as a witness to atrocity, as well as the child soldier’s own victimisation. Brechtian devices, seeking to create a degree of detachment between viewer and film in order to foreground the latter’s political message, are further found in Jiseul’s monochrome cinematography and frequent manipulation of space-time, most identifiable in scenes set within the refuge cave.

This is not to say the film pursues a full-scale Brechtian detachment whereby empathetic connection is severed in favour of moral and political clarity. Rather, O Muel draws on such techniques to exhort “the audience to an engaged spectatorship that moves beyond simple witnessing” and toward more active remembering.[25]

When Sergeant Kim is found to be missing at the end of the film, viewers discover him entrapped within the pot previously used to boil a villager’s pig. As Kim cries for mercy, which he himself failed to once show, Jung-gil mutters “stop murdering people. Goodbye”. His parting mirrors that heartlessly offered by Kim to Moo-dong’s mother.

While the boundary between perpetrator and victim is blurred in such instances, it is through the presentation and resistance of an absolute evil – Master Sergeant Kim – that complexity is able to emerge elsewhere. By blurring the lines between perpetrator and victim, and offering presentations of perpetrators-as-victims, Jiseul functions as a didactic counter-mnemonic admonishing South Korean government and US responsibility for the violence on Jeju, while gesturing at the possibility of reconciliation.

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[1] Richard J.H. Johnston, “Small War Rages on Korean Island: Communists on Cheju Attack Villages – Demand Police Surrender, No Election,” New York Times, May 3 1948, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1948/05/03/96593119.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0.

[2] Kim Dong-choon, The Unending Korean War: A Social History, trans. Kim Sung-ok (Tamal Visa Publications, 2000); Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton University Press, 1990).

[3] Kornel Chang, “Independence without Liberation: Democratization as Decolonization Management in U.S.-Occupied Korea, 1945-1948,” The Journal of American History 107, no.1 (2020): 94, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa009.

[4] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report (The National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident, 2003), 651.

[5] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 460.

[6] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 470.

[7] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 484.

[8] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 293.

[9] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 405.

[10] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 475.

[11] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 481.

[12] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 652.

[13] Kim Hun-joon, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2014).

[14] Brendan Wright, “Divided Nation, Divided Memories,” in Monumental Conflicts: Twentieth Century Wars and the Evolution of Public Memory, ed. Derek R. Mallet (Routledge, 2018), 112. https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/1576151/17?element_originalid=chapter6&page_number=111.

[15] Areum Jeong, “Documenting, Representing and Remembering the Jeju 4.3 in Korean Theatre and Performance,” Theatre Research International 51, no.1 (2025): 5-6 & 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/03078833.2026.2631810.

[16] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 654.

[17] Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 167.

[18] Chang, “Independence without Liberation,” 95-101.

[19] Wright, “Divided Nation, Divided Memories,” 122.

[20] Sohl Lee, “Cinema as Ritual Space: O Meul’s Jiseul,” in Asian Cinema and the Use of Space, ed. Lilian Chee and Edna Lim (Routledge, 2015). https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/1642513/23?page_number=171.

[21] Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.

[22] Wright, “Divided Nation, Divided Memories,” 119.

[23] Lee, “Cinema as Ritual Space,” 183.

[24] Sonia Ryang, “Reading Volcano Island: In the Sixty-fifth Year of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 11, no.36 (2013): 5, doi:10.1017/S1557466013034591.

[25] Lee, “Cinema as Ritual Space,” 172.