Hieyoon Kim's research asks how cinema and its ecology evolve during times of political uncertainty and what cinematic practices and expressions are used to undermine the status quo. Her research agenda is based in Korea and is organized around three questions: 1) What kind of a different world do the various participants in the film ecology struggle for, and what roles do they see for cinema in this struggle? 2) How do they challenge blockages of public expression and access to public resources, as well as institutionalized hegemonic codes that appear natural and sensible? 3) How does cinema expand public spaces in such a way that alternative imaginations of the social fabric can flourish?

Her first book, Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (University of California Press) examines how Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways amid political turbulence from liberation through the decades of military rule (1945–1987). With acts ranging from making films that brought the dispossessed to the screen to bootlegging as an effort to redistribute resources under the state’s control, they explored ideas and practices that exceeded the limits of the statist notion of democracy and of the cinematic medium. Combining archival research, film analysis, and interviews, she traces how they constructively reinvented the political fields constituted by films, the practices of production and circulation that propelled these films, and the platforms on which they were shown. Their work, she argues, foregrounds a utopian vision of democracy in which the ruled could represent themselves and exercise their rights to access resources free from state suppression, a vision that was transient but that nonetheless disrupted the status quo. As the first account of the history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, the book contributes to the growing field of Korean film studies. By expanding our definition of radical film discourses and practices in the Cold War, it also broadens the current understanding of film activism.

Hieyoon Kim has also written about such topics as film historiography, archives, and memory. An essay published in The Journal of Asian Studies provides a new interpretation of a seminal historiographical text in Korean film studies in order to rethink the relationship between Korean nationalism, Japanese colonialism, and the postcolonial present. In an article published in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, she offers a fresh look at the history of film preservation with the case of South Korean government’s aspiration for and struggle toward acquiring membership in the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) vis-à-vis Cold War politics. Her Korea Journal piece concerns how recent popular cinema reflects upon the public memory of the democratization process in South Korea. All these works, in one way and another, attempt to disarticulate the seemingly coherent cinematic medium and its institutions, mapping their many iterations across a widening array of social and cultural phenomena.

Hieyoon Kim is currently writing her second book titled Hereness in Twenty-First Century Audiovisual Media: The 1980 Gwangju Uprising Made Present. The book explores new constellations of aesthetics and politics in recent multimedia projects about the Gwangju uprising, a ten-day act of civil resistance against the military dictatorship in May 1980. The ultra-right wing’s corporate media have aggressively fabricated “new evidence” that distorts extant audiovisual footage to reinforce the former military government’s claim: that the Gwangju protesters were motivated by North Korean provocation. Her project investigates how multimedia artists have recently challenged this misinformation through creative activism, including the construction of a grassroots media archive, the reappropriation of archival footage, and transnational collaboration that connects Gwangju to other dissident movements. The book theorizes an ethical and aesthetic praxis that emerges out of and traverses these works, a praxis she calls “hereness.” Essays based on this research have appeared or are forthcoming in Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea, and Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past.

As a scholar of dissident culture and politics, Hieyoon Kim is deeply committed to decolonizing her fields. One such effort is her collaboration with film historians, archivists, and practitioners across the world to critique film theory's western imperialist foundations. For more information, please visit the website of "Global Circulations of Film Theory Networking Project."

Society of Cinema and Media Studies; Association for Asian Studies; Modern Language Association; International Association for Media and History; Cultural Studies Association

In the classroom, Hieyoon Kim draws upon her interest in the intersections of culture and politics, inviting students to experiment with a range of materials and interpretive methods. In “Women Make Movies: Feminist Practices in Asia,” students not only reinterpret the canonical texts of feminist film theory but also engage with recent feminism activism and filmmaking from across Asia. Throughout the semester, students collaboratively produce their own manifesto of feminist filmmaking and propose a new festival program that foregrounds their definition of women’s cinema. In “Korean Cinema,” students discuss films from the silent to the contemporary era to trace the development of the film industry and various genres within the context of Korean and global film culture. Her students reexamine well-known films and genres with fresh lenses and explore previously undervalued areas of interest. The course’s major assignment is to propose a film series and research for it over the course of the semester. In this way, students are encouraged to acknowledge and redress the gap in the study of Korean cinema that privileges already-established texts and auteurs. Outside the classroom, she has organized and spoken at workshops on Journal Article Writing and The Academic Job Market.

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