During my fellowship, I have made continued progress on my dissertation, entitled “Discordant Visions: The Emergence of Experimental Film in South Korea, 1964–1977.” I have completed the third chapter, “In the Spirit of a Mongolian Warrior: Kaidu Club and Feminist Experiments in Art and Film,” which focuses on the work of Kaidu Club, a short-lived feminist film collective, and how experimental film as a genre served as a means for them to challenge the male-dominant world order. I have now commenced my first chapter, “Poetry in Motion: Cine-Poem and a Transnational Network in Formation,” which examines the very first filmmaking collective in South Korea, established with the explicit purpose of creating so-called avant-garde films.

One of the major through lines of the chapter concerns the ways in which the notion of “experimental” or “avant-garde” film found its way into the South Korean context via international platforms, such as the San Francisco International Film Festival and 1967 International and Universal Exposition. But as much of this history has been well covered in the existing literature, I wanted to add different conceptual layers to the notion of a “transnational network.” This led me to consider conceptual connections between analogous works from the surrounding regions during the same period, particularly as the generative relationship between cinema and poetry has been a recurring interest for artists and filmmakers since the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, as I looked at archival materials about how the conceptual backdrop of the collective was formed and articulated, it occurred to me that an entirely different transnational network emerges when contextualizing the idea of “cine-poem” within the larger history of South Korean poetry.

These questions, in turn, have not only enriched the history of cine-poem narrated in this chapter, but have also begun to inform the arc of my dissertation. As I read through histories of experimental film in neighboring regions, I discovered that the relationship between cinema and poetry was articulated in at least two different countries. In Japan, Takahiko Iimura (1937–2022) referred to short, nonnarrative films he created from 1962 to 1971 as “film poems.” This intersection was also explored in Modern Poetry Exhibition (1966) in Taiwan, which served as the subject of Chang Chao-Tang’s foray into experimental filmmaking. These parallel examples prompted me to think about how other chapters could benefit from similar gestures, which effectively position the history of South Korean experimental film within an interconnected network of modernist thinking. Kaidu Club’s attention to the body as a site of performativity, for instance, resonates with Keiichi Tanaami’s Human Events (1975), a film that features extreme close-ups of dancers’ bodies. In addition, the history of “cine-poem,” which I trace in the first chapter by surveying how it was introduced through surrealist poetry via Japan, motivated me to delineate analogous nuances in subsequent chapters: In what ways were the members of Kaidu Club aware of art and film in other nations with an explicitly feminist agenda? What kind of connection could I draw between Kaidu Club and earlier, better-known instances of feminist expanded cinema, such as VALIE EXPORT’s TAPP und TASTKINO (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA) (1968)?

By asking these questions in the first chapter, I was able to formulate a new objective for my dissertation, which has thus far focused on narrating an interdisciplinary history of experimental film in South Korea—one that is much less thoroughly studied than comparable examples from the United States, France, and Japan. As important as filling in the gaps was, the task of identifying how the missing pieces already connected to the existing landscape was critical. Only at this point is it possible to give shape to a truly transnational history of experimental film—a history that remains, by its very nature, porous and disjointed. Perhaps the most important insight that I carry from this dissertation is that connecting the dots is as important as putting the dots on the map.

Stanford University
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2025–2026

Harry C. H. Choi plans to complete his dissertation in 2026 and continue his career as a curator of modern and contemporary art.