A Study of Images as The Ability of Nothingness - Focusing on Bae Yongkyoon’s 'Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?', 'The People In White'

This study examines the work of Bae Yongkyun, who is regarded as one of the most challenging and creative directors in Korean cinema. In Bae's two highly non-narrative films, and , the cinematic images seem to be something mysterious and wondrous, floating on the screen without much reliance on the actions and dialogues of the characters. The ambiguous visual images, elaborate auditory images, and the implications of the dialogues, which are thrown around like Zen Kōan, are interwoven and generate new meanings. There is a point at which it is not enough to discuss these images simply in terms of their meditative depth and outstanding poetic beauty. Like the world of Zen Kōan, where it is difficult to grasp a clear meaning, Bae's cinematic images approach the people and nature they show in a way that reveals their texture rather than giving them a clear shape, so this researcher would like to analyze them from the perspective of the image as a 'ability of nothingness'. Bae's cinematic images, with their exceptional character of incompleteness and uncertainty, call for a reflection on the viewer's own self through the medium of film and the indeterminate images it presents, away from the narrative aspect. This study aims to understand Bae's work more clearly by appropriating the concept of 'nothingness' advocated by existentialists who emphasized existence in nature. For existentialists, 'nothingness' is often described as a concept of anxiety for existence beyond what is identified as non-being or emptiness. The original existence is able to recognize itself by establishing subjectivity through anxiety and freedom through 'nothingness', and this is the point that resonates with Bae Yongkyun's film images. Therefore, this study aims to explore in depth the situation in which montage as a decentered time and exteriority as a zone of anxiety, which are common to Bae's two works, operate as a 'capacity of nothingness' and expand the film into a contemplative image.