The Filmic Reflexivity in Mother —Focusing on Close-Up and Human Face

This paper is to focus on the filmic reflexivity that the modernizing movements in European Cinema in the 1960s showed as a new trend of film theory. While classical film theory looked at film in terms of construction and composition (like formalists) or paid attention to the transparency of the filmic medium (like realists), mirror shot in modern cinema brings out filmic reflexivity. With regard to the reflexive and reflective potential of cinema, the close-up or the human face plays a significant role. It breaks the transparency of the filmic medium and destructs illusionism of the film by adopting a mirror image. These filmic images often interrupt the narrative flow. Therefore, close-up ultimately connects the theme of the split personality or the exchanged identity and the spectator’s own uncomfortable recognition. The uncertainty of subject or the topic of split subject related to an object or ‘the other’ is well known through many art works. This topic is also often revealed in film history. A typical example is the Doppelgänger motif that has fascinated cinema since its birth. Close-up and mirror shot can also be used as filmic images to reveal split subject and identity confusion. In Joon-Ho Bong’s Mother the Doppelgänger motif, the close-up and the mirror shot as self-reflexive images play a significant role. Mother is a work which once again reveals “why Joon-Ho Bong” so great. Not only does Mother construct an interesting story with elements of genre film like other Bong’s movies, but it deals with the topic of split subject and exchanged identity. In Mother, mother’s face is reflected on the divided window of the visiting room of the prison that her son Do-Joon is hold in custody. This mother’s face in close-up can be understood as mirror shot. In this moment, the image of mother gazing Do-Joon as an object changes her from an observer to an observed object. The mother’s face image in this mirror shot keeps the spectator at a distance and defamiliarizes it, thus creating the moment of reflexivity. In other words, the divided window of the visiting room as mirror “implies not just confronting oneself, but also turning this gaze outward, i.e. transforming it into the gaze of the Other” (Elsaesser and Hagener 9). This is to research the reflexive image in Mother with focus on the close-up and the human face, exploring how this reflexive image is related to the narrative.