On Guard
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
18:00 minutes
Jeamin Cha
In On Guard by Jeamin Cha, a security guard receives safety training, juxtaposed against his patrol of an empty building as he tries to give care instructions for his ailing mother over the phone. The film dismantles the binary oppositions between “caring” and “guarding,” two actions that parallel one another in their emphasis on attentiveness without a logical conclusion. Cha’s exploration of the relationship between these two focuses is channeled through nocturnal urban space, drawing attention to the labor that each requires. The film’s non-linear flow is stretched out over long, symmetrical shots of the guard’s patrol. Objects occasionally (and alarmingly) fall over in his wake, retaining a suspense that forces the viewer into an attentive dread. This attention is poignantly the same sort of labor On Guard thematizes, roping the viewer into the guard’s repetitive, observant world. On Guard proposes an aesthetics of iterative anxiety, in which the attentive labor of its protagonist is equally imposed on the viewer. Small details become noticed because the audience is anxious, an emotional state common in neoliberal urban existence. Cha’s nuanced appropriation of this paranoia to focus on the seemingly “impractical” allows for On Guard to speak resonantly to the social construction of attention and environment.
Jeamin Cha’s questions exist in the gyre between individual and social environment, stepping over conspicuous strands of relation between the two in favor of cultivating characters that dwell in the night, under-noticed or otherwise surplus figures outside of mainstream societal representation. She works primarily in video-based installations, which oftentimes are the result of years of interviews, research, and a meticulous editing process. Her films are indexes of reality in its minutiae, both regionally specific to her native South Korea, and also purposefully roaming, fragmented and nonlinear, able to touch almost any contemporary population in the world. The subjects Cha conjures expand fluidly beyond the limits of her work, giving depth to figures ranging from an electrician to a trio of ancient garbage collectors, their paths echoing off of the urban environment, engaged in a web of political, cultural, and social factors. Her films have increasingly consisted of nuanced, unblinking meditation on political issues and their echoes within urban existence. It would be wrong to describe these films as positivist, or documentarian. Rather, they strive to capture the viewer’s affective affinities with a critical edge.
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