Her

Abstract

The final project, Her is a cine-roman on war that does not talk about war. Instead, Her hollows out the subject by focusing on places and events outside of war that exist simultaneously with war. Both compassion and aggression base themselves only on illusion, shaped by the false notion of the other. At the same time, without the illusion, there would be no interaction between self and the other; the possibility of co-existence founds itself on the impossibility of coexistence. The question of inter-subjectivity and co-existence is explored by casting two video-makers (a male and a female) in a real relationship to be the characters, actors, narrators, cameramen, interviewers, interviewed, and editors. Through this device, the boundaries are blurred between fiction and non-fiction; male and female perspectives; subject and the objects around it. Visiting Seoul, Hawaii, and Boston, they are subjects when they confess to the camera, objects when they shoot each other, and fictional bodies when they perform for the camera. The multiplicity embodied by the interaction between these two characters attests to their task of understanding a word that is incommensurable: war.