This video was motivated by labor activists’ demand for “immediately filming the struggles that occur at dif­ferent times and making it into a news format.” Labor News Production’s use of various post-production techniques—evident in the appropriation of a TV news clip on violence during a strike through the interplay of slow motion and a majestic classic music track—attest not only to its pursuit of propagandistic, agitational and pedagogical effects but also to its effort to elaborate on the aesthetics of montage in seeking nonfiction media’s expressive possibilities, an effort distinct from the activist tradition’s privileging of on-the-spot realism and its obsession with documentary authenticity. It can also be read as an artifact of alternative media or a “visual magazine,” considering the labor activists’ growing awareness of visual media as more effective than brochures and breaking-news pamphlets. LNP chose the video camera not merely for accessibility, portability and cheap production costs, but also for circulation of Labor News via VHS through labor unions’ in-house broadcasting networks. In so doing, LNP pioneered the alternative distribution strategy adopted by other practitioners and collectives from the late 1980s.

The documentary directed by artist-filmmaker Hong Jin-hwon focuses on the processes of restoring water-damaged films of such collectives as the Institute of Social Photography (Sahoe sajin yŏn’guhoe) and National Photography Institute (Minjok sajin yŏn’guso) committed to documenting sites of student protests and labor movements in the spirit of minjung art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fea­turing interviews with the collectives’ members. The filmstrips left by the activist photo groups aimed to document people’s struggles during the massive anti-dictatorship movement are legitimized as objects of preservation and restoration in contrast to lo-fi amateur videos subject to deterioration and forgetting, audiovisual records charged with the cries and gestures of workers who desperately fight against the legislation of the law that allowed for the mass dismissal of irregular workers in 2007. The film’s alternative, material historiography goes so far as to associate the material and technical dimensions of photographic and video documents with a memory war regarding which historical records deserve to be preserved and which are excluded.