The ghostly remapping of the camptown: the aesthetics of subversive documentary in The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019)

The camptown genre – literary and cinematic works depicting military camptowns and the lives of military sex workers – emerged after US dominance replaced Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Feminist scholars have critiqued this genre for appropriating the voices of the survivors and subsuming their experience under national allegories of postcolonial trauma. The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019) experiments with the conventions of documentary film as a way to address this. By summoning the dead and staging the memories and trauma of victim-survivors, the film employs counterfactual aesthetics that allow survivors to express their desires while resisting the gaze of the other. This approach unsettles the power dynamics between observer and observed and disrupts the indexical link between representations of military sex workers and their lived experiences. The deployment of the counterfactual blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, the living and the dead, by dismantling the dichotomy of truth and falsehood. By so doing, the film creates a cinematic space in which past and present coexist, allowing victim-survivors to mourn losses while resisting the institutionalization of their trauma. Ultimately, this paper argues that the film is a subversive documentary that expands the boundaries of truth and testimony in its form and aesthetics.