Monochromator is a new magazine based between Seoul and Berlin that deconstructs selected films by converting all to black and white to amplify social relevance, bringing the cinematic, the cultural, the artistic and the political in dialogue.
The magazine is divided into three sections: Refraction, Wavelength and Interference. Monochromator takes ‘Barbenheimer’— the summer blockbuster phenomenon of 2023 — as the headlining story of its first issue, ‘Birth of a Nation’. That birth accompanied various deaths. In Refraction, we uproot and replant the phenomenon of Barbenheimer through a trip to Walmart. In Wavelength, we displace Barbie and Oppenheimer. We look at their spatial, existential, and democratic contexts, and imagine if Barbie were a biopic and Oppenheimer were a fantasy. In Interference, we look into the said and the unsaid of Barbenheimer.'
The second issue of Monochromator deconstructs Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest and Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing under the manifesto of We Refuse to Be Afraid. The publisher says, 'To Theodore Adorno’s statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, we say writing poetry after Auschwitz is a necessity.' The issue brings together a documentary-like fiction film and a fiction film-like documentary to examine how the realities of violence are constructed on screen, deconstructing the political powers embedded in the act of representation.
