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 Interferece. By way of explanation the publishers say, ' In 1945, the United States was reborn as the empire we experience, through the hard military power of the atomic bomb and the ‘soft’ capitalist power of corporations such as Mattel. Monochromator takes ‘Barbenheimer’— the summer blockbuster phenomenon of 2023 — as the headlining story of ‘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.'
