New film magazine Monochromator sets out to contextualize films in such a bold manner that even its editor-in-chief Alex Heeyeon Kil wonders whether it should be described as a film magazine.

Alex is a writer and researcher who splits her time between Berlin and Seoul. She explains more about her beautiful new magazine Monochromator as she shares her influences and working week.

What are you doing this Monday morning?
Mornings are the biggest challenge for me, the hours before 11am is a constant struggle if I should go back into bed. I am not the biggest morning person—but this morning, I went to Tazza d’Oro (above), which is my favorite café in Friedrichshain, Berlin. Friedrichshain is my neighborhood, where I’ve been living the past two years. The vibe is immaculate in this café, shocking because this is a touristy area of Boxi.

I always order the lungo there, and I always have two of them. I didn’t bring any of my work stuff, just my little purse, and stared at the sky in the café’s outside garden. After that, I went to a stationary store to buy a pen and a new notebook. I lost my pen yesterday and I simply cannot work without pen and paper.

I sit down around 1pm in my living room, at the wooden round table that we use as a dining table as well. I often wonder if I’ll ever have a room of my own, a separate office with a window and a big desk and whatnot. But for now I am happy at this table next to my cute window.

The publisher, Veronica, lives in Seoul and I am in Berlin. So the Monochromator office looks like this, in the virtual space

Which magazine do you first remember?
Honestly, I loved Vogue Girl and Elle Girl. Growing up in Korea, there was no Teen Vogue, and instead both Vogue and Elle produced the “Girl” lines, targeted to women in their early twenties. Flipping through these pages as a 13-year old, I couldn’t wait to be an adult.

My dad operated a publishing house when I was little, so a storage room with stacks and stacks of books was always a familiar sight to me. But it was when I started collecting the Vogue & Elle Girls that I fell in love with print. I loved the seasonality of these fashion magazines, and I simply fell in love with the fact that every month, there is a whole new collection of stories to read. It felt like the golden age of the print publication—sometimes an issue would be accompanied with a small booklet as well. Like wow. So shiny, so sophisticated, so many things to look at.

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine?
I love MacGuffin. Each issue focuses on just one object, and expands it in directions both expected and unexpected. In issue 11, The Chain issue, there is a story “Slavery, Symbols and streetwear: The legacy of slavery on the soul of the Dominican Republic.’ Then a few pages later, there is a story “Chainettes: Textures fashioned from bicycle chains.” To talk about the legacy of slavery and bicycles in one magazine through the single object of chains was insane to me. These articles talk about the two drastically different issues through that very specific lens, and we understand the chain better, as a symbol and as a tool.

I am in love with the power of small things, I think it is valuable to think so hard about one specific thing to encompass the many potential discourses that thing can produce. That is of course what we do in Monochramator as well.

Describe Monochromator in three words.
Contextual, decontextual, recontextual

Highlight one story from the issue that sums up the magazine and the concept underlying it.
One of the questions we grappled with the most while working on the general concept and identity of the magazine, is whether we were a film magazine or not. Still, the answer shifts, and I think this fluctuation of our identity is actually the key. We are a film magazine that is not about the film itself. We are more interested in the political context that birthed or surrounded the films we talk about, and we don’t pretend that the film has nothing to do with colonialism, capitalism, racism, and other macro and micro-isms that operate intricately to create the world we live in.

That is why we have ‘manifestos,’ or we also call it our ‘monochrome,’ for each issue, the first issue’s manifesto being ‘Birth of a Nation.’

We have a sub-section internally called ‘Switch’ within the section called Wavelength. In Switch, we switch a key aspect of the topic films with each other—in the first issue, we switched genre between Oppenheimer and Barbie. We asked Kenneth Geurts to write a piece on Oppenheimer as if it is a fantasy film like Barbie, and Nicole Froio on Barbie as if it is a biopic like Oppenheimer. As you can see, this is very different from conventional criticisms: we are not interested in how well Oppenheimer was created and how, for example, things such as its black-and-white scenes contributed to the genre, etc. Through this switch, we attempted to challenge the boundaries between the fictional, non-fictional, factual, and truthful, by switching fundamentally opposing genres.

This is really the key in Monochramator. We talk about the real world through non-real stories, because we believe the above boundaries must be challenged to understand our lived conditions at depth.

This first issue is built on such a singular idea that it’s difficult to envisage what issue two will be based on. Will it be a similar triad of movies?
The first issue, ‘Barbenheimer: Birth of a Nation’ definitely focuses on a very singular idea that Barbenheimer is cultural imperialism. The films, the memes, the whole shebang. The title ‘Birth of a Nation’ was inspired by Griffith’s film, and I do engage with it in my Editor’s Letter. Yet the phrase is used in a wider meaning than just that horrifying film itself—this title works as the manifesto for American Settler Colonialism and Imperialism and dictates all analyses that go into the magazine.

To elaborate on our concept, a monochromator is a light-splitting device that refracts a spectrum of different colored lights (different wavelengths) and produces a monochrome light. Likewise, Monochromator produces a single monochrome, the ‘manifesto,’ and all the articles are coming down to a single political message we want to deliver. So yes, we do not help to understand the mastery of the film, but we rearrange, engage, and contextualize the films. For the second issue, expect another unexpected ‘monochromating’ of two cinematic works, and another relevant, meaningful, and politically urgent ‘monochrome.’

Apart from this, we also have a new, small, and secret line of publications that we’ve been keeping up our sleeve. So we’ve been envisioning a lot. Stay tuned.

We loved this first issue; what has been the general response to it?
At Indiecon, in Hamburg early this month (above), we got to meet face-to-face with our readers for the first time, which was an amazing experience. The most frequently asked question was what the next issue will be—and this is a very important comment to us. The biggest compliment we can receive at this stage, with only the first issue published, is to see that the readers are curious for our next steps.

Another comment we love is when readers and other magazine makers tell us that they’ve been wanting to see this type of engagement with films. As we always questioned our validity as a film magazine and simultaneously worked to push its boundaries to be a more politically discursive magazine, to hear that our content can quench a certain thirst was immensely meaningful to us: because that means that our intention was expressed accurately and delivered.

What advice do you have for anyone planning to launch a magazine?
Don’t forget that a magazine is a periodical, and that seriality is one of the most important characteristics of a magazine that differentiates it from a book. Unlike a book, a magazine requires you to come up with an identity and a structure that is sustainable: consistent yet also variable.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
On Wednesday, I am supposed to take pictures for my wedding invitation. We decided to use a photobooth in Berlin, and the invitation is for the ceremony in Seoul. I am really excited for this small photoshoot!

And I am also really excited about the new notebook that I got today. It’s A3 size. Isn’t that amazing?

Design Cleo Tew & Alex Walker, with assistance from June Yang

monochromatormagazine.com