This study explores how Siegfried Kracauer’s five affinities of film— the unstaged, the fortuitous, endlessness, indeterminacy, and the flow of life— serve as critical strategies for rendering the subaltern visible within cinematic media. This study examines how cinema captures the fragmented, contingent, and opaque material realities of marginalized lives that often remain invisible in dominant representational systems. Through the case study of All We Imagine as Light(2024), this paper specifically demonstrates what the recording and revealing functions of film are, how the five affinities of film work in the process of recording and revealing, and through these five affinities, how film can make the subaltern visible.

Huiju Kim is Master's degree in Film & Animation Theory at the Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science Multimedia and Film at Chung-Ang University; interested in decolonialism critics of films, always looking forward to the subaltern that could speak through media