Tell me you heav’ns, in which part of his body Shall I destroy him?
Whether there, or there, or there,
That I may give the local wound a name;
And make distinct the very breach, whereout Hector’s great spirit flew.

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, IV, 9

If this is not the best gangster film ever, this is perhaps the most organic. A Dirty Carnival, as the title suggests, is a film made of flesh (a popular etymology associates the word “carnival” with the Latin nouns carnem and caro -flesh- and levare -lighten or lift-: literally “to remove the flesh”), generously offered to copious slashing and stabbing. And indeed it goes deep beneath the skin, where the cut runs bare and raw. Where some kind of truth may lie hidden.

With his fourth film (We Must Go To Apgujung-Dong On Windy Days in 1993, Marriage is a Crazy Thing in 2002, Once Upon a Time in High School in 2004), poet Yu Ha has not reinvented the gangster drama genre, he has concentrated and dramatized it, by strictly adhering to a limited number of formal rules, into an infinitely vulnerable body: Jo In-Seong's (The Classic, Spring Days, Public Toilet) slender and nervous Byung-Du. A mid-level mobster, hardly more than a common thug, Byung-Du is in his late 20's and in a bit of a pickle, money-wise. The young man does not only have himself to support, he has to earn the sustenance of his father-deprived family. Things in fact are even tougher than he is: his mother, younger sister and wayward brother are about to get evicted as the film opens.

To begin with, to all the readers and those involved in the creation of this Korean film blog: 

Have a happy fulfilling new year!

Since a new year is always the occasion of reflecting upon a past itinerary, as is the custom when you reach the end of a path, and since a picture sometimes speaks louder than words, I have put up the poster of The King and the Clown, newly renamed The Royal Jester for some obscure marketing reason (the Korean title is, literally, The King's Man): to my mind, the most emblematic film of 2006, it was picked as South Korea's representative for the Oscars in the foreign film category. The Academy will announce whether or not the film is selected for the official competition on January 23rd. I for one certainly hope so. In the meantime, it will be screened in San Francisco at the San Rafael Theatre on Sunday, January 14th at 6:30pm and Wednesday, January 17th at 8:30pm.

This complex, deceptively low-key historical drama with Shakespearean dimensions (Falstaff, Hamlet... but I will come back to this later) was a tremendous critical and commercial success, and a good reminder that less (money, stars, publicity, etc) can be more in the Korean film world. Not only was it one of the best films of last year, it was also arguably, one of the most unusual and interesting ones. In many ways, it seems to illustrate well what 2006 was all about: instead of an identifiable itinerary, we had multiple lanes and short cuts, dead ends and detours... occasional accidents and incidents. In one word, peregrinations.

What was 2006 about then?

It is tempting to say: figures, lots of figures... lots and lots... and always more figures. That is what people have been talking about, and drowning into, to a large extent (that includes the 13 million ticket-selling The Host as well). To put all these numbers in a nutshell: the screen quota days, established in 1996 to encourage local theaters to screen local films and protect their perennity against Hollywood movies, were halved from 146 days to 73 days by the government, to the distress of many professionals and general public outrage. However, 108 films were released in 2006 (by an odd coincidence, a sacred number in Hinduism and Buddhism), the biggest number in the last ten years, confirming the hegemony of the domestic production (about 60%) over an estimated $1.54 billion market.

These numbers have something to say. Obviously, most commentators and the actual agents and players in the business have been speaking and reasoning in terms of profits and losses, investments and returns, rather than “artistic” value. From an economic point of view, this year's success is far from evident, and has perhaps, never been so fraught with ambiguities. Does it mean that the overall quality of Korean films have dropped this year, as quite a few seem to suggest? Can we speak the dirty word... decline? That is actually quite doubtful. The feverish rush to capitalize on the pop-culture-boosted, hyper-fashionable hallyu (“Korean Wave”) and make a lightning-quick buck on the handful of hot names that tops East Asian box-office lists  has not contributed to an increased number of cinematic masterpieces, admittedly... but I do not recall seeing fewer artistically notable films than the other years, at least not considerably so. Having said that, quality works seem much harder to track because of the current sheer volume of an ever-growing film production, which one adjective characterizes most accurately: massive. This year, size mattered and made both critics and creative crews very nervous.

A lot of anxiety, gloom and perhaps Schadenfreude-feel-alike glee was expressed here and there, as the stakes have gone sky-high, and the commercial failures have become all the more spectacular, stirring controversies, raising new questions and worries about the state of the “7th art” in Korean, and provoking its share of impromptu market studies and sudden fascination for Excel tables and spreadsheets (for example, this very revealing piece from JoongAng Daily: here). So in this respect, 2006 has been a year of intense financial darwinism, where the fittest have turned out to be very few, and sometimes none the happier for it.

From the point of the view of the professional or semi-professional observer/outsider, it is striking to see how easy it has become to consider (to confuse?) Korean cinema exclusively as an industry (which of course it is), or worse, as a factory (which it should not be, for everybody's sake). In that, last year marked a deep structural change, which will entail many readjustments in the near future.

It seems strangely appropriate, in this context, to quote the introductory lines of Adrien Gombeaud's Seoul Cinema:

“From the early 90's to the first hours of the 21st century, Korean films were the most hallucinating under the sun. Unleashed characters beat the living daylights out of each other, spat blood, insulted each other, loved each other to distraction, ran for their lives, screamed, stripped, immolated themselves, got drunk, got sick, slashed each other with bottle shards or ashtrays, cried all the tears of their bodies and collapsed, in exhilaration and exhaustion...” Dont acte (in effect here):

  A scene from A Dirty Carnival

 Jeon Ji-Hyun

It seems only fitting that the largest retrospective ever devoted to Kim Ki-young was hosted by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, 51 rue de Bercy, in the curving postmodern Frank Gehry building.

The architecture provided the appropriate setting for the works of a director who was nicknamed “Mister Monster” by his admirers; a moniker that fully says how far off the beaten track Kim Ki-young has ventured. In the context of Korean cinema, his was an oeuvre of considerable excess, characterized by the most unusual mise-en-scène, as disturbing as it is enjoyable, where a grotesque but unforgettable figurative power is the governing force. Long forgotten by the Korean public (and ignored by the the rest of the world), his films were reappraised at the 1997 Pusan International Film Festival, where eight of his works were shown. Since then, Kim Ki-Young has slowly found a place in retrospective screenings around the world, drawing forth shocked and passionate responses from global audiences.

The master, chilling out.

After presenting four titles in the perspective of its “50 years of Korean cinema” cycle, the Cinémathèque française offered until Christmas Eve 18 out of his 32 films. No small feat considering that 90% of his production is considered to be lost, not to mention the borderline quality of some of the remaining copies...

Born in Seoul in 1919, Kim Ki-Young spends the early 40’s in Japan, where he develops an intense passion for cinema and theater. Upon his return to his homeland in the early days of the liberation, he goes to Kyungsung school of dentistry, and concomitantly leads the National College Theater movement at Seoul University . This gives him the opportunity to produce The Dark Road, adapted from Chekhov’s On the Road, Ibsen’s Ghost, Capek’s Robots and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He also becomes an expert on Stanislavsky’s acting theory.

During the Korean War, he finds employment with the United States Information Service (USIS). In the prospect of the work he performs as a war journalist and producer for “Liberty News”, he completes about twenty documentaries. Then, he borrows the material necessary for the shooting of his first film, A Box of Death (1955), about war orphans, a debut strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism.

Little is left from this period, except for Yangsan Province (1955), a costume drama that already reveals some of the ruling obsessions of the director, centered on the disruptive aspect of desire.

The opening scene of Yangsan Province

On the surface, a typical tale of thwarted loves set in the Choseon Dynasty era, not unlike Chunhyang, the film is obviously more interested in the staging of the erotic mechanism of attraction. The damages wrought by time have unfortunately deprived the contemporary viewer from several scenes and the original ending of the film, deemed too “unrealistic” and “absurd” by the moral and aesthetic standards of the time. The script suggests extremely bold sequences: after the suicide of the protagonist, the mother was supposed to stab his beloved on the very tomb where her son was buried so that she could see the marriage of their souls. The film ended with an elegiac hallucination: the couple was making love before ascending to the heavens on a ray of light.

This idiosyncratic visual language that speaks more about surreality than reality finds its ideal expression five years later in The Housemaid (1960), the matrix of his subsequent works in many ways. Kim Ki-Young creates here a narrative and thematic pattern that he will use in most of his films: a woman seduces a married man and confronts the wife, breaking the couple apart and destroying herself in the process. In some respects, his other films appears as variations to the torments and punishments that he inflicts on the traditional domestic couple in The Housemaid with a sadistic delight that is only found in the works of Italian masters like Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

In Ban Gum-yon (made in 1975 but banned until 1981 and released in a heavily-censored version - 40 minutes were edited out), a film based on an old erotic Chinese tale, a courtesan blinds the first two wives of her husband and proceeds to poison the third. In A Moment To Die For/An Experience Worth Dying For (shot in 1995 but released posthumously, after the director died with his wife in the fire that destroyed his house in February 1998, in a strange echo of his fictional work), two women abused by their husbands decide to wreak each other’s vengeance.

To build his radical representation of gender/sex wars, often reminiscent of the films of Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura (Irezumi, Blind Beast, etc.), the South-Korean director almost always uses the traditional framework of melodrama, but a form of melodrama whose codes are perverted, contaminated by a deep undercurrent of black humor and elements from other seemingly incompatible genres. The Housemaid could have been a proper gothic horror movie complete with the haunted house, the anguish-ridden soundtrack - a mixture of maudlin piano melodies and dissonant pieces - and the ghost-like woman with whom something wicked this way (always) comes, usually behind a window first, like a threatening spectral presence.

Beautiful and weird: The Housemaid (Hanyo)

Instead, the film turns out to be not so much a horror tale à la Edgar A. Poe as a relentless, quasi-entomological study of characters enclosed within the animality of a sex drive that is dangerously close to a death drive, miles away from the misogynistic piece of work it would have been shaped into by a less creative filmmaker.

An extreme rarity in the history of cinema, the film, critically and publicly acclaimed, has been remade by his author three times, three moments of Korean society/history through the prism of one story, always the same and always different. All the while, the filmmaker commits himself to more and more formal experiments. For his first Woman of Fire (1972), Kim Ki-Young abandons the expressionist black and white of The Housemaid to adopt a gamut of psychedelic colors that give the viewer an acute sense of unease. With time, the filmmaker seems to radicalize his style: the hardly realistic frames become outright baroque in the second Woman of Fire (1982), a film on the verge of pure oneirism (or madness). There, the lovers turn ashen-colored in a metal room, as if consumed by their own drives, and the love scene literally comes to a standstill in a sequence showing statues that seem to evoke the petrifying property of desire.

From the 1970’s, Kim takes reality as a pre-text, a point of departure for the whims and wanderings of his fantasy, and explores the area where Eros and Thanatos meet further and further. Thirty years before the case of the frozen babies in Seoul, the Insect Woman (1972) depicts a child abandoned in a fridge. As his own producer, the director enjoys exceptional creative freedom that allows him to represent more and more horrific scenes and approach an increasing number of taboos and normally off-limits subject-matters. At the same, his films because an easy target for the “scissorhands” of the strict censorship exerted by the military regime. In I-eoh Island (1976), for example, the delirious story of a female community that resorts to spirits to fight against pollution and sterility, two sequences are edited out: a lovemaking scene with a drowned man and a scene involving a knife-wielding female shaman who arouses a dead man. Eventually, Kim is “asked” to make an anticommunist film, Love of Blood Relations (1976), but he finds a way to customize the commission into a deeply personal affair, by recentering the story on Lee Hwa-Si as a femme fatale of Marxism-Leninism, thus transcending the formal and political limits of the propaganda movie.

The 1980’s are a long era of hardships for a filmmaker that finds himself marginalized as a second-rate auteur, condemned to the hell of B-movies. His films, dominated by a primal, quasi-primitive fascination for genre movies and the symptoms of the transformation of Korean society, become increasingly strange, obsessive, and subversive and wind up as commercial disasters. With titles like Carnivore (self-remake of The Insect Woman, released in 1984) or the Hunting of Fools (1984), Kim Ki-young becomes a cult director among young video aficionados, but remains a master without disciple. For more than ten years, the director ceases to make films. Despite his persistent silence, it seems as if, during this time of inactivity, his influence left an imprint all the more profound on a whole generation of Korean filmmakers: Bong Joon-Ho, Park Chan-Wook, Im Sang-Soo, Kim Ki-Duk...

Between horror, satire, eroticism, melodrama and sometimes comedy, the director has created a morbid and multifaceted universe where despair is the ultimate horizon and sex systematically leads to the worst that can happen: death of course, but also the inhuman child of The Insect Woman, or the aborted foetus of the Woman of Fire ’82, symbols of a humanity disintegrated into infra-human objects, both dispossessed of its sovereignty and possessed by something greater, stronger (and meaner) than itself.

Although this has not been confirmed yet, the retrospective should find a new home next summer at the Lincoln Center, as a part of the Asian American film Festival organized by Subway Cinema. An event of importance, not to be missed, especially for the lovers of the cruel and unusual... this is the good stuff.