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Kim Ki-Duk: The Walking Dead |
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Film Blog -
Essays
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Since I was mentioning Kim Ki-Duk’s presentation of Breath for the official competition at Cannes a few days ago, I thought of sharing a couple of interesting insights I gathered from recent informal conversations with Sue-Young Park-Primiano, after her monthly Classic Movie Night lectures at The Korea Society. I would like to linger over the persistence (and the relevance) of her usage of the term homosocial when describing both post-war Korean cinema and Korean culture in general, but maybe some other time…
To breathe or to live, that is the question
So, here is the idea… one troubling thing appears if you think about Kim Ki-Duk’s works as a whole: in a lot of his films (3-Iron, Bad Guy, Spring…, Time, Samaria), there is invariably a turning or vanishing point at which one of the main characters actually ceases to exist. As a matter of fact, a number of the protagonists literally die, sometimes at an early stage of the narrative, and spend the rest of the story wandering as ghostly supplements, who haunt rather than inhabit the film. Most viewers and critics have noticed their inability to speak. This silence could very well be the translation of their non-existence. Thus, what they do is not so much being, as appearing. The natural state of the usual Kim Ki-Duk character is that of a vision, and its primary quality seems to lie in the passage: s/he passes away, out, and so on. Hence its spectral status and the general impression of morbidity that they convey.It is very tempting indeed to read all the directors’ films as ghost stories, and see them as painterly staging of disincarnate ciphers or symbols (“a vision of society”, as Kim Ki-Duk recently put it).
The staging of the romantic couple in Ago (Crocodile. This is the Japanese poster)
In other words, they stand for something else than themselves. Instead of flesh and blood, the director seems to offer spirit, intervals, breathing between moments of being, mobile figures that are more like medieval allegories than realistic representations of actual humans. This could explain at least part of the violence usually associated with the director’s works. Basically, if the bodies of the characters are subjected to all kinds of unsavory treatments, it is because their skin, their bones, their being are already too much. One could say that what happens in Kim Ki-Duk’s is a slow mise à nu (stripping bare) of a man/a woman. What is there, beneath the face, beneath the skull, beneath this messy bag of organs? The answer may be: a bit of time and a lot of suffering.
Time does not heal in Kim Ki-Duk's films
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