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.

“Don't shoot the film director!”

Currently between films, Kim Ki-Duk has been in a rather puzzling situation this year. Mostly, things are looking good for him... outside Korea. His latest work, Time, scheduled for January 31st 2007 in France (a country where he is particularly well-received), was sold to Lifesize Entertainement for distribution in the US (Lifesize distributed Kim's Bad Guy and Lee Chang-dong's Oasis). His new project seems off to a good start, as Cineclick has already secured pre-sales for his next film, entitled Breath and scheduled to start shooting in early 2007. Territories covered by the transaction include Italy (Mikado), Mexico (Film House), Turkey (Bir Film), Benelux (Cineart), Israel (Shani Film), and Greece (Hollywood Entertainment). Following Kim Ki-duk’s usual formal codes, the film will dispense with dialogues (a good thing for the subtitling) and will deal with the relationship between a prison inmate and the woman who decorates his cell, afflicted with an unfaithful husband. From these bits and pieces of information, it looks like Breath will be thematically close to 3-Iron and Bad Guy, with which it shares two elements: the incarceration, and the woman disappointed in her couple.

The actor he has picked up for his new project is Chang Chen (Zhang Zhen in pinyin), a Taiwanese actor best known to Western audiences for his role in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He has also worked with major Chinese directors like Wong Kar Wai, (Eros, Happy Together), Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Go Master) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Three Times.

Chang Chen

As for the rest of the cast, Kim allegedly wishes to have a mixture of Chinese and Koreans. It is easy to read in the casting choice a will to distanciate himself further (if such a thing is possible) from the Korean industry.

In this respect, to fully grasp what Kim Ki-Duk's current status is (quite the quandary), it is worth looking back to the events that occurred last August.

A mini-festival on the maximal career of South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho will take place at the IFC Center on February 26 and 27. A special line-up of Bong’s signature cinema—black comedies, gritty and ubercool crime dramas and sci-fi thrillers with a manhwa feel—will kick off with showings of Incoherence, Sink and Rise, Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder.

 

 

 Bong Joon-Ho

Bong Joon-Ho is a South Korean film director and screenwriter, born in 1969. After graduating from Yonsei University majoring in sociology, Bong, Jun-ho made his first 6mm short film, White Man in 1993, and won an award at Shin-young Teenager Film Festival. After working as an assistant director for the film Motel Cactus by Park Ki-yong(1997), he made his feature film debut with Barking Dogs Never Bites (2000). In 2003, he made his second feature film, Memories of Murder, which won the Best Director Price (Concha de Plata) in San Sebastian Film Festival.

Films:
The Host
2006, 35mm, color, Showbox & Magnolia Films, 119 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Song Kang- Ho, Park Hae-Il, Bae Du-Na, Byeon Hie-Bong, Ko Ah-Sung

Synopsis: Toxins from a U.S military base flow into Korea’s Han River, causing the birth of a mutant creature which terrorizes Seoul. When it grabs a little girl, her dysfunctional family must band together to save her. The Host is like a mutant hybrid spawned from the improbable union of Little Miss Sunshine and Godzilla, for the film is a family comedy and political satire in which an unnaturally evolved tadpole just happens to loom (very) large. Bong expertly balances absurd humor against tense thrills, and domestic drama against mass mayhem, reasserting South Korea's place at the pinnacle of genre-busting cinema - and most of all he surprises at every turn in a film where, despite a realistic social milieu, almost anything seems possible.

Awards:
Best Director, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Film, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Sound, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best CG, 5th Korean Film Festival
Best Picture, 5th Korean Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
New York Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
DHL Audience Choice Award For Best Feature, Hawaii International Film Festival
Pusan International Film Festival
Best Special Effects and Orient Express Award for Best Asian Film, Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia (Spain) 2006


Memories of Murder
2003, 35mm, color, CJ Entertainment & Palm Pictures, 127 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Song Kang-Ho, Kim Sang-Kyung, Park Hae-Il

Synopsis:

South Korea was rocked to its foundations when struck by its first serial killer, who raped and murdered ten women in a small village in Kyonggi Province between 1986 and 1991. Director Bong Joon-Ho (Barking Dogs Never Bite) has taken the investigation and combined it with best-of-career performances from Song Kang-Ho (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) and Kim Sang-Kyung (Turning Gate), to make Korea's most highly-acclaimed film of 2003, a master work that is itself like a memory of a dream: heartbreaking, mysterious, stunningly beautiful, and unspeakably sad.  
A comedy, of sorts, of procedural errors that would be hilarious were it not so tragic, the film is a haunting look at a nation finding itself inevitably slipping back to an earlier, uglier era when an authoritarian government could freely violate the rights of private citizens in the name of the law. 

Awards:
Best Film, Grand Bell Awards
Best Actor (Song Kang-Ho), Grand Bell Awards
Best Director (Bong Joon-Ho), Grand Bell Awards
Silver Seashell, San Sebastian International Film Festival
Fipresci Prize, San Sebastian International Film Festival
Best New Director (Bong Joon-Ho), San Sebastian International Film Festival 2003
Asian Film Award, Tokyo International Film Festival
Grand Prix, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Premiere Award, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Prix Mediatheques, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Special Prize of the Police, Cognac Festival du Film Policier
Best Screenplay Award, Audience Award, Torino Film Festival (Italy), 2003.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)
2000, 35mm, color, Mirovision, 106 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Cast: Bae Du-Na, Lee Sung-Jae

Synopsis:
American Beauty hopped up on laughing gas, Barking Dogs Never Bite’s plot is choreographed as intricately as a triple-time minuet. Its director says it's about corruption and innocence (and it is), but the story plays as a wild comedy focusing on two of the greatest characters to appear onscreen in decades: Lee Sung-Jae, a part-time lecturer who learns he'll do anything to achieve a coveted position as a professor and Bae Doo-Na, a female member of an apartment building's custodial staff who yearns to do something brave. A shaggy-dog story about the mysteries of pregnancy, the length of toilet paper, lost dogs, and good stew, this movie is a bedtime story for urban sophisticates, scored to a be-bop soundtrack. The director's debut feature, and one of the few independent Korean films, it gleefully mixes razor-sharp acting, goofy physicality, black comedy, and genuine warmth. It's the kind of movie that audiences live for, and that gives marketing departments nightmares.  

Awards:
Best Editing, Slamdance Film Festival 2001
International Film Critics Federation Award of Young Asian filmmakers, 25th Hong Kong International Film Festival
Special award presented to composer Cho Sung-Woo for his soundtrack for Barking Dogs Never Bite, Buenos Aires International Film Festival (Argentina) 2001.
Best Newcomer Award to Producer Cho Min-hwan for Barking Dogs Never Bite, Munich Film Fest (Germany) 2001

Sink And Rise (from Twentidentity )
2004, Digi-beta, color, 95 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
Twentidentity is a 20-part omnibus film made by alumni of the Korean Academy of Film Arts, on the occasion of the school's 20th anniversary. Bong's contribution is Sink and Rise, a whimsical work set alongside the Han River that can be seen as a warm up for the director's third feature The Host.

Incoherence (1994)
1994, Digi-Beta, color, 30 min.
Director: Bong Joon-Ho
In 1996, his short graduation film, Incoherence, a black comedy that criticized society with his unique sense of humor, was invited to international film festivals, the San Diego and Hong Kong Film Festivals, giving Bong recognition and a rise to fame.

As I was reading these lines from Suji Kwock Kim's beautiful collection of poetry, I recollected a somewhat problematic moment in my writing life: once upon a time, I wrote a 15-page essay on Kim Ki-Duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. The essay in its original form never made it into the pages of the magazine it was intended for, and did not survive a hard drive crash (the postmodern version of the autodafé). The point of this anecdote is this: there are a lot of things to talk about when we talk about Kim Ki-Duk, to parody the title of a book by Raymond Carver, but there is a strong possibility that this excess of talk to which the filmmaker seems to invite us, viewers, spectators, commentators, may end up being nothing more than superfetatory trash, meant to crash and/or burn from the start.

Nevertheless, Kim Ki-Duk's cinema invites us to speak, think, find fault or inspiration with and in what he shows and what he does not, somewhere between beauty and horror, serenity and brutality. And Time, his thirteenth film, is no exception to the rule.

A compelling meditation on what I can only call, for lack of a better expression, temps vécu (roughly speaking, time as the experience of a subjective passing), the film inspired the following thoughts: