Film

Kim Ki-duk (Contemporary Film Directors)

Kim Ki-duk (Contemporary Film Directors)

Hye Seung Chung

Language: English

Pages: 176

ISBN: 0252078411

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


 

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian "extreme" cinema, and Kim has been labeled a "psychopath" and "misogynist" in South Korea.
 
Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, Hye Seung Chung challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression). Chung argues that the power of Kim's cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture, channel, and convey the raw emotions of protagonists who live on the bottom rungs of Korean society. She provides historical and postcolonial readings of victimization and violence in Kim's cinema, which tackles such socially relevant topics as national division in Wild Animals and The Coast Guard and U.S. military occupation in Address Unknown. She also explores the religious and spiritual themes in Kim's most recent works, which suggest possibilities of reconciliation and transcendence.

Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film

Film Technology in Post Production (Media Manuals)

Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel Faith

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Cultographies)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

War (1989), Kim situates their relationship within the larger context of U.S. military dominance from the opening sequence onward. The thirty-second precredit montage shows close-up shots of a toy gun being made out of a wooden plank with a U.S. military logo. An extreme close-up of a boy’s hand loading a steel pellet into the gun is followed by a medium close-up reaction shot of a ponytailed young girl who has been crowned with a C-ration can, presumably placed on her 28 | Kim Ki-duk

church for the visually impaired, Kim nurtured his love of painting, a lifelong hobby that he had developed as a child. In 1990, Kim cashed in his savings and flew to Paris, eventually spending three years in the City of Lights and in a seaside village near Montpellier, in the South of France, as a sidewalk artist. Besides making a meager living from sketching portraits of passersby, the self-taught artist put together a collection of over twenty semi-abstract oil paintings and toured nearly a

and designs, targeting Western audiences,” Kim replies: Some people are sarcastically saying that my films are made for European film festivals. It is true that the biggest patrons of my films are Europeans. Partially I did intend to maintain my primary market by providing Korean mise-en-scène to Western audiences. At the same time, I aimed to show the “beauty of Korea.” . . . Those who have a negative view called me “arrogant” for letting Odagiri Jo speak Japanese with the European market in

apologizing for having been unable to make it to my class. Apparently, he was not ready to “stand up in public” again. As I did in the Parisian theater a few years earlier, I could sense in the filmmaker’s typed comment a self-conscious recognition of internalized pain, one that ran deep. That was the last time I heard from him. In his interview with Cine 21 at the time of Dream’s release in the fall of 2008, Kim indicated that he had taken up farming in Kangwoˇn Province as a pastime, choosing

criminals of some sort—murderers, rapists, gangsters, and so on—who are themselves victims of circumstance and often evoke our sympathy. 11. For more information about the Kwangju Uprising and anti-Americanism in South Korea, see Cumings 382–91. 12. According to official records, between 1967 and 1998, 56,904 American soldiers committed 50,082 crimes in South Korea. Based on this statistic, scholars and activists infer that over a hundred thousand crimes were committed by U.S. soldiers

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