FEDAKAR KIZ FILMINDE TRAVMATIK CINSELLIK

Abstract


 
 
 
 
 
 
 In his fictional films, Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed South Korean directors of contemporary
 transnational cinema, usually focuses on transgressive deeds that are themselves traumatic and cause
 other traumatic events in turn. In other words, Kim Ki-duk’s narrative films represent transgression
 and trauma as two sides of the same coin. Kim Ki-duk is not the kind of director who adopts a stable
 moral stance. Suggesting certain attitudes towards certain occasions by confirming some deeds while
 disconfirming others that are in accord or discord with the current sociocultural prohibitions is a style of
 narrating he does not embrace. Rather than simply condemning subversions that have traumatic consequences, rather than rendering subversion and trauma as mutually exclusive for praising subversions and
 condemning trauma-inducing events, Kim Ki-duk perceives them always as interpenetrating phenomena
 that trouble unilateral morality. It seems that he tends to display fictitious worlds in which deviation
 from the law, on the one hand, paves the way for unconventional (bodily/psychic) experiences, and, on
 the other, entails violence, emotional breakdown, guiltiness, (self-) punishment and vengeance. Along
 these lines of thought, this paper discusses the depiction of female prostitution in Kim Ki-duk’s Samaria
 (Samaritan Girl, 2004). By borrowing some tools from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, the paper
 shows that the film, in the context of deviant-traumatic female sexuality, leads its audience to a margin
 where they find themselves unable to reach generic moral answers regarding the relationship between
 the law and transgression.