Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Imperceptibility: The Flaying of the Senses

Abstract

This is a sweeping chapter that charts the filmography of Kim Ki-duk as he explores the many symptoms of Korean society. I follow Deleuze in his approach to cinema where he maintains that the artist is a symptomologist of his or her culture. Kim Ki-duk is such a figure. His films solicit either complete rejection by fellow citizens, as well as complete admiration for his ability to face the darkest and most difficult questions that are repressed by the Korean social order. Kim Ki-duk offers a ‘minoritarian film’ position as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. His is a revolutionary cinema wherein a new Body without Organs is being fabulated through what I call ‘flaying the senses.’ Deleuze and Guattari ask: “ Is the Tao masochist?” (TP, 157). The masochism of bodily pain that characterize his imagery does two things: first, these images confront and position the audience into a subject position (should they take it) in a thought experiment that confronts ethical sensibilities by arresting signification via the impulse image; a piercing stillness is achieved. This impulse image has been explored by Patricia MacCormack (Cinesexuality. Ashgate, Hampshire and Burlington, 2008) in her work on cinemasochism. I try to show how Kim’s cinematography is imbued with it. Second, Kim Ki-duk ushers in the play of a new magical regime of images that I call fabulated signs. These created signs attempt to bring in a new joy and health into Korean way of life by subtly introducing the non-capitalist notion of the gift, as well as recalling the country’s wisdom traditions whose return comes with a difference. It is Tao-ist through and through.