Kim Ki-duk Research Articles

Quenching Annihilation: Exploring Cinematic Space in the Crime Film Pieta

Pieta is a South Korean film directed by Kim Ki-duk, featuring a crime story about love and redemption between a mother and her son, starring Jeong-jin Lee and Min-su Jo. The film narrates the story of a “mother” and “son” without any blood relation, aligning with Director Kim Ki-duk’s consistent thematic choices: love and redemption, death and destruction. This article focuses on the analysis of the audio-visual language of Pieta, attempting to examine the film’s narrative space from the perspective of audio-visual language. It primarily explores the functional forms of space, analyzing the construction of physical, mental, and social spaces within the film’s scenes.

Erratum

Correction| May 01 2023 Erratum positions (2023) 31 (2): 529. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10602270 Connected Content Errata: Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Erratum. positions 1 May 2023; 31 (2): 529. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10602270 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search Erratum for Youngmin Choe, “Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals,” positions 31, no. 1 (2022): 299–54.Mariah Devereux Herbeck was misspelled as Mariah Deveraux Herbeck on page 251, in the notes on page 252, and in the references on page 253. These errors have been corrected in the print and online versions of this article.https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122203 View Original Article You do not currently have access to this content.

Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals

Abstract This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.

Seeing in Circles: Narrative Circularity, the Cosmetic Gaze, and the Fusion of Self and Other in Kim Ki-duk's Sigan

This article examines the connections between narrative circularity, cosmetic surgery, and the circular nature of the cosmetic gaze in South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk's film Sigan (Time, 2006). I argue that the cosmetic gaze, which allows the human body to act as both subject and object to the self, also mirrors the looping circularity of Kim's film. By formally and narratively (con)fusing the film's male and female protagonists, Sigan enacts the interconnectedness of male and female, subject and object, and, consequently, self and other while offering a critique of how Korean subjects have literally embodied the burdens of the male-identified, Eurocentric gaze.

False Redemption—The Narrative Pattern of Korean Art Cinema

Korean art cinema has an undeniable han favor, which is considered scholarly as the most characteristic aesthetic category of Korea. The iconic auteurs who pushed Korean brands to the international stages, such as Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Lee Chang Dong, did not only gain their fame with their han films, but also prompted the dominated style, which is the han motif. This article extracted the common narrative pattern of the internationally acclaimed Korean art films by comparing and reading the films under the assumed pattern of false redemption. The parallel Christian redemption is a good supplement for the better understanding of false redemption. The false redemption is the most popular and effective pattern for expressing the han motif.

The Image of the North Korean in Contemporary South Korean Cinema

Confidential Assignment (Kongjo, Kim Sung-hoon), released on January 18, 2017 between DPRK nuclear tests, tells a story of two special agents. One is from North Korea and the other one from South Korea, and they unite to fight against a common enemy. Extraordinarily, the North Korean agent is portrayed as more formidable than his South Korean counterpart who is unable to match him in every field. Also, the North Korean agent is portrayed by a Korean super star, Hyun-Bin. In this paper, I analyze two other similarly themed movies: The Net (Kŭmul, Kim Ki-Duk) and Steel Rain (Kangch’ŏlbi, Yang Wooseok). All of them were released recently and were huge commercial successes in South Korea. The aim of the following paper is to show and analyze the evolution of the image of North Korean characters in South Korean cinema. During the analysis, the question of how the change from villain to super hero was possible is answered. The way in which the movies talk about inter-Korean relations and how they portray both countries is particularly important to understand the current political sentiments in the Peninsula and how it can affect the Moon Jae-in presidency.

Questioning ethical possibility: thigh slicing as ritual for the initiation of compassion and filial piety in Kim Ki-duk’s Pietà (2012)

ABSTRACTFilial piety forms the core of human relations in Confucian morality. One form of filial piety is ‘filial cannibalism’, a term for incidents in which children offer their own flesh to their parents out of filial piety (Wang, Sixiang. 2012. “The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan: Finger Servering, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early Chosǒn.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 25 (2): 175–212). One method of filial cannibalism during the Joseon dynasty in Korea (1392–1910) was thigh slicing. This motif appears in Kim Ki-duk’s film Pietà, in which the male protagonist Gangdo slices his thigh and offers his flesh to Miseon, a woman pretending to be his mother. While many studies on Pietà examine the Christian references and decode the film’s title as a reference to compassion, this study suggests there is also value in examining Confucian references. The act of cannibalism in the film can be understood as initiation of compassion and filial piety, although it is still clear that the relation between Gangdo and Miseon is based on betrayal and revenge. Arguably, filial piety– the very core of Confucian morality– can be understood as representative of Confucianism itself, similar to the way that compassion is one of the central concepts of Christianity. The film’s disturbing usage of both concepts seems to reveal what Steve Choe calls the ‘possibility of ethical impossibility’ (Choe, Steve. 2007. “Kim Ki-Duk’s Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Economy.” Positions 15 (1): 65–90).

Representing Buddhism through Mise-en-scène, Diegesis, and Mimesis: Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

This paper examines elements identified as “Buddhist” in the Korean film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (K. Pom yŏrŭm kaŭl kyŏul kŭrigo pom) written and directed by Kim Ki-duk (b. 1960) and released in 2003. It draws on research on this topic by numerous notable researchers of Korean film. For the sake of our investigation, we have arranged various points made by these scholars into three sections reflecting categories philosophers have long used to analyze drama. These are (1) mise-en-scene: the visual design of the film, (2) diegesis: the fictive narrative space of the film, and (3) mimesis: symbolic or ritual action in the film. This arrangement is based on a study of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring by Pak Chongch’ŏn. This paper reorganizes Pak’s analysis and expands it to include the ideas of other Korean critics along with our own. Specifically, the paper looks at how the director uses mimicry, seasonal allegory, and various elements of visual design to create a multifaceted religious narrative. We analyze his assorted usages of Buddhist iconographical images and temple sounds including chanting of the Heart Sūtra, but argue that Kim additionally builds the storyline with cinematic symbolism and metaphor taken from Yin/Yang philosophy, Five Elements theory, Christianity, Jainism, and Korean folklore. We also offer a theory of Buddhist adoptive society in terms of the island and orphan metaphor found in the film. The paper considers whether Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring falls short of the requirements necessary for designating it as a “Buddhist film” as argued by a number of researchers, particularly if it lacks a soteriological solution to the inherent problem of human suffering at the forefront of the movie.

«Нарративные трансформации» в текстах неклассической парадигмы художественности (кино, литература)

The principles and methods of violation of the narrative statements of the text are examined. Typologically similar trends in the use of “narrative transformations” in literature and cinema are shown. The fundamental difference of their implementation in various symbolic systems is commented. The paper shows that the narrative transformations in the film text are: openness of composite construction (violation of the order of the parts, skip parts, open end), fragmentation; plot polysemy (multiplicity); polysubjectness; gaps (space of uncertainty). Special attention is paid to non-narrativity as the main strategy of non-classical artistic paradigm, defined as a lack of event experience of being. This problem is related to the crisis of I-consciousness, for which the destruction of the personal event experience means the loss of self-identity. Narrative transformations are discussed in the following films: “Irreversible” (dir. Gaspar Noe), “Descended from heaven” (dir. V. Kunin), “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (dir. Guy Ritchie), “Rashomon” (dir. A. Kurosawa), “Trans-Europ-Express” (dir. A. Robbe-Grillet), “Reconstruction” (dir. Christoffer Boe), “Groundhog Day” (dir. X. Ramis), “Run, Lola, run” (dir. T. Tykwer), “Empty house” (dir. Kim Ki-Duk), “No trains, no planes” (dir. Jos Stelling), “Amelie” (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet), etc.

Subverting patriarchal Buddhism in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring

A number of Kim Ki-duk’s films, particularly Bad Guy (2001), are infamous for the violence towards women characters. While feminist critics deplore Kim as a misogynist, alternative readings – some based on interviews with the director – suggest violence is the only way his silent characters, existing on the margins of society, can communicate. In this way, his body of work is not read as an endorsement of misogyny, but rather as a social critique of patriarchy. One film, however, that is considered unique and eludes these discussions is Spring, Sumer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003), a contemplative Buddhist story. I argue, in fact, the film is in dialogue with patriarchal Buddhist portrayals of women as temptresses and samsaric mothers. Further, since it appears the monks in the narrative are incapable of enlightenment, we should question if this is a result of their treatment of women.

How They Become Spectral Flâneurs: Walking the City Haunting the Cinema in Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron

Cet article examine 3-Iron (2004), un film de Kim Ki-duk, de la perspective de la flânerie spectrale. Chacun de ses films a été reçu différemment dans son pays d’origine et à l’étranger – Kim se trouvait pris dans un lien, car c’est un cinéaste qui a reçu des accolades et des succès de boxe modérée à l’étranger tout en manquant, à plusieurs reprises, de faire appel aux critiques et aux cinéphiles locaux. Curieusement, cette situation de Kim est, à la manière d’un palimpseste, alignée avec les façons dont il fait des films. Il habite à la tangente de l’industrie cinématographique comme un fantôme, et il rend possible le spectral d’une manière qui ne peut incarner qu’un flâneur spectral dans son onzième film 3-Iron . Ce flâneur ouvert un espace où Kim peut opérer à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de l’industrie cinématographique. Le personnage du flâneur spectral vient à la place de Kim, et 3-Iron devient une allégorie bizarre, finalement convaincante, du réalisateur fantôme qui a fait un film sur les fantômes.

The topography of 1960s Korean youth film: between plagiarism and adaptation

ABSTRACTThis paper compares and contrasts the prototypical Korean youth film The Barefooted Youth (Menbal ui cheongchun, Kim Ki-duk 1964) with the Japanese film, Mud Spattered Purity (Dorodarake no junjō, Nakahira Kō 1963), thereby examining the process of plagiarism and adaptation in Korean youth film production. Youth film was a popular film genre during the 1960s Korean cinema renaissance, and it is no exaggeration to say that The Barefooted Youth was a cultural phenomenon, attracting enthusiastic support from young viewers of the day. However, the film is also accused of plagiarism whenever conversation turns to Korean imitation of Japanese culture. I track two phases of plagiarism and adaptation in the case of The Barefooted Youth at a time when Korean imports of Japanese culture were at their peak; I utilize the two films and their corresponding screenplays, as well as archival materials including the actual censorship document that dealt with the film. I find that the screenplays are very similar, but that genuine adaptation took place during the filming process. I focus on mise-en-scene, the theme song and, above all, the shinpa style adopted for Korean viewers. This analysis offers a starting point for studies of comparative Korean–Japanese film history.

Study on Space of hierarchy based on‘Urban Slum’ －With focus on <Pieta> by director Kim Ki-duk－

Study on Space of hierarchy based on‘Urban Slum’ －With focus on <Pieta> by director Kim Ki-duk－

FEDAKAR KIZ FILMINDE TRAVMATIK CINSELLIK


 
 
 
 
 
 
 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. 
 
 

Contemplation of Film Styles through Images : Focusing on Birdcage Inn by Kim Ki-duk

In movies, images combine many phenomena of a film style to express the main idea; and at this level, images reach even the unique subconscious inner mind of the audience, director, and writer. When it comes to images, by understanding the idea the movie is trying to convey, the narrative links of images that the movie conveys can be seen according to the environment each person lives in, the habits and ego that developed within that environment, and the subjective thoughts and personalities formed through social relations. In this process, a platform of reason is opened for each individual, who each create their own narrative, and this is the ripple effect created by images in movies. This style of approach ? using images with moderated language ? allows the viewer to combine one’s inner phenomena to form and create another narrative, and at the same time, provide an opportunity to recreate a realm of cognitive and perceptive thought. It is in this opportunity to experience this ripple effect that lays the significance of images in films.

Między Koreą i Europą. O dramaturgii filmów Kim Ki-duka

Between Korea and Europe. The Dramaturgy of Films by Kim Ki-duk The article attempts to point out how Korean director Kim Ki-duk constructs the dramaturgy of his films. His works belong to the European art cinema tradition, and are marked by specific narrative structures and strategies (e.g. chronological order of events, parallel and mirror plot schemes, silent characters and limitation of film dialogue). Dramaturgically significant are also repeating scenes of violence and cruelty, characteristic for Kim. Finally, briefly presented are critical approaches to his films, which together with the director’s biography allow us to call him “an accented filmmaker” (using terms and concepts proposed by Hamid Naficy).

MIRROR PLAY, OR SUBJECTIVIZATION IN 3 IRON: BASED ON LACAN’S ANALYSIS OF LAS MENINAS AND HIS OPTICAL MODEL

Though Kim Ki-duk (Kim Kidŏk) has been most notorious as a filmmaker for his bleak and misogynistic imagination, most notably in The Isle (Sŏm), Address Unknown (Such’wiin pulmyŏng), Bad Guy (Nappŭn namja), The Coast Guard (Haeansŏn), and Samaritan Girl (Samaria), 3 Iron (Pinjip) seems rather a moderate and romantic love story. Nevertheless, the film still remains problematic mainly because of its enigmatic narrative line. The sensational poster image of the female protagonist embracing her husband, while at the same time kissing her lover, epitomizes what is at stake in 3 Iron from a Lacanian perspective. This article is devoted to the task of identifying the logic of subjectivization and different directions of freedom operating in that strange love triangle. What is noticeable in describing the subjectivity of protagonists is 3 Iron’s elaborate use of mise-en-scene through windows and mirrors. The function of reflective materials is to show the protagonists in love as alienated, split and spectral. Being spectral means being related to the status of the Real as otherness or nothingness. In that regard, the personages in Las Meninas could be applied to the characters in this film in terms of their topological status: the royal couple and Min’gyu, Velasquez and T’aesŏk, the princess and Sŏnwha. The first pair has the status of the Other, the second the Real and the third the Symbolic shifting to the Real. In addition, Lacan’s rotated double-mirror device helps us to understand why subjectivization, or the psychoanalytic cure, means separation, or freedom, from the mirror of the Other. The transgressive couple seems to achieve freedom in the end. However, the different choices made by the masculine and feminine subjects need to be analyzed more closely on the basis of Lacan’s theory of sexuation. T’aesŏk finally becomes a ghostly existence and leaves the symbolic reality completely, whereas Sŏnwha decides to return home while letting her life and house remain open to the spectral being of T’aesŏk. According to Lacan, Sŏnwha’s way of living could be interpreted as having ultimate freedom because she treats the Symbolic as being ‘not-all’, that is, as being a reality containing an infinite gap that changes the reality from inside. By contrast, T’aesŏk’s choice is subject to the idea of reality as being ‘total’, thus he subtracts himself as an exceptional blot in the Symbolic. T’aesŏk’s way of enjoying freedom is limited because his resistant position is still inherently bound to the existent reality. In that sense, 3 Iron represented a crucial moment for the appearance of feminine subjectivity in Korean cinema during the 2000s, when so much effort had been made to rebuild the masculinity lost mainly as a result of the social decline following “the IMF crisis”.

The Transnational Buddhism of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

Kim Kiduk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . and Spring is a Buddhist film from Korea that reflects both traditional Asian and modern western-influenced impulses. A close reading of the film reveals how it replicates long-standing ritual practices such as seeing and being seen by the Buddha, and literary themes such as the cycle of karma. It also exhibits fidelity to canonical accounts of contemplative practices, reflecting a mainstream interest of western Buddhism that has found its way back to Korean society. Kiduk's film demonstrates that Buddhism is a complex and dynamic entity that evolves through a process of feedback and response in a global context that should not be atomized into “Asian” versus “western,” and “traditional” versus “contemporary” fragments.

Toronto 2013

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALToronto’s 38th edition (5–15 September 2013) was as big and diverse as its ambitions allowed, but its stubborn public image partial to Euro-American content continues to weaken its “international” status. The festival hasn’t struck a respectable balance between indulging the puffery of dominant film industries and supporting lesser-known cinemas. Indeed, this year’s milestones went largely unplugged. There were encores: at least five directors – Hong Sang-soo, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Kim Ki-duk, Brillante Mendoza and Sono Sion – returned with films for the second year running. There was discontinuity: Miyazaki Hayao and Tsai Ming-liang delivered what could be their last features after retiring. There was politics that ordained merit: no film was as insincerely hyped as 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s take on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography about chattel slavery – a lifeless adaptation writ large given this skeleton’s dead weight. On the other hand,...

가치사슬 구조로 본 저예산 디지털 영화제작 시스템의 안정을 위한 연구

한국영화산업에서 디지털 기술의 도입은 저예산 디지털 영화제작을 활발하게 하는 요소가 되었고, 그 결과 국내 영화감독들이 해외 영화제에서 각종 수상과 함께 작품성을 인정받으며 마침내, 2012년 김기덕 감독은 <피에타>로 세계 3대 영화제 중 하나인 베니스 영화제에서 최고상인 '황금사자상'을 수상하는 쾌거를 이루기도 하였다. 하지만 저예산 디지털 영화들이 양적 증가에 비해 질적 성장을 비례적으로 완성하지 못한 이유들이 드러나면서 제작 단계와 시스템 측면에서 몇 가지 한계점을 안고 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 문제점들의 해결방식의 하나로서, 2000년부터 현재까지 제작 시스템을 통해 영화산업의 가치사슬 구조가 일반형에서 수직 수평통합형으로 변화되고 있음을 살펴보았다. 또한, 2000년대 중 후반 부에 제작된 저예산 디지털 영화들을 중심으로 (홍대)인디밴드 음악시장의 성공사례, 제작비의 정책적인 지원, 저예산 영화제작 투자사에 대한 세제혜택, 그리고 해외 영화제에 대한 지원책 등을 제시하였고, 상업적으로 성공을 거둔 저예산 디지털 영화의 제작과정을 분석하여 그에 따른 방안을 모색하였다. The phase in digital technology expedited low-budget digital film productions in the Korean film industry; hence the international film festivals circuit became the launching pad for Korean directors as they built their reputation and careers around the critical acclaim. Pieta (Kim Ki-Duk)'s Claim on Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 would be one of the splendid achievements - the festival is considered to be one of the top the international film festival. However, the increased volume of the low-budget digital film productions are not necessarily proportional to the growth in the quality of the productions. The drawbacks to the production system appeared to be the underlying cause. In attempt to approach the issue, this article explores the production system from 2000 until now. It is illustrated that the value chain model has been transformed from general ones into vertical & horizontal integrated ones. A notable example of successful indie bands-around Hongik university area-, as well the analysis on the low-budget hit productions, especially from the mid-2000's, are introduced as the case studies. The strategies that led the success, such as subsidies policy, the tax benefits on investment firms and production companies, and the aid in international film festival submissions on low-budget digital film productions, are thus examined with further suggestions.