Kim Ki-duk

BEYOND "EXTREME": THE CINEMA OF RESSENTIMENT

Beyond “Extreme” The Cinema of Ressentiment Kim Ki-duk: Towards a More Perfect Imperfection Alongside Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk), famous for his Vengeance Trilogy of films comprising Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Poksu nǔn na ǔi kǒt; 2002), Oldboy (Oldǔpoi; 2003), and Lady Vengeance (Ch’ingǒlhan Kǔmjassi; 2005), Kim Ki-duk is one of the most acclaimed Korean filmmakers in the Western world. As of 2011, an unprecedented ten of Kim’s seventeen feature-length motion pictures are commercially available in the U.S. home-video market: The Isle (Sǒm; 2000), Real Fiction (Siljae sanghwang; 2000), Bad Guy (Nappǔn namja; 2001), Address Unknown (Such’wiin pulmyǒng; 2001), The Coast Guard (Haeansǒn; 2002), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (Pom yŏrŭm kaŭl kyŏul kŭrigo pom; 2003), Samaritan Girl (Samaria; 2004), 3-Iron (Pinjip; 2004), The Bow (Hwal; 2005), and Time (Sigan; 2006).1 Among these thematically linked yet stylistically disparate films, his award-winning Buddhist fable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring became an 2 | Kim Ki-duk international art-house hit in April and May 2004, breaking all previous box-office records for South Korean films receiving theatrical distribution in the United States and Europe. Around the time of this film’s U.S. debut on April 2, Kim was beginning to make his way into Western critics’ East Asian film canons by winning two prestigious Best Director awards from the Berlin and Venice International Film Festivals, for Samaritan Girl and 3-Iron, respectively. As the mother of all tributes to a maverick filmmaker whose “sensuous, sensational imagery and wild and haunting narratives” have enthralled film-festival juries and “extreme cinema” aficionados around the world, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held a retrospective of Kim’s fourteen films to date between April 23 and May 8, 2008 (Kardish).2 As a self-trained visual artist with little formal training in filmmaking , Kim Ki-duk is a distinctive talent in world cinema, someone whose oeuvre spills over with painterly landscapes—from placid lakes and sunbleached seashores to mist-shrouded mountains and windswept fields. Yet those sometimes serene evocations of the natural world contrast sharply with the agitated mental state of his films’ anguished characters . Exposing the dark underbelly of Korean society and training an unforgiving lens on the actual as well as imagined spaces where criminal activities proliferate and corruption or vice is a fact of life, Kim’s cinema simultaneously respects and deconstructs conventional codes of realism through the incorporation of metaphysical elements and fantasy sequences. Film after film, in narratives of alienation, cruelty, obsession, and transcendence that shift between Brechtian distanciation techniques and coercive strategies of affective suture, immersing the viewer in a world that is both comfortably familiar and strangely foreign or “exotic,” Kim has consistently invited audiences to question the distinctions between morality and immorality, love and hatred, happiness and misery, reality and fantasy. Shifting effortlessly from the sublime spiritual symbolism of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky to the interclass angst of Oshima Nagisa or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kim’s diverse yet unified body of work—seventeen feature-length motion pictures thus far, all of which were written by him between 1996 and 2011—has left an indelible mark on global art cinema. Kim’s high profile among cinephiles in North America and Europe as well as his thoroughgoing attempts to take chances as an experimental Beyond “Extreme”: The Cinema of Ressentiment | 3 filmmaker—mixing Japanese and Korean dialogue in Dream (Pimong; 2008) and shooting large sections of Real Fiction in a single take, without conventional cuts3 —are not the only reasons why his body of work deserves a book-length treatment. While his expressive and painterly visual style merits critical attention as a sign of his ability to conjure up thoughts of “pure cinema,” his life story is filled with enough drama and controversy to pique the interest of casual readers outside film studies. Indeed, his unique personal background sets Kim Ki-duk apart from other world directors whose names are referenced in this introductory section for the sake of aesthetic and thematic comparisons. Born December 20, 1960, in the remote mountain hamlet of Bonghwa , north of Kyǒngsan Province (southeast of Seoul), Kim experienced numerous setbacks—including class discrimination and harassment based on his lowly status—as a young boy forced to fit...