Kim Ki-young

Kim Ki-young (; October 10, 1919 – February 5, 1998) was a South Korean film director known for intensely psychosexual, melodramatic, and grotesque films, often centred on female characters. Born in Seoul and raised in Pyongyang, he developed an interest in theatre before moving south after World War II, where he studied dentistry while continuing to work in theatre. During the Korean War, he made propaganda films for the United States Information Service, and in 1955 used discarded equipment to produce his first two features, whose success led him to establish his own production company.

Kim established himself with The Housemaid (1960), now regarded as one of the greatest Korean films. Despite South Korea's heavy censorship and depressed market of the 1970s, Kim produced some of his most significant work, including Insect Woman (1972) and Iodo (1977). His career waned in the 1980s, but he became a cult figure in the early 1990s, and a retrospective at the 1997 Pusan International Film Festival brought renewed attention to his work. He and his wife died in a house fire in 1998 while he was preparing a comeback film. Directors including Im Sang-soo, Bong Joon-ho, and Park Chan-wook have cited Kim as a formative influence.

Biography

Early life Kim Ki-young was born in the Gyo-dong neighborhood of Seoul—now part of Gyeongun-dong in Jongno-gu —on October 10, 1922. His family had lived in Seoul for several generations, and his grandfather was a guard at Gwanghwamun. Kim's family was well-educated and artistically inclined. His father, Kim Seok-jin, was an English teacher, and his mother, Han Jin-cho, was also a teacher and a graduate of Gyeonggi Women's College. Both painted as a hobby. The family moved to Pyongyang in 1930, where they stayed for the next 10 years. While still a student, one of Kim's poems was published in a Japanese newspaper, and he was awarded first prize in a painting competition.

Despite his artistic talents, Kim's main interest was medicine, and he applied for entrance into medical school upon graduation from high school in 1940. The theater and cinema grew into lifetime interests at this time. Kim often went to Kyoto, where he attended many stage productions and saw many international films. Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) and Fritz Lang's M (1931) made a particularly strong impression on him, and their influence was to show in his mature film style. To avoid conscription by the Japanese into the military, Kim returned to Japan briefly before 1945. and founded a theatrical group called "The Little Orchid".

Film career Kim was an intern at Seoul University Medical Clinic when the Korean War broke out. He went to Pusan on June 1, 1951, the day the North Korean army retreated.

Kim filmed about 20 documentaries for the U.S.I.S. with such titles as Diary of the Navy and I Am a Truck for "Liberty News". The film, now lost, showed stylistic influences from the Italian neo-realists and was the first Korean film to employ synchronous sound.

Theatrical poster to Yangsan Province (1955).With the success of this first film, Kim was able to direct his second feature, the historical costume drama Yangsan Province (also 1955), again using primitive equipment obtained from the U.S.I.S. Although Kim claimed to have based the film on a traditional song he learned from his mother, no exact source for the story has been found. It is suspected that the director made up the story himself, modeling it on traditional stories such as Chunhyangjeon, Lee Kyu-hwan's remake of which had recently become a major success, stimulating a rebirth in Korean cinema. After Lee's Chunhyangjeon, Yangsan Province was the second most successful Korean film of 1955. Though a popular success, critics of the time were not kind to Yangsan Province. Yoo Do-yeon called the film a "work of bad taste," and Heo Baek-nyeon said that it "debases the dignity of Korean cinema." In an era in which Korean film critics considered realism to be important, the now-lost ending to Yangsan Province, in which two dead lovers ascend to heaven on a beam of light, was harshly criticized. In light of Kim's later career, critics today believe that this cut scene displays some of the most recognizable characteristics of Kim's mature style such as an interest in the fantastic, and a jarring blending of genres. Other motifs that were to be explored in depth in Kim's later work can also be found in Yangsan Province, such as animal imagery, particularly the use of hens as a representation of fertility and sexuality.

In 1956 Kim started Kim Ki-young Productions,

The Housemaid

1960 was a critical year for South Korea, marking the end of the rule of Syngman Rhee through the civilian April Revolution. In 1962, another military authoritarian, General Park Chung-Hee, would ascend to power and rule South Korea for nearly two decades. The short period of relative freedom between these two administrations was known as the Second Republic. During this time, filmmakers took advantage of the relaxation of governmental control over the film industry to create several boldly experimental works. Director Yu Hyun-mok's film Aimless Bullet (1960) dates from this period, as does Kim Ki-young's major breakthrough, The Housemaid (also 1960). A lurid, expressionistic melodrama set in an eerie house, involving sexual obsessions, murder and rats, this is the first film in which Kim's mature style is fully evident, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest Korean films ever made.

The Housemaid marked Kim's full break with realism, the main style of Korean cinema at the time, into his own version of expressionism. Also, at least two other later films—Insect Woman (1972) and Beasts of Prey (1985)—are, in some ways, remakes of The Housemaid. By using the story as a template, Kim was able to emphasize different aspects of the scenario, and to concentrate on different details and aspects of the central situation with each new re-telling. The box-office success of this film enabled Kim to buy his first house, in the Namsan district of Seoul.

Some of the characteristic traits of Kim's mature style, first seen in these three films, are gothic excess, surrealism, horror, perversions and sexuality. Although in stark contrast to the realism, harmony, balance and sentimentality typical of Korean cinema of the time, Kim's films, in an eccentric and metaphorical way, deal with the realities of postwar, industrializing South Korean society and psychology. After having firmly established his auteur status with these films, Kim's unique vision began to wane in his films of the later 1960s.

During the 1970s, South Korea's film industry was at a low point due to government censorship and underfunding. Because of the poor state of the local film industry, cinema attendance in South Korea had dropped drastically since its high-point in the 1960s. Kim Ki-young, however, working independently in B-movie-like genre films, began to produce some of his most innovative and personal works at this time. Kim fully regained his auteurist spirit with Woman of Fire (1971), the second of his Housemaid trilogy. For this film, Kim was named Best Director at the Blue Dragon Film Awards and actress Youn Yuh-jung was given Special Mention for Best Actress at the Festival de Cine de Sitges. Not only popular with the critics, Kim's independently produced films were box-office successes during this era in which most films were harmed through heavy governmental interference. In 1972 Kim's Insect Woman was the only film to sell more than 100,000 tickets in Seoul and won Kim the Best Director prize at the Baeksang Arts Awards in 1973.

"I'm a scientist specializing in medicine. That makes me close to a technician... In some ways, human beings are more accurate than machines. Of course, that depends on their expertise. As an independent producer, I have to be a type of skilled laborer. There were many times that I had to make a film quickly. At those times, I kept entertainment-value in mind. Not once have I made a film for the sake of making the film itself. My taste is in looking through the camera. Filming happens to correspond with that taste. Art films are what Yu Hyun-mok makes. That's because director Yu wants to make art films. I just make films by following my heart, so the analysis I leave to all of you."— Kim Ki-young Although a critically acclaimed, financially successful independent filmmaker, Kim was not immune from governmental pressure. He filmed Ban Geum-ryeon in 1975, but it was banned at the time, and not released until 1981, with 40 minutes of footage censored. An examination of environmental, religious, social and sexual taboos, the film culminates in a scene of necrophilia that Paquet calls "one of the most shocking, brazen sequences ever shot by a Korean filmmaker". South Korean film critic Lee Young-il remembers that Kim's shoes were never shined, and that one of his few material pleasures was gourmet coffee. Kim Ki-young's unconventional and nonconformist nature also prevented him from participating in South Korea's mainstream film industry. The only official title he held within the film community was member of The National Academy of Arts, which he joined in 1997, and he did not cultivate friendships with journalists who could further his career. However, by the 1980s Kim's career had fallen into neglect. His continued fascination with B-movie exploitation themes as well as the increasingly obsessive and subversive nature of his films resulted in his isolation from the film community, and in financial failures at the box-office. The last of the Housemaid trilogy, Woman of Fire '82 (1982) is an even more radicalized and baroque retelling of the same basic story he had filmed numerous times in the previous two decades. With his profile again high in Korean film society, Kim's work began to attract international attention. Five of his films were screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 1996. With this renewed interest, Kim began work on a comeback film to be titled Diabolical Woman. Before Kim started work on the film or attended the festival, he and his wife were killed in a house fire caused by an electrical short circuit Few prints of Korean films before the 1970s survive, and at one point 90% of Kim's output was considered lost.

During his lifetime, Kim gained many supporters among the younger generation of South Korean directors. Park Kwang-su reportedly admires Kim Ki-young above all other directors, Park Chan-wook names The Housemaid as one of the films which most influenced his career, and says of Kim Ki-young, "He is able to find and portray beauty in destruction, humor in violence and terror."

Filmography