June 10, 1998

Meet Mr. Monster

By Chuck Stephens

KIM KI-YOUNG , one of world cinema's least-known and greatest eccentrics, lived -- and died -- in a haunted house.

His death was sudden, shocking, cruel -- and completely in keeping with his work. One night this past February, a fire consumed the South Korean filmmaker's house in Seoul -- a house he bought and loved not least because he understood that the wraith of its former owner was still in residence -- and took his life, and that of his wife, Kim Yu-bong. Everyone who knew him, and especially those who had met him only near the end, would agree: it had been too short a life. Kim Ki-young was 78 years old.

According to some, his nickname had been "Mr. Monster": a term of affection, an index of his passion for the grotesque. Kim's films were horrifying, sure, but no more than they were hilariously melodramatic, fantastically overwrought, and gloriously confused; monster movies about the lusting, brutal beasts we make of ourselves.

Born in Seoul in 1919, Kim was raised in Pyongyang (now the North Korean capital), spent time drifting through Japan and soaking up movies as a young man, and finally returned to Korea in 1941, where his plans of becoming a dentist soon gave way to a career in theater: he established the National University Theater in Seoul and made his reputation with numerous productions of O'Neill, Ibsen, and Chekhov. After writing and producing documentaries for the Bureau of Public Information (including the irresistibly titled I Am a Truck), Kim completed his first film as a director, The Box of Death, in 1955, but it wasn't until 1960's The Housemaid -- a lurid, spectral tale of domestic chaos and double suicide -- that he truly seemed to hit his stride.

Maid in Korea

Part of a six-film tribute to the director playing at the Castro this weekend, and again at the Pacific Film Archive later this summer, The Housemaid is one of Kim's signal accomplishments. Ominous and unpredictable, it studies the consequences of upward mobility when a middle-class family moves into a new house and determines to employ a housemaid. The husband, a feckless music teacher, gives piano lessons to the young, rural-born women who staff a local factory; his wife, in addition to raising their bratty son and crippled daughter, takes in sewing to supplement the family income. When hubby asks one of his students to recommend a suitable domestic from among the factory girls, the trouble begins.

The student, it seems, has developed a powerful crush on the teacher, and when her advances are spurned, she spitefully recommends a chain-smoking farm girl, Myong-ja, to the family's employ. A panic-eyed succubus, Myong-ja makes her first appearance emerging from the student's closet -- as if directly from the rejected woman's vengeful unconscious -- and immediately begins to sow the seeds of the family's destruction.

As littered with uncanny doublings and overdetermined details as anything in the collected works of Poe, The Housemaid -- framed as a cautionary episode torn from the day's headlines -- is filled with motifs that would haunt Kim's films for years to come: sexual blackmail; weak-willed men crippled by their breadwinning wives and infantilized by their conniving mistresses; death by rat poison. At once historically specific and archaically psychosexual, The Housemaid in some respects suggests Im Kwon-taek's Surrogate Mother turned inside out: a young, sexually feral woman is brought into an already fertile home, seduces a happily married man, and brings disaster on all. But is Myong-ja solely to blame for the ruin which befalls this family?

What about the demands of capital, which force the wife to become a kind of insect-woman, shackled to her sewing machine? Or the social consequences of urbanization and industrialization, which inculcate inflated expectations, promote colliding mores and collapsing morals, and undermine patriarchy with legions of working women? And piano lessons for factory girls? Is art to blame?

Kim, to his credit, never did decide. And so thorough was his indecision, so passionate his devotion to the dilemma, that he remade the same film at least four different times throughout his career: themes and motifs from The Housemaid recur in 1972's The Insect Woman and The Woman of Fire '82, both of which screen in the Castro series, as well as a 1971 version of Woman of Fire and in Kim's final film, 1984's Carnivore.

Yet, the more the situation became a template, the more Kim found the liberty to concentrate on baroque compositions and ornate frippery. The Housemaid's cobwebbed pleasures are as manifold as its plot twists are impossible to synopsize, and not the least of them include the sets Kim himself designed and decorated. The "new house" is a claustrophobic bunker whose ceilings are water-stained and whose walls are covered in oozing stucco ornaments and framed photos that seem to have been torn from a Max Ernst edition of Look magazine. Bodies are forever falling or being dragged down its central flight of stairs, a flight of stairs that appears again and again throughout Kim's films, the centerpiece of wild suburban castles that merge the mod and macabre, as if Vincent Price had been called upon to redecorate Graceland.

In all, Kim Ki-young made more than 30 films, some of them apparently lost, others now revered as pinnacles of expressionism in Korea's melodrama-laden and realism-prone mainstream cinema. If I had to pick a favorite, perhaps it would be Kim's flabbergasting "woman's film," Promise of the Flesh, in which a murderess's descent into madness is "explained" by a succession of rococo rape scenes, unlikely longings, frantic couplings on darkened train cars -- and an addiction to hard pink candies. In the end, domesticity is affirmed, but the film's final image -- a construction site near Seoul Station -- looks like a vision from a war zone, or a vestige of some already-forgotten future.

Incoherence and jarring juxtaposition run rampant throughout Kim's films, and if their titles and topics sometimes seem to suggest a composite of Roger Corman and Shohei Imamura, so be it. Kim's Koryojang (1963; no known prints survive) seems, based on description alone -- an impoverished peasant is forced by tradition to leave his aged mother to die on a snowy mountaintop -- clearly related to the legend from which Imamura's Ballad of Narayama is drawn, and Kim's Iodo is as filled with dirt-caked lust, island-isolated longing, and necrophiliac shamanism as anything in Imamura's hillbilly canon. But what is anyone to make of the inspired madness behind Kim's quota-quickie Killer Butterfly, a film dependent on -- among other astonishments -- the clattering bones of a 2,000-year-old Mongolian virgin and the manic, sexualized burping of a cracker-making machine?

'Dwarfed Male Fantasy'

Nineteen ninety-seven had been, for Kim Ki-young, a very rewarding year. A collection of his screenplays had just been published, and the second Pusan International Film Festival mounted an extensive retrospective of his films, with Kim in attendance at every screening and cocktail party. An English-language booklet entitled Kim Ki-young: Cinema of Diabolical Desire and Death -- with chapter titles like "Dwarfed Male Fantasy" and "Imagination of Excess or Heresy" -- was published as an adjunct to the event, and for the first time a handful of Westerners were made aware of this major and hitherto unheralded film stylist.

"Kim's films are as psychically fraught as Hitchcock's, as floridly overwrought as Nicholas Ray's, and may well be poised to enter the ranks of the world's most sought-after cult flicks," I wrote last November, still stunned by what I'd seen in Pusan. Stunned? Time after time, I was barely able to keep my mouth from hanging open: blue severed heads and rat-beset babies, rape scenes scored to raw acid funk, chicken-fed corpse-grinders and cascades of hard candy -- these are a few of Kim's favorite things.

And, though he hadn't made a film in over a decade, Kim's old films were being embraced by young Korean audiences and he seemed on the verge of a resurrection. Re-energized, he was preparing something called Diabolical Woman, a film, Kim told me in Pusan, to be "based on a tragic story that befell a doctor in Korea about four years ago."

"This doctor was losing patients and his hospital was on the verge of closing," Kim explained, sucking on his pipe and filling the air around his head with smoke. "He began to suffer from paranoia and other psychological problems. When an attractive nurse came along and tempted him they fell into a relationship, but through some cunning work she ends up taking over the hospital and dumping the doctor. When the doctor's wife learns of the situation, she leaves him too, and the man finds himself with no money, no wife.

"Ironically though," Kim chuckled, as if his films could resolve on any other note, "there's a happy ending. Just as the man's life seems ruined, the nurse suddenly returns to him; she has doubled the assets of the hospital, and they end up living together, happily ever after! And it's all true; that doctor and nurse live together to this day. Unfortunately, though, it is very difficult to find this kind of woman!"

Not for everyone, it seems. Kim's wife since 1951, Yu-bong, was once an actress, but she made her career as a dentist and determined that her husband should be afforded every opportunity to live an artist's life. Ultimately she financed many of Kim's films: "My wife's support has been unflagging over the years, even if, at times, she has seen one of my films and cried 'What have you done with my money?' But at rare moments like this retrospective, she becomes very emotional, recognizing that finally it has all been worthwhile."

When I tried to throw the obvious Freud saddle on him, though, Kim quickly jumped to one side: "Nothing in my films is based on my personal experience, but they're often taken from 'true' experiences I've read about or heard about from friends. As far as my married life goes, I can only say that I perceive my relationship with my wife -- and married life itself -- as a kind of game."

And the winner is?

"Always my wife!"

The riches of embarrassment

Even though Kim's life straddled what is currently known as the DMZ -- the fortified latitude that slices Korea in half -- his professed fondness for hot-needling sexual politics has always superseded his interest in his nation's domestic divide: "North or south, capitalist or communist, ideology is far less interesting to me than the things that divide the sexes."

"I once made a film whose release was delayed 14 years," Kim told me, without ever mentioning the film's title. "And when I finally was able to see it, over 40 minutes had been removed by the censors. But that had nothing to do with politics either. I had tried to show the difference between animal and human sexual behavior.

"When female animals ovulate, the males instinctively know it; it's a condition of instinct, and the animals copulate instinctively and without constraints. In the case of humans, the wife and husband are both trapped in this thing called marriage, where sex has very different purposes. It's not for reproduction only. After men receive the rather momentary satisfaction of the honeymoon's sex encounter they are forever after trapped and must devote their lives to their wives. I wanted to focus on this obvious difference between the species, but the censors didn't like what I was getting at: human females don't show signs that they're ovulating but that they simply want sexual pleasure. And males must suffer every night, whenever females want their pleasure.

"But these are fundamental problems for men and women everywhere," Kim hedged, "not just for Koreans."

Indeed, there is something universal in Kim's cinema of sexual panic and psychic pain, and not just something universally "male." He has created a world where isolation and interdependence are bedmates, where the ancient and the modern are joined at the hips, and where suffering and pleasure dress in one another's clothes. It is a cinema, as described by Korean critic Oh Young-sook in Cinema of Diabolical Desire and Death, of "embarrassment":

"The oddity of his films' themes, motifs, and chosen characters appear on the surface. The sense of embarrassment, which Kim Ki-young's films give the audience, comes from a deeper place. We can see gaps in his films that demolish the rationality of their narrative structures. The textures of his stories are complicated and illogical. The stories flow at random without letting the audience expect them. Episodes breaking up the stories appear all of a sudden and shake the balance of narrative composition. Maxims that the characters speak out constantly interrupt one's concentration on the story."

Confronted with the riches of Kim's embarrassments, the viewer is left to her own devices. Is Kim's elixir of desire a tincture of rat poison or sugar water? Is the promise of the flesh but a mouthful of hard pink candy? Why does the new house -- the house that Kim Ki-young built on the rubble of patriarchy -- look so old? Because it is a house twice haunted: once by demons, once by lovers.

Now the house itself is but a memory, the cinders damp, the monster gone. But in Kim Ki-young's films -- each of them as startling now as the day they were made -- those terrifying, embarrassing passions live on, and there is music playing still. A deranged pianist is banging out a discordant wedding march, and the wind takes hold of sighs and breathy longings. Somewhere a train whistle screams and dies, choked by a tunnel, and bells begin to toll, thin and remote, like the rattle of ancient chains.

'Kim Ki-young: Master of Madness.' June 12-14, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. $7.50; $6.50 for S.F. Film Society members. (415) 621-6120. 'Diabolical Desire: Kim Ki-young.' July 2-July 10, Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant, Berk. $6-$7.50. (510) 642-0365. See Rep Clock in Film Listings for shows and times.

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