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Home > TIFF Report > Inuhiko Yomota talks about Kim Ki-young, the Korean giant "Goryeojang" talk show
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2007.12.07
[Winds of Asia-Middle East]
Inuhiko Yomota talks about Kim Ki-young, the Korean giant "Goryeojang" talk show
Director Kim Ki-young passed away in 1998. In the Winds of Asia-Middle East section on the 26th, Kim Ki-young's"Goryeojang" and a documentary "Two or Three Things I Know about KIM Ki-young" were screened, in the first of the Discovering Asian Cinema category that focuses on uncovering Asian films that have not been introduced to date. Below is the talk show by Professor Inuhiko Yomota of the Meiji Gakuin University, held after the screening.

Kenji Ishizaka, Programming Director (hereinafter called Ishizaka PD)
The film that contains the last scene has been discovered only recently. What do you think about it?

Professor Inuhiko Yomota (hereinafter called Prof. Yomota)
I read the original story in the 70s, and I was surprised at the difference. The work has been said to have been inspired by "Ballad of Narayama," but having watched it, it is completely different.

Ishizaka PD
I only heard the sound before. The images completely took me by surprise. Especially the scene where great egrets peck on the old woman, I did not understand it at all before with just sound. KOFIC, the organization that supports film culture and the film industry in Korea, has been rediscovering Kim Ki-young's films for the "Kim Ki-young Renaissance" project, and it was only when the KOFIC restored the damaged films, that the last scene was discovered.

Prof. Yomota
Kim Ki-young's films can be categorized into masculine type or feminine type. "Goryeojang" falls into the masculine category.

Ishizaka PD
What is attractive about this director is that it is difficult to nail him down as to whether he is serious or joking. Maybe he is a naturalist...

Prof. Yomota
That means he is not anthropocentric. The "Human beings are merely like worms" type of ideology comes up from time to time in the world. Erich Von Stroheim, who is known for his "Foolish Wives" (1922) and "Greed" (1925), Luis Buñuel, Roman Polanski, and Manoel de Oliveira are directors who visualized such an ideology. In Japan, "Suna no Onna" (1964) and "Otoshi Ana" (1962) by Hiroshi Teshigahara, (we used to call him Tessie) are further such examples.

I screened a number of Japanese films as reference at a series of screening sessions for Film Studies Association of Korea in 1989. It was before the ban on Japanese films was lifted. When "Suna no Onna" was screened at The Chosun Ilbo Hall, Kim Ki-young came along. He said he had read the original by Kobo Abe, written the script, and that he was intending to make it into a movie as a "feminine type." However, he left it alone due to the copyright issue. Asked for his impression of the film, he said "it would be completely different if I made it." I told Tessie that. Then in 1996 at the Kim Ki-young special at the Japan Foundation, I saw Tessie with his secretary at the screening.


Professor Inuhiko Yomota


Prof. Yomota
A comparison can be drawn between Kim Ki-young and Yasuzo Masumura. Both by coincidence have dentists for their wives, and both pursued the essence of women in creating their works.

As regards "Two or Three Things I Know about KIM Ki-young," a documentary about Kim Ki-young, I have one complaint to make. - It was you who took notice of Kim Ki-young before Busan did. You spotted Kim Ki-young's works and screened his five films, which were available at that time, at the Japan Foundation. A boom started after that and his films were re-imported.

Ishizaka PD
There was a time when Kim Ki-young was quite a hit maker. The documentary mentioned that his box-office takings remained the largest for some years. He was almost forgotten in his later years, but another boom broke out in the last two years before his death. It started in Tokyo, then moved on to Busan and to Berlin. However, his films were too few and unable to be screened in quantity. When twenty-two films were discovered in later years, France, as expected, promptly screened all of his works back to back at Cinémathèque in 2006.

Prof. Yomota
Having seen the global frenzy, we may have to correct our frame of reference about Kim Ki-young as the Korean Buñuel. We should say Buñuel is the Mexican Kim Ki-young.

Ishizaka PD
Having seen his works in France, other Europeans are holding screening sessions in their own countries. The next session will be in Italy, and this fever seems to have no end in sight for the moment.

Prof. Yomota
Korea has a number of other directors worthy of attention. For example, Lee Man-hui, the director who created many films with both sensitivity as well as humor, should be reviewed in a same way as Mikio Naruse in Japan. Shin Sang-okk is another example. He had the extraordinary experience of having been abducted by North Korea and forced to make a monster movie, etc. He later moved to America where he created a Ninja movie. He was also on a jury at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Ishizaka PD
As it was mentioned in the documentary which was screened this time, film directors can be categorized in two types, one is "those who show things people would not like to see" and "those who show things people would like to see." Kim Ki-young is definitely the former. Chun-hyang Jeon is a story beloved by the nation that is sometimes referred to as a "Korean identity." The story has been made into films many times, but Kim Ki-young did not do it. Shin Sang-okk made his films both in the South and the North.

Prof. Yomota
It would be interesting to think about Kim Ki-young making Chun-hyang Jeon. He may focus on torture. He may even show the beheading of the wicked governor. Actually, it is a story about the virtues of women.

Kim Ki-young's works exaggerate characters, just like Roberto Rossellini's "Francesco Giullare di Dio" (1950) and monster movies, creating an allegory. "Goryeojang" is almost like a Greek mythology about urban construction. Motifs such as "Ten sons and the youngest brother" and "The Symbolic tree" come up in myths from around the country, and mythical elements are intentionally scattered. Many myths tell a story of the beginning through urban formation, however, "Goryeojang" denies genesis and shamanism. The main character kills a transcendental Mudang who tells fortunes and casts spells, and cuts down a tree that links the earth with heaven. Asian cosmology includes an idea that people gather around a giant tree, from where a world starts to spread. It is very interesting that the story ends with the action "to fell a tree" which declares the end of the mythical age and the start of humanity who cultivate the ground.

Ishizaka PD
It reminded me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Charisma" (1999).

Prof. Yomota
The setting with 10 single men is just like Gabriel José García Márquez's novel.

Ishizaka PD
Or "Osomatsu Kun"(Fujio Akatsuka's comic). That is also a myth.

Prof. Yomota
Shichiro Fukasawa's novel, "Tohoku no Zunmu Tachi" comes to my mind, too. It is pronounced "zunmu" by the way.

"Goryeojang" was made in 1963, only 10 years after the truce of the Korean war. There must have been a lot of orphans and hunger around him. It must have been a very realistic film as he must have seen a lot during the Korean War. There is an episode when Kim Ki-young said to John Ford that he (John Ford) did not know the real war. Kim Ki-young had survived the war and made films. As well he had fled from Pyongyang.

Ishizaka PD
The director himself was a doctor, and in a sense he is a naturalist. Animals and insects often appear in his films, too. The children do not really look like human beings, they are not pretty at all, and they rather look like mice.

Prof. Yomota
They certainly do not look like fashionable Korean boys of the day...

Kobo Abe shares a common background. He also fled Manchuria and he was a doctor.
Kim Ki-young was not alone. He had blood relations of the soul. He may have teamed up with Celine and others in the other world by now.

Ishizaka PD
I heard that his wife used to be the highest earning dentist in Seoul. All that money was used to fund his movies. Kim Ki-young was quite an eccentric man. He strolls out of his home for about three months, shuts himself up in a sleazy hotel, and writes his scripts while listening to his neighbors. He just continues writing without even turning on the light in an unearthly manner. "The Evil Woman," his unfinished work, was written in the library at the Japan Foundation.

Ishizaka PD
Lee Chang-ho was like his protégé. Kim Ki-young was an atheist, but converted to Christianity only a few months before his death. Lee Chang-ho seems to have encouraged him. There are episodes, however, when he shouted "it's a lie" to a priest in a church and Lee Chang-ho quickly stopped him.

Prof. Yomota
Christianity, is it? He won't be able to see Pasolini in the other world.

Ishizaka PD
It is horrific that Kim Ki-young along his wife died in a fire at home only a few days before they were set to go to Berlin.

Prof. Yomota
If he was alive, we would have been too scared to talk like this. He was the kind of person who shouted at film censors and refused his films being censored. Behind cruel stories, Kim Ki-young also created beautiful small pieces, as well. If you watch these works, it would help understanding the expanse of Kim Ki-young's world. He never forgot the weak. His cruelty seems to me his desire to bring chaos back into the world once more.
I would like the TIFF to screen all twenty-two films by Kim Ki-young. The significance of an international film festival is the extent of how far it can change the film history of the world. I am glad to see the TIFF started retrospectives this year.


Professor Inuhiko Yomota and Kenji Ishizaka, Programming Director



As I learned more about Kim Ki-young, I felt that undiluted films are more fearful, monstrous, and appealing. Professor Yomota, I hope you will discover more and more extraordinary directors who transcend Asia in your research of nameless horror films, and I hope these will be showcased from Tokyo to a global audience.

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