It seems only fitting that the largest retrospective ever devoted to Kim Ki-young was hosted by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, 51 rue de Bercy, in the curving postmodern Frank Gehry building.

The architecture provided the appropriate setting for the works of a director who was nicknamed “Mister Monster” by his admirers; a moniker that fully says how far off the beaten track Kim Ki-young has ventured. In the context of Korean cinema, his was an oeuvre of considerable excess, characterized by the most unusual mise-en-scène, as disturbing as it is enjoyable, where a grotesque but unforgettable figurative power is the governing force. Long forgotten by the Korean public (and ignored by the the rest of the world), his films were reappraised at the 1997 Pusan International Film Festival, where eight of his works were shown. Since then, Kim Ki-Young has slowly found a place in retrospective screenings around the world, drawing forth shocked and passionate responses from global audiences.

The master, chilling out.

After presenting four titles in the perspective of its “50 years of Korean cinema” cycle, the Cinémathèque française offered until Christmas Eve 18 out of his 32 films. No small feat considering that 90% of his production is considered to be lost, not to mention the borderline quality of some of the remaining copies...

Born in Seoul in 1919, Kim Ki-Young spends the early 40’s in Japan, where he develops an intense passion for cinema and theater. Upon his return to his homeland in the early days of the liberation, he goes to Kyungsung school of dentistry, and concomitantly leads the National College Theater movement at Seoul University . This gives him the opportunity to produce The Dark Road, adapted from Chekhov’s On the Road, Ibsen’s Ghost, Capek’s Robots and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He also becomes an expert on Stanislavsky’s acting theory.

During the Korean War, he finds employment with the United States Information Service (USIS). In the prospect of the work he performs as a war journalist and producer for “Liberty News”, he completes about twenty documentaries. Then, he borrows the material necessary for the shooting of his first film, A Box of Death (1955), about war orphans, a debut strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism.

Little is left from this period, except for Yangsan Province (1955), a costume drama that already reveals some of the ruling obsessions of the director, centered on the disruptive aspect of desire.

The opening scene of Yangsan Province

On the surface, a typical tale of thwarted loves set in the Choseon Dynasty era, not unlike Chunhyang, the film is obviously more interested in the staging of the erotic mechanism of attraction. The damages wrought by time have unfortunately deprived the contemporary viewer from several scenes and the original ending of the film, deemed too “unrealistic” and “absurd” by the moral and aesthetic standards of the time. The script suggests extremely bold sequences: after the suicide of the protagonist, the mother was supposed to stab his beloved on the very tomb where her son was buried so that she could see the marriage of their souls. The film ended with an elegiac hallucination: the couple was making love before ascending to the heavens on a ray of light.

This idiosyncratic visual language that speaks more about surreality than reality finds its ideal expression five years later in The Housemaid (1960), the matrix of his subsequent works in many ways. Kim Ki-Young creates here a narrative and thematic pattern that he will use in most of his films: a woman seduces a married man and confronts the wife, breaking the couple apart and destroying herself in the process. In some respects, his other films appears as variations to the torments and punishments that he inflicts on the traditional domestic couple in The Housemaid with a sadistic delight that is only found in the works of Italian masters like Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

In Ban Gum-yon (made in 1975 but banned until 1981 and released in a heavily-censored version - 40 minutes were edited out), a film based on an old erotic Chinese tale, a courtesan blinds the first two wives of her husband and proceeds to poison the third. In A Moment To Die For/An Experience Worth Dying For (shot in 1995 but released posthumously, after the director died with his wife in the fire that destroyed his house in February 1998, in a strange echo of his fictional work), two women abused by their husbands decide to wreak each other’s vengeance.

To build his radical representation of gender/sex wars, often reminiscent of the films of Japanese director Yasuzo Masumura (Irezumi, Blind Beast, etc.), the South-Korean director almost always uses the traditional framework of melodrama, but a form of melodrama whose codes are perverted, contaminated by a deep undercurrent of black humor and elements from other seemingly incompatible genres. The Housemaid could have been a proper gothic horror movie complete with the haunted house, the anguish-ridden soundtrack - a mixture of maudlin piano melodies and dissonant pieces - and the ghost-like woman with whom something wicked this way (always) comes, usually behind a window first, like a threatening spectral presence.

Beautiful and weird: The Housemaid (Hanyo)

Instead, the film turns out to be not so much a horror tale à la Edgar A. Poe as a relentless, quasi-entomological study of characters enclosed within the animality of a sex drive that is dangerously close to a death drive, miles away from the misogynistic piece of work it would have been shaped into by a less creative filmmaker.

An extreme rarity in the history of cinema, the film, critically and publicly acclaimed, has been remade by his author three times, three moments of Korean society/history through the prism of one story, always the same and always different. All the while, the filmmaker commits himself to more and more formal experiments. For his first Woman of Fire (1972), Kim Ki-Young abandons the expressionist black and white of The Housemaid to adopt a gamut of psychedelic colors that give the viewer an acute sense of unease. With time, the filmmaker seems to radicalize his style: the hardly realistic frames become outright baroque in the second Woman of Fire (1982), a film on the verge of pure oneirism (or madness). There, the lovers turn ashen-colored in a metal room, as if consumed by their own drives, and the love scene literally comes to a standstill in a sequence showing statues that seem to evoke the petrifying property of desire.

From the 1970’s, Kim takes reality as a pre-text, a point of departure for the whims and wanderings of his fantasy, and explores the area where Eros and Thanatos meet further and further. Thirty years before the case of the frozen babies in Seoul, the Insect Woman (1972) depicts a child abandoned in a fridge. As his own producer, the director enjoys exceptional creative freedom that allows him to represent more and more horrific scenes and approach an increasing number of taboos and normally off-limits subject-matters. At the same, his films because an easy target for the “scissorhands” of the strict censorship exerted by the military regime. In I-eoh Island (1976), for example, the delirious story of a female community that resorts to spirits to fight against pollution and sterility, two sequences are edited out: a lovemaking scene with a drowned man and a scene involving a knife-wielding female shaman who arouses a dead man. Eventually, Kim is “asked” to make an anticommunist film, Love of Blood Relations (1976), but he finds a way to customize the commission into a deeply personal affair, by recentering the story on Lee Hwa-Si as a femme fatale of Marxism-Leninism, thus transcending the formal and political limits of the propaganda movie.

The 1980’s are a long era of hardships for a filmmaker that finds himself marginalized as a second-rate auteur, condemned to the hell of B-movies. His films, dominated by a primal, quasi-primitive fascination for genre movies and the symptoms of the transformation of Korean society, become increasingly strange, obsessive, and subversive and wind up as commercial disasters. With titles like Carnivore (self-remake of The Insect Woman, released in 1984) or the Hunting of Fools (1984), Kim Ki-young becomes a cult director among young video aficionados, but remains a master without disciple. For more than ten years, the director ceases to make films. Despite his persistent silence, it seems as if, during this time of inactivity, his influence left an imprint all the more profound on a whole generation of Korean filmmakers: Bong Joon-Ho, Park Chan-Wook, Im Sang-Soo, Kim Ki-Duk...

Between horror, satire, eroticism, melodrama and sometimes comedy, the director has created a morbid and multifaceted universe where despair is the ultimate horizon and sex systematically leads to the worst that can happen: death of course, but also the inhuman child of The Insect Woman, or the aborted foetus of the Woman of Fire ’82, symbols of a humanity disintegrated into infra-human objects, both dispossessed of its sovereignty and possessed by something greater, stronger (and meaner) than itself.

Although this has not been confirmed yet, the retrospective should find a new home next summer at the Lincoln Center, as a part of the Asian American film Festival organized by Subway Cinema. An event of importance, not to be missed, especially for the lovers of the cruel and unusual... this is the good stuff.