“Those who hated me and denied me will be scrambling to see my films with a different attitude after my death. Is this idea of mine too arrogant and haughty, but it shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of.”
On Dec. 11, South Korean director Kim Ki-duk died in a Latvian hospital ten days short of turning 60 due to complications from newly crowned pneumonia, according to Chosun Ilbo, citing Russian news.
The source said he entered Latvia from St. Petersburg via Estonia around Oct. 20 and settled down with the help of local filmmakers with the aim of buying a house in the Latvian seaside town of Jurmala. He was later hospitalized with symptoms of a new crown and died after medical treatment.
Born in 1960, Kim Ki-duk is a famous Korean director and screenwriter whose works have been selected and awarded in many international film festivals such as Venice and Cannes. His works are known for their “boldness” and “non-mainstream”, with monks, prostitutes, underclass artists, domestic violence victims and teenage girls all becoming the protagonists of his camera.
For many fans, Kim Ki-duk is one of the best directors in Korea. His works have broken the record of “zero awards” in the history of Korean cinema. However, such a “national treasure” director is not taken seriously in Chungmuro (Korean film industry). His highest-grossing work, “Only Love Strangers,” attracted only 700,000 viewers. In the Korean film industry, where education is important, Kim Ki-duk, who has only a junior high school education, is seen as an “erotic director”.
The reason why his works have failed to become mainstream has a lot to do with Kim Ki-duk’s film style. His works are very dull, and he is shy about his lines. In terms of plot, he likes to incorporate elements such as sexual innuendo and abuse, and goes off the beaten track in the portrayal of love, violence and humanity. Some people think that Kim Ki-duk’s films are disgusting, dirty and physically uncomfortable.
On the other hand, his movie images are very rough. In Korea, Kim Ki-duk is known as a “starving spirit,” which means that he often shoots in a combat style on a very low budget and in a very short time. For example, his 2012 film “Holy Gotham” cost only 100 million won (about 550,000 yuan) and took only 10 days to shoot, but it became the first Korean film to win the highest awards at the Venice, Cannes and Berlin film festivals.
After 2008, Kim Ki-duk declared that he had developed a social phobia and started to live in isolation. The 2011 documentary “Arirang” was written, directed, acted, post-produced and sung by Kim Ki-duk alone, with a lot of self-questions and monologues, making the whole film feel like an exclusive interview with Kim Ki-duk.
He was criticized by critics for his “crude” and “amateurish” work.
The monster who grew up with a bad feeling
But to say that Kim Ki-duk is amateurish is not entirely unjustified. Kim Ki-duk came from a poor background, his highest education was junior high school, and he did not receive a single day of film education. From the age of 15, he worked in a factory in Seoul, and his childhood dream was to become a sacristan.
At the age of 20, he volunteered to join the Marine Corps. After five years of service, he found a job in a church and worked in a shelter for the disabled for five years. Two years later, he saw two films in France, “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Lovers of the New Bridge,” and was inspired to become a director, which led him to the film industry.
Kim Ki-duk once said that he was “a monster who grew up with a bad sense”. But in a sense, it is this sense of inferiority that leads him to create his works, and often his works are inspired by his early experiences. A person who has experienced hardships can accurately portray the pain, numbness and sadness of his characters.
The protagonist of “Beast City” is a young man who spends his days on the streets of Paris, scamming and stealing for a living; the street gangster “Henji” in “Bad Kids” was inspired by Kim Ki-duk’s reflections on class. “Why is it that everyone is born into the world with the same rights and the same qualities, but once we grow up, we are separated and categorized ……” The “bat army” in “Coastline”, according to some critics, is an allusion to the Korean naval force in which Kim Ki-duk served.
On the other hand, Kim Ki-duk’s shots of men and women are often borderline. When he was in France, Kim Ki-duk liked the paintings of Egon Schiele, which depicted prostitutes in a frank and innocent manner. Based on this, he created three works in succession, “The Young Whore”, “Bad Boy” and “Samaritan Girl”, and was therefore also called the “director of prostitutes”.
In his other film “Bad Boys”, a college girl becomes a slutty prostitute because she is disliked by men; in “Samaritan Girls”, he focuses on two young girls who sell their bodies as a price for prostitution, and they still have innocent smiles.
According to critics, Kim Ki-duk’s films can be simply divided into those before “Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter” and those after “Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter”. Kim Ki-duk himself agreed, saying in an interview at the Shanghai International Film Festival, “My early works were dark, gritty and raw, and my works after ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring’ are increasingly gentle in style, but there is still a dark, bitter side in them, and they are emotionally consistent with my previous works.”
Harming me, harming him and being harmed
Kim Ki-duk’s work is astounding and extremely personal. But in other words, Kim Ki-duk is also very stubborn. His personal approach to his work, and his complete isolation from the Korean film industry, has exacerbated his self-absorption and extremes to the point that it often brings him controversy.
In 2013, Kim Ki-duk had revealed in the movie “Arirang” that during the filming of “Sad Dream” in 2008, due to his own mistake, a scene of Lee Na-young committing suicide in prison did not shout cut for a long time, and Lee Na-young, who was hanging in mid-air for a long time, passed out due to lack of oxygen, which almost caused a tragedy. Kim Ki-duk suffered for this and thought he was a murderer, and finally the actors and cronies around him left him.
Some people think that Kim Ki-duk’s depiction of female abuse is a kind of “male power”. Lee Hyo-in, the former director of the Korea Film Archive, said, “Why has Kim Ki-duk been repeatedly directing this type of movie from the 1990s to the 21st century? The women depicted by Kim Ki-duk are like women who have been conditioned under Kim Ki-duk, who cannot pursue self-development based on their own feelings or will, but are the kind of ‘sexual organ proprieties’ who are waiting to receive male sexual organs no matter when or where. Whether voluntary or forced, as soon as they enter the state of sexuality, they immediately become emotional animals, a kind of weird being that becomes docile with it.”
In recent years, Kim Ki-duk has been involved in gender controversies more frequently: in 2013, “Möbius” was rated as a restricted release in South Korea due to its incestuous scenes containing mother and child sex, and Kim Ki-duk himself was fined 5 million won (about 30,000 yuan); in August 2017, Kim Ki-duk was investigated by the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office for allegedly beating an actress on set and forcing her to shoot a bed scene that was not in the script; in March 2018, South Korea’s MBC TV current affairs program “PD Manual” exposed Kim Ki-duk’s sex scandal, in which three actresses claimed that they had been sexually harassed or even sexually assaulted by the director during the filming of the movie.
After that, Kim Ki-duk sued the actress and MBC TV for 1 billion won (about 6 million yuan) for false accusation, but his claim was rejected by the court in October this year.
The company has confessed that it is for the purpose of “acting guidance and to stimulate the emotions of the actors”. Perhaps for him, these female images are also for the sake of movie creation. However, the damage he caused was real, and most of the actresses did not want to work with her for a second time, and actor Cho Jae-hyun, who appeared in “Mopius” ring and had a 30-year acting career, finally announced his retirement due to the sexual assault allegations.
Kim Ki-duk once described himself, “Life for me is harming me, harming him and being harmed. I do harm to others, I am harmed by others, and I harm myself. We are always bound to reality, pain, hard feelings, hatred, hatred, understanding, forgiveness takes time.” Yonhap News Agency has predicted that Kim Ki-duk’s future directing activities are likely to be “completely blocked” after the controversy of “violence” and “sexual assault”.
But will his directing career really be blocked? I don’t think Kim Ki-duk himself cared. Now that he has passed away, he is just reminding the world to open his films again with a new perspective.
In his book “Kim Ki-duk: The Wild, or the Sheep of Atonement”, he confidently said, “I ask you, do you have the confidence not to watch Kim Ki-duk’s films? I think if I were to die now, Kim Ki-duk would be brought up again. Those who hated me and denied me would compete to see my movies with a different attitude after my death. Is it too arrogant and haughty for me to think this way, but it shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of.”
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