Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur

Summary

Kim Ki-Young, The First Global South Korean Auteur

Over the thirty years of his career, Kim Ki-young (1919–98) produced and directed thirty-two feature films which are widely considered to be among the most sensual, grotesque, and provocative Korean cinematic works to have been created during the twentieth century. Although thirty-two is no small number of films to have directed, it is nonetheless difficult to say that Kim was particularly prolific in comparison to many of his South Korean contemporaries. Twenty-nine of his productions were made before 1980, and so it could be said that his directorial output seriously declined after the 1970s. In the 1980s, Kim wrote seven scripts, though none of these scripts were made into films. However, despite his relative lack of productivity in his later career, the unique thematic, stylistic and aesthetic character of the main body of Kim's work far exceeded the cultural and generic norms of the period, a legacy which renders him one of the most compelling directors in the history of South Korean cinema.

Despite the significance and unique nature of Kim Ki-young's oeuvre, it is notable that his work was largely forgotten by Korean and global audiences, only to be “rediscovered” through a retrospective program at the Second Busan International Film festival in 1997. As Chris Berry noted, when Kim Ki-young's films were brought back from the past and first presented to global audiences through this retrospective, the immediate appeal of his work to the international film community was that it offered something different to the idea of classic Asian cinema, as represented by the work of Ozu Yasujiro, Mijoguchi Kenji, and the Fifth Generation directors of China. While the distinctive quality of Kim's work (“excessive” and “violent” in Berry's terms) rendered its stylistic and thematic categorization within the frame of “Asian art cinema” difficult, after the once forgotten director's films were widely welcomed by global audiences, his newly located oeuvre was immediately characterized as a “hidden Asian pearl.” Even domestically the retrieval of his lost directorial legacy came as something of a major critical surprise, and in relation to the success of the Busan retrospective one film writer even lamented that “the entire contemporary South Korean cinematic community during the 1990s [has] failed to produce any new works as interesting as the films of Kim Ki-young.”