Over the last decade, amidst a surge of interest in Korean cinema by critics, cinephiles and scholars, the films of Kim Ki-duk have elicited the most sharply divided yet consistently ebullient responses from a broad spectrum of viewers. Characterized by subversion of “polite” sensibilities, Kim's films generate fierce debate and concomitantly fervent censure and praise. As a result of this furor, Kim's work is often omitted from university courses and even scholarly writing on South Korean film and media, despite its role in bringing South Korean cinema to prominence in the global arena. Rising to the complex challenge of analyzing Kim's controversial oeuvre, Hye Seung Chung's Kim Ki-duk situates Kim's films in their varied sites of reception. From transnational contexts, such as new canons of “global” art cinema and international film festival circuits, to national domains, including Kim's significance to the South Korean film market, journalists, activists and intellectuals, Chung's text deftly juxtaposes multiple frames of reference to dispute insufficiently nuanced appraisals by Kim's vocal detractors.
In so doing, Kim Ki-duk introduces English-language readers to Kim's reception by various Korean critics and scholars, a much-needed contribution to the English-language discourse on contemporary South Korean cinema. In particular, Chung's text insightfully suggests that Kim, by dint of his stigmatized, underclass characters, participates in an ongoing consideration of the condition of internal exile of subjects made abject by the rapidly developing nation. Chung compares this condition to diasporic displacement, in the most compelling elaboration of the insoluble interpretive barriers that have plagued Kim's cinematic vision that I have encountered to date. Chung's analysis manages to turn claims of Kim's perversity inside out, so that Kim is rendered not an anomaly but rather an exemplary illustration of the independent, non-Euro-American filmmaker today, trying to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of domestic commercialism and overseas self-orientalism. Methodologically, Chung's text forges its “hermeneutic key[s]…to Kim Ki-duk's oeuvre” (p. 66) by using theoretical concepts to track the development of overarching themes and motifs in Kim's body of work, producing elegant and often persuasive close-readings of Kim's films.
Aimed primarily at a film studies readership, Kim Ki-duk integrates references to national cinema debates, auteur theory and, perhaps more startlingly, influential figures in feminist film criticism, affect theory and feminist poststructuralism, including Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz, and Julia Kristeva. While these references help indicate the book's primary audience, the act of mobilizing these critics without thoroughly historicizing their polemics against South Korean feminists' claims of Kim's mistreatment of women might alienate readers who perceive this as the elevation of continental theory over local concerns. This perception might be exacerbated by Chung's spirited defense of Kim against accusations of misogyny through what strikes this reader as a possible overstatement: while she acknowledges that in a number of Kim's films, “women's bodies…become a figurative battlefield where a Korean-specific class warfare between upper/middle-class husbands and boyfriends and underclass men is waged” (pp. 71–72), she nevertheless finds in Kim's films “some of the most powerfully feminist evocations of sisterly solidarity to be found in contemporary Korean cinema, exclusive of issue-oriented women's documentaries…” (p. 72). Moreover, in these film texts, which she deems “neofeminist,” Chung finds “a redemptive haven in Kim's otherwise cold universe of cruelty and despair…” (p. 73). Here, the appeal to a logic of redemption in female, cross-class relationships risks contravening the book's earlier premise that Kim rejects redemption as a normative, bourgeois convention. Indeed, the argument that Kim's films are not only not misogynist but in fact “neofeminist” seems to require a fuller elaboration of Kim's politics. However, the text leaves the political implications of Kim's shift “from national and societal issues to contradictions of life and existential anguish” (p. 118) unexamined, though it proposes in its introductory pages that Kim's films “[evince] the potential to blur or perhaps even eradicate the boundaries between Second (auteurist) and Third (subaltern) Cinemas” (p. 10). In addition, Kim's working-class status occasionally seems to function as a generic alibi for the relentless negativity and extreme violence of his films.
Yet, Chung's text often critiques its own founding assumptions, acknowledging the pitfalls of an auteurist approach that conflates artist and artwork, and the ways in which this might reinforce a sentimental characterization of Kim as a proxy working class hero. Principally, the book deflects the reductive demand to justify Kim's oeuvre for a more incisive inquiry into the spatial, corporeal and political structures that give rise to it. Readers across film, media and East Asian studies will find this an immensely informative study of one of the world's most provocative and challenging filmmakers. Especially for those who would like to teach Kim's films, but lack instructive secondary material on his work, Kim Ki-duk is a contribution of considerable significance.
