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This month marks the 20th anniversary of the sudden passing of KIM Ki-young, one of Korean cinema’s most celebrated directors. To this day he is most well known for his 1960 masterwork The Housemaid, yet his more idiosyncratic output from the 1970s, not to mention his latter works, long considered cult fare, also continue to build esteem among the world’s cinephiles.

Born in 1919 in Seoul and raised in Pyongyang, KIM Ki-young later bounced between Seoul and Tokyo, juggling small jobs before he entered medical school. There he developed an interest in the dramatic arts and after a brief stint as an otorhinolaryngologist, he found himself working for the Liberty News of the United States Information Service (USIS), where he went on to make his debut, the anti-communist propaganda film The Boxes of Death in 1955. 

He quickly developed his craft through his subsequent work, including the period drama Yang San Province (1955) which, though a hit with audiences, was ill-regarded by critics at the time, presumably for indulging in a fantastical ending which has since been lost, at a time when realism was de rigueur in the industry. 

 

With the help of the financial security provided by his wife’s dental practice, KIM started independently producing films in 1956 with A Touch-Me-Not and his status as a respected filmmaker was established with The Housemaid in 1960, made during a brief time of relaxed governmental control between the RHEE Syng-man and PARK Chung-hee administrations, known as the Second Republic (which also yielded classics such as YU Hyun-mok’s An Aimless Bullet and SHIN Sang-ok’s Mother And A Guest, both released in 1961). Considered by many to be the greatest Korean film of all time, the film sees a middle-class fall to ruin when a professor indulges his sexual desire with the young country maid who stays with them. Teeming with symbolic and horrific scenarios played out on intricately designed and lit sets, the film shocked and thrilled audiences at the time, as it pushed Korean cinema into a bolder direction.

 

At the end of Korea’s Golden Era of cinema at the close of the 1960s, when censorship had grown stricter and funding more sparse, KIM flourished by independently producing innovative B-movie fare that soared to the top of the charts, including Woman of Fire (1971), the first of two remakes of The Housemaid he would make, and the following year’s Insect Woman (1972), both of which featured a young YOUN Yuh-jung and were the most well attended local films of their respective release years. 

Densely weaving symbolism and psychology while heightened throughout with ingeniously grotesque flourishes, KIM created a body of work like no other in Korea, not to mention anywhere else around the world. Often exploring delicate thematic ground with an uncompromising sensibility that flew in the face of contemporary decorum, his films tugged at the thin veneer of Korean society, revealing the cogs of avarice and lechery spinning at its core. 

While most of the respected masters of classic Korean cinema were prized for their realistic or richly literary works, director KIM reveled in experimentations within genre cinema, which he used as a template to explore his thematic interests. Rather than fully fleshed-out characters, he preferred to foreground the same archetypes over and over again, each serving as an entry point into common aspects of Korean society.

Through these sometimes coarse archetypes, sexuality collides with social propriety in electric fashion across KIM’s filmography, as characters are often undone by their primal desires. Their macabre journeys, whether ensconced within two-story middle class homes or let loose within some of the country’s starkest landscapes, feature many of the same social themes, which he portrayed through several metaphorical visual aids.

 

Among these are the desire for social mobility, as represented by the many staircases found in his films, notable all three versions of The Housemaid, which include 1971’s Woman of Fire and Hwa-Nyuh Of '82. Another is the desire for freedom, which can be witnessed through the butterfly symbols found in several of his latter films. This imagery is prevalent in KIM’s deranged masterpiece A Woman after a Killer Butterfly (1978) but also in works such as Free Maiden (1982), in which man’s desire to control woman’s sexual freedom is memorably captured on the screen as an impotent professor envelopes the eponymous heroine with a butterfly net while they saunter through a field at night.

Much like the famed Korean directors of today such as PARK Chan-wook and BONG Joon-ho, both of whom have professed a deep admiration of the late cineaste, KIM’s approach to genre cinema was unlike that of his peers. Never content to stay in one mode for too long, he mixed and matched as he borrowed from various narrative styles to suit his own needs as a storyteller. Melodrama is central to all his works, yet many of his famous films could just as easily be labeled horror. With A Woman after a Killer Butterfly, a film through which he aggressively demonstrated his will to live, in a seemingly endless array of ways, KIM ran the gamut of genres, smashing science fiction, comedy, fantasy and serial killer tropes into his already unique blend of horror-drama.

 

KIM relied on literary sources for much of his 1970s output, which included the big-budget period drama Ban Geum-ryun (shot in the mid-70s but only released in 1981 after initially being denied by the censors’ board). His next hit came in 1977 with Ieoh Island, which was also based on a book. Both films star LEE Hwa-si as dangerous woman with piercing stares, yet they also share several stylistic traits, such as swooping zooms from distant long shots and a roving camera in interior scenes which pans, moves and punches in and out as it follows scheming characters through claustrophobic sets teeming with red and blue hues.

After Ieoh Island, as audiences for local fare dwindled and KIM’s unorthodox style grew more pronounced, he steadily receded from the spotlight until being all but forgotten as the 1980s got going. The final period of his career recycles many of the social themes he explored earlier in his life, yet forced as he was to operate on rushed schedules (sometimes going from script to certification in under a month) and film on open sets (as opposed to the tight control afforded by his beloved sets), these works, which include the 1984 titles Hunting for Idiots and Carnivorous Animal (1985) (a remake of Insect Woman), were unable to reach the formal brilliance of some of his prior films. That said, his psychological scrutiny, eerily matter-of-fact dialogue and frenzied set pieces remained as surprising and inventive as ever.

 

Following 1990’s Angel, Become An Evil Woman (which didn’t received a certificate until 1995 and was first screened at the Busan International Film Festival in 1998), KIM stopped making films but remained a busy screenwriter, reportedly penning some 50 screenplays over a 10 year period. Yet it was in the early 1990s, with the rise of video in Korea, that young cinephiles rediscovered KIM’s works, particularly his final films which became celebrated as cult cinema.

KIM’s resurgence continued through the decade and peaked when he was the subject of a retrospective at the 2nd Busan International Film Festival in 1997. Foreign guests immediately took note and several international retrospectives followed as a result. In the midst of his renewed popularity KIM prepared to make a new film called Diabolical Woman which would have been his 33rd. However, a few days before leaving for the Berlin International Film Festival, which was about to stage a program dedicated to him, KIM perished along with his wife in their home, the result of an accidental fire.

Just as in his films, KIM’s death was unexpected and violent, yet the legacy of this Korean master, who vividly presented his will to live on the screen, lives on today through the works of his loyal and manifold descendants, both in Korea, and increasingly in far flung corners of the world.