Happy Birthday, Kim Ki-young! Born today in 1919, this South Korean film director was known for his intensely psychosexual and melodramatic horror films, often focusing on the psychology of their female characters.
Ki-young's family, by the time of his birth, had lived in Seoul for several generations. His family was well-educated and artistically inclined.
Years later, at Pyongyang National High School, Ki-young showed exceptional talent in music, painting and writing, and his studious nature earned him the nickname "Professor of Physics".
While still a student there, one of Ki-young's poems was published in a Japanese newspaper, and he was awarded first prize in a painting competition.
Despite his artistic talents, Ki-young's main interest was medicine, and he applied for entrance into medical school upon graduation from high school in 1940.
When he failed to gain admittance, he moved to Japan, planning to study and save up money to reapply for medical school.
At this time, the theater and cinema grew into lifetime interests≥ Kim often went to Kyoto, where he attended many stage productions and saw many international films.
Most notably, this included Josef von Sternberg's 1930 American pre-Code black and white romance/drama film 'Morocco' and Fritz Lang's 1931 German black and white drama/thriller mystery film 'M'.
It was both of these films of which made a particularly strong impression on him, and their influence was to show in his mature film style as well.
In 1941, Ki-young later returned to South Korea, initially planning to work as a dentist, but instead immersing himself in the study of drama.
At this time, he was particularly interested in classical Greek theater. This also included Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill.
To avoid conscription by the Japanese into the military, Kim returned to Japan briefly before 1945.
He returned to Pyongyang where he studied seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavsky's theories of acting and founded a theatrical group called "The Little Orchid".
In 1946, Kim enrolled in Seoul Medical School, Seoul National University, and eventually graduated with a major in dentistry in 1950.
While attending university, his theatrical activities continued. He founded the National University Theater in 1949, and with this group staged many works of the Western theater.
During the Korean War, Ki-young made propaganda films for the United States Information Service. In 1955, he used discarded film equipments to produce his first two pictures.
With the success of these two films, Ki-young formed his own production company and produced popular melodramas for the rest of the decade.
Among his credits, Ki-young is best known for writing, producing, and directing the 1960 South Korean black and white thriller/horror film 'Hanyo' ('The Housemaid').
Piano composer Dong-sik Kim (Kim Jin-kyu) and his pregnant wife Mrs. Kim (Ju Jeung-ryu) need extra help around the house, so they hire housemaid Myung-sook (Lee Eun-sim), whose precociousness soon gives way to troubling behavior.
However, tensions between her and Dong-sik lead to an affair. The pregnancy ends in a miscarriage and also results in the maid becoming obsessed with killing the entire family, starting with their older son.
Soon the family's comfortable home becomes a physical and psychological battleground.
'The Housemaid' is a venomous melodrama; a torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal unleashed under one roof.
Immensely popular in its home country when it was released, the film is the thrilling, at times jaw-dropping story of the devastating effect an unstable housemaid has on the domestic cocoon of a bourgeois, morally dubious music teacher, his devoted wife, and their precocious young children.
Grim and taut yet perched on the border of the absurd, Kim’s film is an engrossing tale of class warfare and familial disintegration that has been hugely influential on the new generation of South Korean filmmakers.
In the early 1990s Ki-young's work began to be rediscovered by South Korean cult film fans who discussed his films through the Internet and exchanged hard-to-find copies by videotape.
Noticing this growing domestic Ki-young cult, the Dongsung Cinematheque, an art-house theater in Seoul, programmed a retrospective showing of his films.
With his profile again high in Korean film society, Ki-young's work began to attract international attention, screened at the 11th Tokyo International Film Festival in 1996.
When Ki-young's career was highlighted at the 2nd Pusan International Film Festival in 1997, his work found enthusiastic new audiences in the international film community.
The strongly positive reception of Kim's work by international audiences surprised the festival organizers, who immediately began receiving requests for overseas retrospectives of Ki-young's career.
With this renewed interest, he began work on a comeback film to be titled 'Diabolical Woman'. The 48th Berlin International Film Festival invited him to attend a showing of his films in 1998.
Before Ki-young started work on the film or attended the festival, he and his wife were killed in a house fire caused by an electrical short circuit in Seoul, South Korea on February 5, 1998. Ki-young was 78.
However, Ki-young's death did not stop the revival of interest in his films. A six-film retrospective of Kim's career was shown in San Francisco, California twice in 1998.
Within the year, Ki-young's films were screened at the Belgrade International Film Festival, the London Pan-Asian Film Festival, the Estate Romana and the Paris Videothèque.
Few prints of Korean films before the 1970s survive. At one point, ninety percent of Ki-young's output was considered lost.
Under the "Kim Ki-young Renaissance Project", the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) has worked to find Kim's lost films and to restore those that are damaged.
In 2006, the French Cinémathèque presented eighteen of Kim's films, many of them newly rediscovered and restored through the efforts of the KOFIC.
During his lifetime, Ki-young gained many supporters among the younger generation of South Korean directors.
Ki-young's influence on Korean cinema has continued to be seen through the work of the current generation of South Korean filmmakers, including such prominent directors as South Korean film director and screenwriter Im Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk ('3-Iron'),
Bong Joon-ho ('The Host') has said that ‘The Housemaid’ was an inspiration on ‘Parasite’.
Although it’s a very different story, you can certainly see the inspirational elements. Joon-ho also calls Ki-young his mentor, and favorite South Korean film director.
Chan-work Park ('Oldboy', 'The Handmaiden') names 'The Housemaid' as one of the films which most influenced his career. He said of Ki-young, "He is able to find and portray beauty in destruction, humor in violence and terror."
Today, 'The Housemaid' has been described in Koreanfilm.org as a "consensus pick as one of the top three Korean films of all time".
This was the first installment in Kim's Housemaid trilogy. This was followed by the 1971 South Korean melodrama/drama film 'Hwanyeo' (Woman of Fire' or 'Fire Woman'), and the 1982 South Korean horror film 'Hwanyeo '82' ('Woman of Fire '82').
Interest in Kim does not exist only in Korea, but also abroad. 'The Housemaid', which had been reviewed frequently in Korea and abroad, was able to win support from Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation (WCF) to have a digital copy of it produced in 2008.
However, it was against the WCF principle of only supporting Third World countries. Despite this, Scorsese approved the support saying he made the decision to support the film because of his personal affection for 'The Housemaid'.
Thanks to the support, the Korean Film Archive was able to restore Kim's 'The Housemaid' in digital form in 2010.
Also, that same year, Sang-soo directed the 2010 South Korean melodramatic erotic thriller/drama film 'Hanyo' ('The Housemaid'). It was a remake of Ki-young's 1960 film of the same name.
Ki-young was one of the of the most eccentric figures in Korean cinema.
In a career lasting nearly four decades, he created gloriously grotesque, floridly melodramatic films that have drawn comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Nicolas Ray.
Many of Ki-young's films were financed by his wife's dentistry practice, allowing him to give full flower to his idiosyncratic ideas. He found his way to film directing by a very circuitous route.
Ki-young had been active from 1955–1990.
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