[KS] more kim ki-young films in Orange County

[Kyung Hyun Kim]

Dear friends and colleagues,
Again the UC Irvine provide the last chance to catch Kim Ki-young films
here in Southern California before they return to Korea.  After the
succesful run at UCLA, the two of the Kim Ki-young's masterpieces make
their stops at UCI.  Coined as "Mr. Monster", Kim Ki-young is a legitimate
post-war auteur whose work still remains largely obscure.  His
retrospectives have recently been showcased in Pusan, Berlin, London, San
Francisco, etc.  For anyone who is interested in horror, Asian cinema,
melodrama, issues of gender, and Korean culture, this opportunity simply
cannot be missed.  

Curator,
Kyung Hyun Kim, University of California, Irvine


UC Irvine presents: Kim Ki-young Films


Saturday, October 30
The Insect Woman 
Ch'ungnyô, 1972
This is another chapter of The Housemaid series,
a story which Korean director Kim Ki-young
returned to throughout his five decade career. In
The Insect Woman, Professor Lee÷whose family
was undone by his affair with their
housemaid÷has been hospitalized after suffering
a nervous breakdown and is told the story of a
man murdered by a jealous lover. One of the most
popular Korean films made in the 1970s, The
Insect Woman's raging cinemascope colors,
unorthodox symbolism, and bizarre sexual
triangle confirm Kim's global stature as a director
of uncompromising vision and unconventional
desires. 


Friday, Nov. 5, 7pm 
The Housemaid 
Hanyô, NEW complete print, 1960
The Housemaid is the first film in Kim
Ki-Young's series of domestic melodramas. The
story follows the collapse of a stable family
following the arrival of a young housemaid to
the scene. Presented with stark black and white
cinematography, haunting sound effects, and
detailed props and set design, the film is
considered Kim Ki-young's breakthrough
feature, establishing the style that earned him
the moniker "Mr. Monster."  

Both are screened in 35mm prints, in Korean with English subtitles.
Tickets are 5 dollars.
At UC Irvine campus, Humanties Instructional Building 100 Theater
(949)824-7418 for more info


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Since his rediscovery at the Pusan International Film Festival in 1997,
director Kim Ki-Young's films have been called everything from deviant to
grotesque and he has emerged as an exceptional figure in South Korean
cinema.  Both screenings will take place at the UC Irvine's Humanties
Instructional Building 100. 

 Kim Ki-Young (1919 - 1998) had a long filmmaking career, spanning the
 50's to the 80's. After an early realist period, he began to turn out
 horror-melodramas that dispensed with the sentimentality then favored
 in South Korean film. Instead of classical Korean values of balance
 and harmony, Kim opted for gothic excess, earning the moniker "Mr.
 Monster". Kim's films are a potent cinematic brew of surrealism,
 sexual perversity and domestic melodrama and have been called
 everything from deviant to "Douglas Sirk on acid" by film scholar
 Chris Berry. 

 Kim's films lob extreme zooms and bizarre plots like so many night
 flares illuminating the hidden recesses of the grotesque. KILLER
 BUTTERFLY (1978) alone offers up a veritable menagerie of weirdness,
 from the peculiar cast of characters to the brazenly illogical turns
 of the plot. THE HOUSEMAID (1960), the first of the director's series
 of melodramas about middle-class families destroyed by greed and
 paranoia. In IODO (1977) more crisis ensues around the threat of a
 resort development on an ancestral, rustic society.

 Yet for all their outrageousness, Kim's films manifest many aspects
 of South Korea's postwar reality. Their highly charged eroticism
 pitting male sexual fantasies against predatory women can be seen as
 symbolic metaphors playing out the massive social and psychological
 dislocations wrought by the country's rapid industrialization in the
 60's and the 70's. Thus as eccentric a stylist as he was, Kim can
 also be regarded as a director who captured the chaotic pulse of his
 time. In a strange echo of the violent deaths that populate his
 films, Kim and his wife died in a house fire a year after his movies,
 most of which she financed, were rediscovered at the Pusan festival.

-----------------------------------------------------
For more information, contact:

Sheila Murphy
Assistant Director,  The Film and Video Center @ UCI
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/fvc/
All screenings are at Humanities Instructional Building 100
Irvine, CA 92697-3535  | (949) 824-7418
Fax (949) 824-2464 



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