Edit: Judge
Kim Ki-duk passed away in late 2020.
Kim Ki-duk's next film is said to have been scheduled to be made in Russia, and in the past two years he has been very close to Russia and Kazakhstan, and last year he was the chairman of the jury at the Moscow Film Festival.
He had just arrived in Latvia from St. Petersburg last month, and a local artist with whom he had a personal relationship, Mr. Kim, who had personal relations, said mr. Kim was planning to buy a house in the local seaside city of Jurmala, but died a month later of covid-19 complications.
Regarding Kim Ki-duk, it is a bit complicated to say, as if no director has as many completely different or even seriously contradictory evaluations as he does.
People who like him love him so much that they see philosophy from his movies and see true, pure human nature; those who don't like him can't accept it, and they have a physical dislike for rough eroticism and violence; and a handful of people directly treat his movies as cat movies, watching and rushing.
In China, Kim Ki-duk has countless fans, and even the online monograph journal specializing in Kim Ki-duk's films is comparable to the research articles of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, two Chinese directors.
Kim Ki-duk is indeed famous, the three major European regulars, what golden lion and silver bear have been taken, for the West he is the representative of Korean films, such a person, the reputation in South Korea is far less than in China, Europe, the media scolded him, the public does not want to see him, in the eyes of the Korean public he is an outlier, jumping beam clown, even if he won the award is also a temporary success, can not climb the elegant hall at all, let alone represent Korean movies.
Complex, rejected, controversial Kim Ki-duk, what kind of person are you?
In 1997, Kim Ki-duk made his debut film "The Crocodile Hidden Corpse", before which he had no experience in filming, he used to be a factory worker, and then he went to learn to paint.
"Crocodile Hidden Corpse Diary" Homeless men forcibly occupy young girls
After "Crocodile Hidden Corpse Diary", Kim Ki-duk filmed "The Beast Capital", "Baby Prostitute" and "Drifting Desire Room" at a super fast speed once a year, and there was no channel for distribution and screening in China, kim Ki-duk had to give up the local audience, and from this point on, he officially turned to the international film festival in Europe. This is very similar to the early situation of the sixth generation of directors in China, who made movies and lived on the bonuses of foreign film festivals.
The
"Drifting Desire Room"
In 2004, Kim Ki-duk won the Silver Bear for Best Director in Berlin for "The Samaria Girl", and won 7 nominations at the Venice Film Festival for "The Empty Room", winning the Silver Lion Award for Best Director.
The empty room classic shot
Since then, Kim Ki-duk has continued to shoot "Bow", "Breathing" and "Sad Dream".
"Bow" bizarre wedding
"Breathe" Death Row Prisoner Jane
"Sad Dream" Oda Cut makes fantasy sadistic love
According to Kim Ki-duk, when filming a scene in "Sad Dream" where the heroine Lee Na-young hanged herself, she almost really suffocated to death, Kim Ki-duk was very guilty of this, and at that time, his disciples Jang Hoon and Jeon Jae-hong turned to another company, Kim Ki-duk felt that "people are terrible", and almost suffered from depression, so he ran to the mountains to live in isolation, so he lived for three years.
Three years later, he made a documentary about his reflections during his seclusion into the documentary Arirang. Kim Ki-duk's films are often poorly matched by character dialogue, usually just a few sentences, and he feels that character dialogue is unnecessary, because "if you stick to dialogue, emotions cannot be expressed."
When it comes to the dissected self-description of "Arirang", there are more words, more than the dialogue of all his previous films combined, and Kim Ki-duk is like a schizophrenic, dissecting himself with his heart and lungs.
At that time, he was rumored to be suffering from social phobia, and he was obviously old and emaciated.
The comeback "Arirang" won the best film in the "One Kind of Attention" section in Cannes, followed by Kim Ki-duk's re-entry in Europe, "Holy Death" won the Venice Golden Lion Award, and his career ushered in a new beginning.
Kim Ki-duk once said in the classic Versailles: "I haven't won many awards, I live too small, and the trophies are in bags." ”
After "The Holy Death", he successively filmed "Mobius", "One-on-One" and the latest 2018 "Human, Space, Time and People", all of which were screened at the European International Film Festival.
The year Kim Ki-duk made his first film, another independent Korean film director, Hong Sang-so, also released his debut film "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well", and later Kim Ki-duk, like Hong Sang-so, shined at European film festivals and became a representative of Korean cinema, and Kim Ki-duk's works were even "neoclassical oriental aesthetics".
2020 Hong Shangxiu Berlin Silver Bear
But that's limited to European discussions of him. In 2012, at the 69th Venice Film Festival, at the press conference of the film "Holy Death", Kim Ki-duk said: "I am a famous Korean director in Europe... Unfortunately, my film work is not very popular in my own country... But that situation may get better when the film "Holy Death" is released, and hopefully it will get better and better in the future.
"Holy Death" Venice launch
Unexpectedly, not only did kim ki-duk's reputation in South Korea become completely stinky, so that he later went away.
Kim Ki-duk likes to photograph marginal people, and in the early years his debut film "Crocodile Hidden Corpse Diary" filmed tramps, "Beast Capital" filmed stowaways, and both were violent love stories.
At the same time, South Korea also actively two major guides, Lin Quanze and Kang Digui. When Kim Ki-duk filmed low-level prostitutes twisting love, Kang Te-gyu had just made "Life and Death Spy Change", which entered the history of Korean cinema, setting a record of 6.2 million movies and defining the standard of Korean cinema. The standard is that in the future, Koreans will watch movies again, good movies, and successful movies will have to be like "Life and Death Spy Change".
Lim Kwon-taek, the godfather of Korean cinema
Kang Tik-gyu "Spielberg of Korea"
Kim Ki-duk's twisted and somewhat perverted underlying narratives are something That Koreans can't understand, don't understand what he's doing with these.
South Korea's later film system is mainly based on imitating Hollywood, starting from the 1999 Korean film watershed "Life and Death Spy Change" to the 2019 award-winning "Parasite", which is actually a variation of Hollywood genre films, that is, from imitation to localization, to tell the world story with the nation.
Spy Love Last shot
"Parasite" class contradiction old topic
The Chungmuro system of Korean films advocates large-scale production and systematic large-scale training, and directors like Kim Ki-duk who are killed by wild roads are naturally not welcomed by the mainstream film circle.
In addition, kim ki-duk's films mostly focus on sex and violence. According to Nietzsche, man walks on the tightrope of the cliff, and after the apes are separated, they change from animals to social people by a thin layer of skin, and here kim ki-deok, he uses sex and violence to tear this layer of skin apart, photographing the true humanity of the original taboo. Koreans think that the people he photographs are ugly, hateful, and ugly to the national image.
And that kind of extreme naked image expression is too wild, "Drifting Desire Room" premiered in Venice, it is said that the audience directly vomited on the spot. South Korean audiences also accepted incompetence, with viewers and the media scolding him for sensationalism: "Kim Ki-duk is just a superficial appearance." ”
The fish hook of "Drifting Room"
And the trilogy of "Drifting Desire Room", "Baby Prostitute", and "Samaritan Girl" has completely offended South Korean feminists, and the female image of Kim Ki-duk's brutal treatment in the film has made him reproached again because of misogyny and contempt for women.
Then something big happened, and in 2017 Kim Ki-duk was accused of sexually assaulting an actress.
South Korea's MBC television's investigative news program "PD Handbook" made a program "Film Director Kim Ki-duk, The True Face of the Master", exposing the actresses' joint accusations that he slapped the actress and forced the extra bed during the filming of "Mobius", and the director and the lead actor Cho Jae-hyun sexually assaulted the actress together.
South Korean Oni has always been very powerful, from the "Me too" to the collective response of the N room incident to the recent fallen men's movement, the female voice has always been an important social force.
During the days of the accusation, Kim Ki-duk fell to the bottom and his reputation was completely stinked.
There are rumors that he ran to Latvia to escape legal punishment, but he did not expect the end of a much-anticipated Kim Ki-duk's later years.
Kim Ki-duk carries an innate cowardice.
In his self-description, he was always afraid of his father during his childhood. His father, who had fought in the Korean War, was covered in scars, turned to the government for years, and poured his grievances on his children. He was very afraid of his father, and often hid in the toilet, which he later described as a kind of farmhouse toilet: full of farm tools, very suitable for hanging. Because he was a child scribbling on textbooks, his father pumped his legs and stomach 100 times, and the beating slowly turned into Kim Ki-duk's painful training, and he learned to live with pain.
In "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring", the little monk grabs the frog and draws on his back, which is a game Kim Ki-duk played as a child; "Drifting Desire Room" tortures and kills electric fish in the same year, which is similar to a certain emotion of his own suffering, that is, the transformation of his own pain. It is in self-masochism and abuse that the primal pleasure of violence is satisfied.
When He was a child, Kim Ki-duk took 100 yuan to help his mother buy things, always hoping that the price would not be more than 100 whole, so that there was no need to find money, and there was no need to look at the face of the store, so as not to "provoke unhappiness". At that time, he had the delusion of masochism consciousness, and many years later someone told him about the SM tendencies in his films, he had not heard of it or thought of it, and he was shooting his own direct experience.
Kim Ki-duk is a post-60s, very special era, understand everyone understands, this generation is so "cowardly" to survive. Although Kim Ki-duk rushed out with a barbaric energy with his rich experience of interacting with the people at the bottom, he was more or less influenced by his time, that is, "hate culture" and self-pity.
South Korean President Kim Dae-jung once said: "North Korean culture has become a culture of hate, and throughout history, we have been living in hate." This kind of "hate" of course has its own historical and social reasons, and then it slowly becomes a kind of self-pity that licks the wounds while tasting the beauty brought by "hate", and then it becomes a kind of collective psychology that is very contradictory.
This psychology is reflected in Kim Ki-duk's films, and it becomes a recurring theme in his works: both men and women are self-pitying and enduring.
On the one hand, Kim Ki-duk was a victim of male power, learned to use self-abuse to divert pain in a cowardly childhood life, and became another abuser fatalistically in adulthood, from masochism to abuse. On the other hand, the special growth experience of the post-60s generation has made him "cowardly" and cowardly, and has inherited the "hate culture" of forbearance and self-pity.
Kim Ki-duk did not study film, not even finished the book, after graduating from junior high school, he accepted his father's order to run to the factory to work, in the book "Wild Kim Ki-duk", he described his legendary experience, from the factory director to the army service, and later studied in France, from learning to draw to writing scripts, from the wild road to the siege, became an international director, Kim Ki-duk once said that the film is not learned, it is made.
However, without the support of systematic professional theory, his creation has shown weakness in the later period. Since "Breathe" in 2007, he has fallen into a repetitive repetition of madness.
In arirang, a documentary like the whispers of a schizophrenic, Kim Ki-duk escapes reality and hides in the mountains, realizing that he is exhausted and can't shoot new things, and he doesn't want to live. As early as that time, Kim Ki-duk made a pistol himself and tried to shoot himself.
For Kim Ki-duk, however, suicide takes too much courage.
Many people thought he would continue to make shocking and worldly movies and die on the set at the age of 80, but he did not expect to leave the world in such a way. The life of abandonment ended like this, even more magical than his movies.
2020 is almost over, and I hope everyone is safe.
Design/Vision: SaiBO XiaOsI Men