Another gestation period since the last one, but I am back now. Happy early holidays, and a really huge thank you to everyone for being a part of this newsletter. It started as a small new year’s resolution, but it’s become so much more than I expected.
I wasn’t able to keep my promise of a monthly entry, but hopefully next year I can do more (though I don’t plan to change this format at all). And to those who’ve personally reached out with feedback, I really appreciate every comment. I’ve also added captions for all images in previous entries.
Movies:
An addendum to July’s notes on Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow: Ian Wang and Orion Lee, who plays King Lu in the film, have pointed out to me that the phrase “soft gold”—King Lu’s stated motive for immigration to America—refers to fur, not gold. I’ve mulled over this detail a bit, placing it against my initial argument against the film’s anachronistic mapping of Chinese migration to the West Coast. Obviously, I welcome the correction, but in the months after I’ve seen the film, the inaccuracies or anachronisms don’t irk me nearly as much as its meekness.
Very gently, the film suggests interracial friendship is a two-person melting pot, within which racial difference—and any necessary friction that could arise from an acknowledgment of this difference—might pale against the flames of some external struggle or the warmth of an embrace. I’m still ambivalent about framing this smooth symbiosis as a fiery, anti-capitalist (a term I worry will soon become exhausted with eager overuse) comradeship, or anything above amicable acquaintance.
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Quick details—
The War with Grandpa (Tim Hill, 2020): Irreverent but not rude, pious but not too precious about grandchildren-grandparent relations. There aren’t enough silly live-action slapstick films for kids.
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947): Fast, flirtatious cuts between close-ups of sweat and cigarettes hanging from lips.
Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984): Cassavetes’ sticky web of love is so broad and indiscriminate that it even includes the dog.
Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978): It felt like a big hug. I felt unembarrassed. I’m so happy to now own Criterion Collection’s blu-ray of this, and I think of it fondly every time I make mashed potatoes.
A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019): A lighthearted, conveniently neat rationalization of the urban legend that men age slower and women age faster.
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Books:
I’ve never been good at math and I’ve never been a good cook. But since I’ve become more comfortable with cooking, I started mathematician Eugenia Cheng’s Cakes, Custard and Category Theory: Easy recipes for understanding complex maths in hopes of one skill helping another. It’s encouraging and parental in the best way.
Two books I’ve finished recently but have little to say about: Laura Mulvey’s Citizen Kane and Michèle Bernstein’s All The King’s Horses.
I started Dante’s Inferno after watching Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. It’ll be a long time before I get to Paradiso, so for now I’m grovelling in the circles. This isn’t a special insight, but I really appreciate the thoroughness of its scorn. When hatred can be mapped I think you can actually wield it, put it to good use.
Inka Essenhigh, Snow, 2007.
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*Trigger warning: Discussions of sexual assault.*
Crocodile (1996).
The recent death of Kim Ki-duk—from coronavirus, which he’d contracted in Latvia, where he’d fled to following multiple allegations of rape and sexual harassment between 2017 and 2018—has brought back some difficult memories for me. Some might know that Kim was the reason that I became interested in film criticism. When first confronted with his films, I was extremely skeptical. But I was also overwhelmed with an obligation to cross that bridge from being a fan or detractor to a critic of an artist whose films stirred me as much as they upset me. Many Tumblr blog posts were published, deleted, published, then deleted again as I reckoned with this. The originality of his films ceased to be replicated over the years, but I thought that he was the most important figure of contemporary Korean cinema, though hardly the best.
Kim was a factory worker-turned-street painter, who’d seen his first two films—Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Leos Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge—in his early 30’s. He wrote his early scripts without a complete knowledge of Hangul, and maintained that Korea was a “third world” country. This purview distinguished his tough vision of the world from other middle-class or academic filmmakers, whose sympathies with the working class could at times be inhibited by a calculated eye and an informed stylistic sensibility. Because he lacked taste and training, Kim presented exploitation without the backbone of any political or aesthetic conceptualization. Instead he privileged the libidinal resonance of everyday violence for victim and perpetuator, each chained to some invisible structure in the shadows.
Birdcage Inn (1998), The Isle (2000), Breath (2007).
Despite their laurels, Kim’s films contained little polish or prestige. He segmented society into basic dichotomies that cracked beneath convoluted narratives, and his characters spoke in basic, piecemeal phrases. Like the two-dimensional figures of South Korea’s syncretic folklore, they stumbled among loose strands of Buddhism, Shamanism, Confucianism, and Christianity. Something else was also apparent: that even the filmmaker wanted more. More clarity, more precision, more than he could ever offer. The recurring image of the secret space (the suspended staircase in Birdcage Inn, the glass-panelled room in Bad Guy, the floating homes of The Isle, the vacant apartments in 3-Iron, the isolated temple in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the wide field in Dream, the sauna in Samaritan Girl, the jail cell in Breath…) pointed to a dissociative desire to place people anywhere they would cease to be people, without a name or a face. (One of many ironies, since the 2011 documentary Arirang features the director alone in the mountains talking incessantly about himself and his reputation.)
In that very movement of switching between the fantasy and the real, Kim Ki-duk visualized the possibility of a non-predicated subject and the tragedy of its impossibility. In Breath, a woman finds joy in a prison, then returns to another jail in the home as a mother and a wife. In Time, a man’s devastated girlfriend undergoes plastic surgery to be reborn as his new lover, her transformation an acknowledgment of a dead-end inability to change her surroundings. Agents of capitalism and colonialism—human traffickers, loan sharks, volatile husbands, American soldiers—repeatedly returned to violate the sanctitude of the secret space through lecherous schemes and sexual violence. Kim’s protagonists wrestled with a resulting dual distress: an internal compulsion to retreat into the unconscious (often to a suicidal extent), and a constant fear of an external invasion. Even at their most heavy-handed (and, in the case of his late films, visually flat), his films displayed a more intuitive psychological depth than Park Chan-wook’s vengeance thrillers or the socially conscious pop films of Bong Joon-ho, which present the plight of the poor without the existential hunger for nonbeing that made Kim’s films not just angry, but deeply anguished.
In his efforts towards a “semi-abstract film […] where the painfully real and hopefully imaginative meet” (Kim, in a 2001 interview with Kim So-hee), Kim seemed to cognize that there was more to life than the battle of the sexes and the haves and have-nots. But such heights were only reached in flashes. He intrigued me because although he was neither perfect nor correct, he possessed a raw conviction that the truth about human suffering must be told through art. His greatest successes took the form of tiny trinkets and arrangements (two fishing hooks entwined in the shape of a heart in The Isle, the painted white face of a French woman in Wild Animals, the photographs in Bad Guy, Time, and Address Unknown) and small snippets (the famous last dance in 3-Iron, and more recently, a sequence in Moebius in which a family fights, and their arms tangle in a möbius strip). These were offered to the mind of a voracious viewer who might fill in the gaps, though usually upon prying further that gap would only widen.
Wild Animals (1997), Address Unknown (2001), 3-Iron (2004).
Together, Hye Seung Chung’s book Kim Ki-duk (an assessment of Kim’s films as a postcolonial expression of Nietzche’s ressentiment, rooted in his lived experience), and Hyunjun Min’s dissertation “Kim Ki-duk and the Cinema of Sensations” (an application of Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon to Kim’s scenes of violence) pushed me to think about his filmography—and of course, cinema—outside of the representational realm. Again, Kim frequently failed to surpass these boundaries himself. This was evident especially in films like Crocodile, The Coast Guard, and The Bow, which show an obstinate dependence on rape as plain evidence of a dog-eat-dog world without even a fantasy of freedom. Still in Breath, 3-Iron, and Address Unknown (one of the only films that looks at present-day, rural Korean life around an American military base), slivers of an outside slipped through.
Kim Ki-duk’s most insipid films asked of his viewers only to watch, not to think. The more derivative criticisms of Kim have presumed that the filmmaker does not think at all. Tony Rayns, in an article for Film Comment in 2004, called Kim an overrated “faux Buddhist” who lacks “cinephile knowledge” (a point Min deems unfair given Kim’s limited education as a junior-high dropout, and his years spent as a factory worker and a marine). After the premiere of his award-winner Pieta at TIFF in 2012, Cinema Scope launched an affront against the film, with Kiva Reardon mentioning in her review that she “watched the trailer instead” and Adam Nayman stating that though he didn’t watch the film, “at least a dozen people […] said it was awful.” To a degree, these assertions of intellectual superiority over Kim have diluted any ideological or ethical concerns with his practice. Instead, these takedowns mostly succeed in contributing to a small conversation among other critics. It has always been easier to dismiss an accomplished artist as an institutional fad than to seriously challenge their work as art—awkward and unrefined, maybe, but art nonetheless—as those like Chung and Min have done. Chung’s research suggests that this critical process demands both personal honesty and a capacity for abstraction. In her article “Beyond ‘Extreme’: Regarding Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Ressentiment,” she writes:
As a Korean-born woman who has firsthand knowledge of gender discrimination in my native country, I am more sympathetic to the feminist criticism directed against Kim Ki-duk’s alleged misogyny than to Tony Rayns’s outrage at Kim’s supposed lack of “authenticity” as an artist and his “undeserving” canonical standing as South Korea’s preeminent provocateur. From a feminist perspective, it is indeed problematic that the male-focalized class warfare is waged over the bodies of middle-class women in such films as Crocodile, Bad Guy, and 3-Iron. However, Kim’s oeuvre, which constitutes a visceral, bottom-to-top critique of social stratification in South Korea, cannot be fully grasped from a feminist perspective alone.
[…] Korean society does not have a monopoly on patriarchy and misogyny, for there have been numerous shocking depictions of sexual violence in the annals of world cinema (particularly in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Imamura Shohei, Oshima Nagisa, and Miike Takashi), the likes of which far surpass anything that Kim’s tormented imagination has churned out. What is unique about Kim’s version of extreme cinema is the vivid nature of the psychological wounds apparent therein, caused by or leading to further violence, not violence in and by itself. The “extreme” nature of his films should not be misunderstood as merely a sensorial provocation or exploitative sleight-of-hand to “hook” the audience with repulsive images. Rather, it can be seen as a desperate (and desperately needed) exclamation point—a kind of corporeal exclamation point—emphasizing the excruciating pain suffered by abject heroes, who often serve as semiautobiographical portraits of the filmmaker himself.
I’m also reminded of what Eugenia Cheng writes about abstraction in mathematics, that you should be careful not to “throw away too much” with the bathwater:
When we go round simplifying or idealising our situations, we must be careful not to oversimplify—we must not simplify our objects to the point that they’ve lost all of their useful characteristics.
That being said, with all I’ve gained from Kim Ki-duk’s films, it’s also my extensive understanding of them that gives me even more reason to firmly support the allegations against him by his victims. This includes the actress Seo Won, who I’ve only now learned has described working on Bad Guy as an experience that “wounded her soul.” On the set of Moebius, Kim slapped an actress in the face while shooting a violent sex scene, and was fined $4,570 (KRW 5 million) in 2017. He denied the accusation, stating that it was “nothing personal.” He then retaliated by suing two victims and the investigative news show PD Notebook for defamation. Kim’s complaints were rejected for lack of evidence, but as critic Yoon Sung-eun says: “While the Kim Ki-duk case helped spotlight sexual abuse problems in the South Korean film industry, it is an issue that has been around far too long. […] Korea's social climate continues to make it difficult for women to speak up.”
Kim Ki-duk’s films (which recall the contradiction of Hitchcock’s Marnie, a wrenching depiction of PTSD by Tippi Hedren, who Hitchcock sexually assaulted) confirm the misogyny that has always served as a crutch and kept Kim’s great works from being remembered as masterpieces. They prove that to be “semi-abstract” is to have only half of the real and half of the imaginary, instead of a full involvement in both. Such a commitment might have enabled a turn away from an obsession with violence towards a belief in a future without it. But after the release of Moebius, I concluded that Kim would never change. His films still evoke those days of marathoning, screenshotting, reading. Swept up in awe and disbelief, wondering if anyone else feels the same way, realizing that perplexity can serve a higher purpose than the straight admiration (or disgust) of a group in consensus. At the same time, Kim Ki-duk leaves behind a legacy of insufficiency and betrayal. He viciously hurt the women he proclaimed were “on a higher level than men” and who he insisted were a large majority of his audience. And for that, I’ll always remember him as a liar.
More readings:
Jake Kwon, South Korea’s Young Men Are Fighting Against Feminism (CNN)
Jen Izaakson and Tae Kyung Kim, The South Korean Women’s Movement: ‘We Are Not Flowers, We Are A Fire” (Feminist Current)
So Yun Alysha Park, A Move Forward For The Korean Women’s Movement (Verso)
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An album for winter:
Recent writings:
For MUBI, I wrote an essay on David Fincher’s Mank, Orson Welles and Jerry Lewis, Netflix and Hollywood.