I’ve now seen two of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films — 3-Iron and The Isle — and they are both so astonishing that I want to see everything he’s made. Kim’s films are not like those of any other Korean director I’ve encountered. They are visually beautiful: quite static, with a precision of framing and crispness of editing that prevents them from being merely picturesque or postcard-pretty. They are very slow-moving and contemplative, but they also feel compressed and concise: a paradox I can’t explain except to say that, while little overtly happens, and more action is inferred than actually shown, there is no sense of lingering, and Kim eschews that sort of extended temporality that we get in the works of directors as diverse as Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni (with all of whom Kim might otherwise be compared in terms of composition and pace). Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness. (Nothing too explicit in 3-Iron, although it has its troubling violent moments; but The Isle contains, among other things, two extremely visceral scenes of self-mutilation, which, while not quite as explicitly presented as the violent scenes in, say, Tarantino or Miike, are far more disturbing, because of their emotional intensity, and because we can’t dismiss them as being over-the-top to the point of absurdity). In both films, there is very little dialogue; and in both, the main character does not speak at all. Both films are tales of extreme sexual passion, indeed of passion pushed to a point of transcendent craziness; yet at the same time this passion does not take the (by now all too familiar) form of amour fou, but instead seems reined in by an odd kind of restraint (fairly gentle in 3-Iron, and all the more extreme for being so unexpressive in The Isle). This passion is both otherworldly, and yet too carnal to be called “spiritual” (at least in whatever Western terms I am able to understand). And the passion occurs between two protagonists, moves from one of them to the other, in a way that cannot be reduced either to one-sided erotic obsession (like Vertigo) on the one hand, or folie à deux on the other. Both films are organized around the encounter of a heterosexual couple, in which one of the partners transforms (it would be too crude to say “liberates”) the other: in 3-Iron it is the man who inspires and changes the woman, while in The Isle it is the woman who moves and changes the man. I can’t say much more without going into plot detail about the two films, and obviously I need to see more of Kim’s films before I generalize further as to what he is about. But 3-Iron and The Isle are beautiful in their intensity, and both of them convey something I have never encountered before in film (and only rarely in writing): what I can only call (for want of any better phrase to describe it) trans-subjective affect in motion, on a level that can only be shown, not explicitly said or conventionally expressed.
Kim Ki-Duk
I’ve now seen two of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films — 3-Iron and The Isle — and they are both so astonishing that I want to see everything he’s made. Kim’s films are not like those of any other Korean director I’ve encountered. They are visually beautiful: quite static, with a precision of framing and crispness of editing that prevents them from being merely picturesque or postcard-pretty. They are very slow-moving and contemplative, but they also feel compressed and concise: a paradox I can’t explain except to say that, while little overtly happens, and more action is inferred than actually shown, there is no sense of lingering, and Kim eschews that sort of extended temporality that we get in the works of directors as diverse as Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni (with all of whom Kim might otherwise be compared in terms of composition and pace). Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness. (Nothing too explicit in 3-Iron, although it has its troubling violent moments; but The Isle contains, among other things, two extremely visceral scenes of self-mutilation, which, while not quite as explicitly presented as the violent scenes in, say, Tarantino or Miike, are far more disturbing, because of their emotional intensity, and because we can’t dismiss them as being over-the-top to the point of absurdity). In both films, there is very little dialogue; and in both, the main character does not speak at all. Both films are tales of extreme sexual passion, indeed of passion pushed to a point of transcendent craziness; yet at the same time this passion does not take the (by now all too familiar) form of amour fou, but instead seems reined in by an odd kind of restraint (fairly gentle in 3-Iron, and all the more extreme for being so unexpressive in The Isle). This passion is both otherworldly, and yet too carnal to be called “spiritual” (at least in whatever Western terms I am able to understand). And the passion occurs between two protagonists, moves from one of them to the other, in a way that cannot be reduced either to one-sided erotic obsession (like Vertigo) on the one hand, or folie à deux on the other. Both films are organized around the encounter of a heterosexual couple, in which one of the partners transforms (it would be too crude to say “liberates”) the other: in 3-Iron it is the man who inspires and changes the woman, while in The Isle it is the woman who moves and changes the man. I can’t say much more without going into plot detail about the two films, and obviously I need to see more of Kim’s films before I generalize further as to what he is about. But 3-Iron and The Isle are beautiful in their intensity, and both of them convey something I have never encountered before in film (and only rarely in writing): what I can only call (for want of any better phrase to describe it) trans-subjective affect in motion, on a level that can only be shown, not explicitly said or conventionally expressed.