Love Will Tear Us Apart: Kim Ki-duk


Editor’s Notes: The following article is a part of Rowena’s coverage of the 6th Annual Globus Film Series at the Japan Society in New York, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

The second weekend of the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” series presented by Japan Society is a focus on Korean cinema, or in the case of Lee Sang-il, zainichi Korean cinema. Friday’s screening was devoted to Lee and his newest feature film, Villain (2011). Saturday, 10th March, will see an epic quadruple bill of three of Kim Ki-duk’s more recent films and Jung Ji-woo’s 1999 controversial film Happy End. (For a complete list of screenings, visit http://www.japansociety.org/film.)

Among the filmmakers that film curator Samuel Jamier considered to include in this series, surely Kim Ki-duk’s violent and at once alluring and alienating films did not find any difficulty securing a place in the line-up. The films in this series certainly provide diverse variations of the series title “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” but the aptness of Kim’s cinema is particularly remarkable. One finds disquieting literal interpretations of love tearing people apart in the three Kim films to be screened this weekend, disquieting and literal at the level of flesh and the body. Kim’s focus on the physicality of the psyche, as it were, in contact with other people and things in the world is all the more emphatic due to his penchant for little dialogue to get in the way of the distinct language of gesture and movement of the body and expressivity of the face. Kim’s unsettling way of choreographing his actors makes the language of the body and face all the more marked, not to mention grotesque and surreal, in his most poignant films. The prevalence of the monosyllabic in his choice of film titles should cue the spectator somewhat to both the minimalism of his form and the profundity of issues that he addresses, such as in two of the three films to be showcased.

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