Love Will Tear Us Apart: Kim Ki-duk

March 11, 2012 Love Will Tear Us Apart No Comments

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, 10^th 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.

Love Will Tear Us Apart: An Introduction
This series, curated by Samuel Jamier (chief film programmer at Japan Society), wears a title at once paradoxical, seductive, and melancholy, "Love Will Tear Us Apart." It is an apt choice to conve...
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Dream (2008)
From the first sequence, Kim Ki-duk plunges both his characters and the spectator in doubt: is it dreaming or waking? A man crashes into a car, but then he wakes up. The first dialogue of the film ...
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Bad Guy (2001)
Jo Jae-hyeon holds the rare distinction of being one of the few actors who has worked with Kim Ki-duk multiple times. They began their collaboration on Kim’s debut film Crocodile (1996) and eventua...
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Oasis (2002)
Concluding the magnificent film series “Love Will Tear Us Apart” at the Japan Society in New York is Oasis, the third feature film from the highly esteemed novelist-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong....
Love Will Tear Us Apart: Snake of June (2003)
If water was only somewhat integral to Vital, in Snake of June it becomes fundamental. In this film, one of his most accomplished and concentrated works apart from the early films that make up his ...