Beyond "extreme": the cinema of ressentiment. Kim Ki-duk: towards a more perfect imperfection -- An auteur is born: fishhooks, critical debates, and transnational canons -- On suffering and sufferance: postcolonial pain and the "purloined letter" in Address unknown -- Reconciling the paradox of silence and apologia: Bad guy, The isle, and 3-iron -- Neofeminist revisions: female bodies and semiotic chora in Birdcage inn and Samaritan girl -- The bodhisattva inner-eye: inwardly drawn transcendence in Spring, summer, fall, winter -- and spring -- Interview with Kim Ki-duk: from Crocodile to Address unknown / by Kim So-Hee.

HKBU library

YT2025 M09

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian "extreme" cinema, and Kim has been labelled a "psychopath" and "misogynist" in South Korea. Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, Hye Seung Chung challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression).