Vicious Desire: The Insect Woman of Kim Kiyoung and Imamura Shōhei

Abstract

Let’s begin with some images from the films of Kim Kiyoung (19191998) and Imamura Shōhei (1926-2006): animals such as rats, cats, squirrels, pigs, insects, and mostly images of women. [Image 1] As these images show, Kim Kiyoung and Imamura Shōhei are both known as eccentric art house directors with women (that is, gender and sexuality), animals, and the primitive aspects of human beings at the heart of their films. While Imamura was recognized in the West and won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 for Narayama bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama), Kim Kiyoung was (re)discovered in the mid-1990s through a retrospective at the 2 Busan Film Festival. Naturally, Imamura’s work has been widely discussed both academically and journalistically. In contrast, although Kim Kiyoung was a very popular film director from the late 1950s to 1970 in South Korea, he was not well known in the West before he was discovered in the 1990s. This might have been due to the marginality of South Korea during the 1960s and 70s in world film history. During the same period, Japanese cinema had become accepted as ‘art,’ mostly through positive recognition in Western critical media such as Cahiers du Cinéma. But as soon as Kim was introduced to the West via various venues like the Berlin film festival, many film critics pointed out the similarities of his work to those of such Western directors as Douglas