Editor: Editor not credited
Author: Adrien Gombeaud, Anaid Demir, Catherine Capdeville-Zeng, Cédric Lagandré, Danièle Rivière
Translated by: Catherine Petit, Paul Buck
Publisher: Dis Voir, 2006
Link to online store *
From the publisher’s website:
Born in 1960, the South-Korean film director Kim Ki-duk is today counted among the most prominent directors of the new movement of contemporary cinema while at the same time resolutely remaining outside the cinema industry. From his very first films, he has been noticed at international film festivals such as Berlin (Golden Bear for best director, for Samaritan Girl), Locarno (Coast Guard) or Venice (Silver Lion for 3-Iron). In spite of a growing success, Kim Ki-duk favours independence in his way of working: small budget, fast shooting and strong personal implications which lead him to create his own backgrounds and accessories.
Self-taught, Kim Ki-duk seems to have accumulated in the first part of his life all the experiences necessary to inscribe his future cinema. Moving on the edge for thirty years, he physically explored the forthcoming themes of his work as a director: wandering, escape and, especially, survival.
In Kim Ki-duk’s films people don’t talk, they hit. Relationships are always frontal, direct, decoded, never mediated through language which would neutralize its violence. Flayed, traumatized and continually turning red… Kim Ki-duk’s heroes are presented in idyllic and luxurious landscapes, worthy of romantic postcards sent from Korea. Yet the best dramas are played between the flourishing mountain crests and the blue surfaces of the lakes and oceans.
Through a filmography as injected with blood as on the edge, Kim Ki-duk shows the still-oozing wounds of a Korean society maltreated by its history with an art of precision and a staging of suffering which is all Far-Eastern refinement.
Contents
- Adrien Gombeaud: Break on Through
- Anaid Demir: Kim Ki-duk, serial painter
- Cédric Lagandré: Spoken words in suspense
- Catherine Capdeville-Zeng: In the mirror of silence
- Danièle Rivière / Kim Ki-duk (interview): Black and white is the same color
LKL says:
I struggle to say that any of these essays are about Kim’s films. Rather, they seem to be a stream of ideas somehow inspired by but not necessarily connected to them. The book has told me very little about the director or his films.
LKL rating: 
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Entry on Goodreads.com here.
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