{"id":5428,"date":"2021-05-10T21:32:34","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T04:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5428"},"modified":"2021-05-10T21:32:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T04:32:34","slug":"korea-blog-kim-ki-youngs-the-insect-woman-1972-featuring-the-grandma-from-minari-as-a-grindhouse-femme-fatale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5428","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Kim Ki-young\u2019s The Insect Woman (1972), Featuring the Grandma from Minari as a Grindhouse Femme Fatale"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Now that K-pop, K-drama, and K-beauty have been international phenomena for years, Westerners must prepare themselves for the reign of the K-grandma. I\u2019ve heard that label, or rather its more Korean form\u00a0K-halmeoni<\/em>, applied to Youn Yuh-jung, a veteran actress famous here in Korea since the 1970s. Much more recently she\u2019s become a star in the United States as well: the anointment occurred last month, in the form of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress granted for her performance in Lee Isaac Chung\u2019s\u00a0Minari<\/em>. Much lauded even before the Oscars, Chung\u2019s film tells of a Korean immigrant family struggling to make a go as farmers in the Arkansas of the 1980s. Youn plays the mother-in-law brought over from the old country to watch the children; at first an alien presence to the American-born young son, this foulmouthed grandmother comes ultimately to provide just the kindness and encouragement he needs.<\/p>

Though perhaps not a role that will win any awards for originality, as written by Chung (in a \u201csemi-autobiographical\u201d script) and played by Youn it has resonated with viewers Korean and non-Korean alike. Increasingly many of the latter have been moved to watch\u00a0Minari<\/em>\u00a0expressly in order to see Youn\u2019s performance, so endearing a personality has the actress displayed in her post-Oscar interviews. An immigrant to the United States herself during a decade of \u201cretirement\u201d from the mid-1970s through the mid-80s, she\u2019s spoken playfully and often sardonically in English about the rigors of low-budget independent filmmaking, Western mispronunciations of her name, and her desire to meet absentee producer Brad Pitt. As she accepted her Academy Award, she dedicated it to \u201cmy first director, Kim Ki-young, who was a very genius director. I made my first movie with him. He would be very happy if he is still alive.\u201d<\/p>

Released exactly half a century earlier, that first movie\u00a0Woman of Fire\u00a0<\/em>(\ud654\ub140) features a 23-year-old Youn playing a\u00a0femme fatale<\/em>\u00a0who brings about the destruction of a stolid middle-class household. It shares this basic story with an earlier Kim picture, 1960\u2019s\u00a0The Housemaid<\/em>\u00a0(\ud558\ub140), which is now regarded, in the company of Yu Hyun-mok\u2019s\u00a0Aimless Bullet<\/em><\/a>\u00a0from the following year, as one of the greatest Korean films of all time. Restored by the Korean Film Archive in 2008, it was later granted the supreme cinephile imprimatur of an edition in the Criterion Collection. That the release came\u00a0endorsed by\u00a0Parasite<\/em>\u00a0director Bong Joon-ho<\/a>, star of\u00a0last year\u2019s Academy Awards ceremony<\/a>, speaks to Kim\u2019s lasting influence on Korean cinema. More than 20 years after his death, he lays fair claim to the title of the most important Korean filmmaker of all time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that K-pop, K-drama, and K-beauty have been international phenomena for years, Westerners must prepare themselves for the reign of the K-grandma. I\u2019ve heard that label, or rather its more Korean form\u00a0K-halmeoni, applied to Youn Yuh-jung, a veteran actress famous here in Korea since the 1970s. Much more recently she\u2019s become a star in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5430,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428\/revisions\/5430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}