Film critics have referred to the first and most famous of South Korean director Kim Kiyoung’s housemaid film series, The Housemaid (1960), as both “a symbol of utopia” and as a “grid of collective delusion.” About an intrusive femme fatale in an upwardly mobile home, The Housemaid played a formative role in the class imaginary in the 1960s as the material foundations of the postwar middle class began to take shape at the cusp of South Korea’s compressed modernization. Frequent homage to the film in recent decades brings to the fore a conceptual lineage and highlights the generative capacity of Kim Kiyoung’s aesthetic vision in expressing, then managing, through filmic architecture the tensions of “compressed modernity.” Drawing from her recent book, Hanyo (The Housemaid, BFI Film Classics), this talk analyses how the tensions are concretized as a conceptual formation, figured by the house, which itself becomes the object of attention. It focuses on how density, built into the architecture of the house and in compressed images, registers the unresolved contradictions that consolidate in aesthetic form the contradictions of rapid, compressed modernization.
Youngmin Choe is an associate professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Her research areas are in Korean film and media. She teaches courses on Korean film, Korean visual and cultural studies, and transnational Korean cinema.
The lecture is sponsored by the Teaching Beyond the Classroom and Liu Institute's East Asia Working Group.