Introduction: An Auteurist Masterpiece and its Discontent

No one would deny that The Housemaid (Hanyeo, 1960) is Kim Ki-young's most celebrated film. It was the first film in the Housemaid series, and its story concerned a happy family whose life was shattered following the adultery between the husband and a newly hired housemaid, and the subsequent revenge of the housemaid. When released, it was a box-office hit. Nonetheless, a few critics were cynical about its artistic value: the lack of sophistication, the over-grotesqueness, and its theatrical style were all indicated as problematic elements. When The Housemaid was shortlisted as one of five Korean films for potential inclusion in the 8th Asian Film Festival, the jurors were reluctant to include it. The reason that it was finally chosen was that the other four films shortlisted didn't depict modern urban life, and that The Housemaid's unique cinematography was recognized.

The underestimation of The Housemaid was connected to the inclination of Korean film criticism since the colonial era, which had sought to establish a genealogy of “Korean nationalist and realist cinema” and disparage commercial genre movies. It is well known that Yi Yeong-il, the most influential film critic as well as a film historian in the 1960s and 1970s, categorized The Housemaid as a “psychological thriller” and excluded it from his list of “post-April Revolution masterpieces.” However, unexpectedly, The Housemaid attracted great attention and praise from the Asian cinephiles at the Asian Film Festival (1961). Probably because of this international attention, Kim could win two domestic awards for best director, afterwards.

It was in the early 1990s that The Housemaid was rediscovered as a cult masterpiece. The new generation in the Korean film industry around the late 1980s was influenced by the spirit of the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980 and the student-led democratizing movement in 1987 against the military dictatorship. The obsession with a realist and anti-Hollywood orientation was very intense for the first generation of newcomers, including Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-Woo, who were committed to the independent cinema movement against the military dictatorship. However, the second new generation, including Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, were different from the earlier newcomers.