Housemaid

I was able to see Housemaid (1960) online by Kim Ki-Young last night through the wonderful website The Auteur. The film is from the era of Golden Age of Korean Cinema of the 60's and is considered to be as a "consensus pick as one of the top three Korean films of all the time."
The director is actually known for his melodramas and horror films and has a mainstream style in case of storytelling and filmmaking.
He said: "I'm a scientist specializing in medicine. That makes me close to a technician... In some ways, human beings are more accurate than machines... As an independent producer, I have to be a type of skilled laborer. There were many times that I had to make a film quickly. At those times, I kept entertainment-value in mind. Not once have I made a film for the sake of making the film itself. My taste is in looking through the camera. Filming happens to correspond with that taste. Art films are what Hyun Mok Yoo makes. That's because director Yu wants to make art films. I just make films by following my heart, so the analysis I leave to all of you."


The film is a domestic thriller about a family's destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory femme fatale, into the household. A composer, his pregnant wife and their two children move to a new, two story house where they hire a housemaid to help the wife for the work around the house. The housemaid is strange, stalks the composer and tries to seduce him, catches a rat, and she eventually gets pregnant by the husband. The baby is not welcomed by the father or the mother, therefore the composer's wife convinces the housemaid to induce a miscarriage by falling down a flight of stairs. After the accident, she becomes more erratic and kills one of the child with rat poison and and then persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison. It is a very disturbing story and not an easy film to watch.
Moreover, the director's presence is felt almost in every scene, he seems to be very careful about the staging, the depth, and the compositions, making the film a must see for film students. The way he uses conventional narration and turning it into something completely different makes him unique in case of storytelling.
In 2003, Jean-Michel Frodon, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote that the discovery of The Housemaid by the West, over forty years after the film's debut, was a "marvelous feeling– marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-Young a truly extraordinary image maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable work."
Actually what also attracted me about the period, the film and the director was the design of the posters. This is the poster designed for the film Housemaid.


And this is the poster design for the VHS release of his film "Woman of Fire" (1971).



I haven't seen Woman of Fire, but the way the director often focuses on the psychology of their female characters is very well visualized within the design of the posters. The icon of femme fatale belong to western cinema of the film noir of the 40's and 50's but the director was able to apply it to his own cinema creating an unique work of storytelling.