루이스 부뉴엘과 김기영의 하녀 영화의 정치적 · 성정치적 전복성

Abstract

This paper attempts a comparative reading of Luis Buñuel's The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960) as representative French and Korean naturalistic maidservant films which reveal the originary worlds of perverse and brutal impulses that exist and operate in the depths of societies during the periods of modernization. It focuses on their ways of managing the subversive power of sexual politics of the repressed others, which can find a line of flight out of the closed originary world. Although the two maid films are supposed to have maids as their leading characters, their central concern is not the maid herself as the repressed other but the power struggle between classes. Thus they are prone to appropriate subversive power of the return of the repressed in order to solve the main concern of the power struggle, i.e., to exploit sexual politics for politics. Buñuel exploits the servant, Joseph, to attack the conservative politics of the bourgeois class and also exploits the subversive power of the maid, Célestine, who revolts against the fascist and misogynist servant. Deleuze argues that Buñuel, a great master of naturalism in cinema, succeeds in going beyond the originary world of impulses by using the power of repetition from inside the world. But this paper argues that Buñuel can find a line of flight from the maid who is outside the originary world of men, revealing his exploitation of her subversive power of sexual politics instead of the power of repetition. Moreover, it argues that Kim Ki-young can succeed in searching for a line of flight out of the naturalistic originary world from its inside by using the subversive power of sexual politics of the maid who remains inside the originary world and goes through naturalistic degradation as an originary woman. Thus it concludes that the Korean naturalistic maid film can go beyond naturalism from the inside, unlike the French naturalistic maid film.