Abstract: This chapter draws attention to the use of performative paratexts to rework an auteur's fluctuating reputation. Drawing on the case of the late Kim Ki-duk, I examine the director's self-confessions, festival performances, and self-fashionings through auteur paratexts that project a public self in crisis. On certain occasions, corporeal self-projection unveiled the filmmaker's lived contradictions and worked to regain support from specific audiences. At other times, self-projections were deemed to be unacceptable and the filmmaker's public representation was terminated. Through performative paratexts in the public domain, the contemporary authorial position is open to contested views, media call-outs, and what has been termed “cancel culture.”

Keywords: cult authorship, corporeal excess, self-fashioning, selfconfession, ethics

In today's auteur culture, the figure of the filmmaker has increasingly become a site of consumption resembling a brand or a star. Given the ambivalent relationship to commerce in the tradition of art and avant-garde cinema, the previous chapter highlighted how one East Asian auteur was able to resist their celebrity status by making various experimental and self-reflective short films for auteur-driven film markets. This chapter draws attention to authorial paratexts that work differently; these are another filmmaker's performances and public appearances that play a significant role in shaping public recognition and reworking a highly problematic position for the filmmaker concerned, associated with the realm of cult cinema.

In Anglo-European film culture, many East Asian auteurs who emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s gained their reputations through the context of cult consumption, which coincided with the opening up of film festivals to genre films and art-cult movies, along with the rise of a specialized film distribution sector and transmedia promotion (see, for example, Martin, 2015). Alongside figures such as Takashi Miike, Nakata Hideo, and Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk played a key part in the discussion of East Asian cult films in the late 1990s to early 2000s (see the background in Chapter 2). The cult branding of Kim's films has been widely discussed in the context of film distribution (see, for example, Shin, 2008; Martin, 2015). Attention has been given to festival audiences being disturbed by explicit visual excess, as well as controversies surrounding the release, and negotiation with censorship, of certain “extreme” films, followed by the analysis of transgressive elements and aesthetic merit (Chung, 2012, p. 14).