Sightlines · reception

How Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring was received

2003 · Kim Ki-duk · Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring on Sightlines

The arc

A rapturous arthouse hit abroad in 2003–04 — Ebert canonized it as a Great Movie — even as Kim Ki-duk stayed a marginal figure at home in Korea. It remains his most beloved film, but the sexual-abuse allegations against him that surfaced in 2017–18 have made revisiting it a much more complicated act.

What’s debated

It's now the definitive can-you-separate-art-from-artist case in Korean cinema — the most serene film ever made by one of its most disgraced directors — with the real on-screen treatment of animals a second, perennial flashpoint.

Its footprint

The floating hermitage drifting on a mountain lake is one of the most screenshotted, poster-ready images in 2000s world cinema — shorthand for 'meditative movie' in a thousand lists and video essays — along with the film's freestanding doors that characters dutifully use despite there being no walls.

Where it stands

A gateway drug to Korean arthouse and 'slow cinema' — the one Kim Ki-duk film even people who avoid Kim Ki-duk have seen, and a fixture of most-beautiful-films-of-the-2000s lists.

Did you know? Kim Ki-duk himself plays the monk in the film's final season, and the floating temple set was purpose-built on Jusanji Pond and removed after filming — the 'monastery' never actually existed as a building.

A Deleuzian reading of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring →