1960년대 근대적 욕망과 불안의 감각으로서 <하녀>의 ‘오프사운드’ 연구 = Study on the ‘Off-Sound’ in The Housemaid (1960): As the Sensory Expression of Modern Desire and Anxiety

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines how the use of off-screen sound (off-sound) in Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) produces a split between sight and sound within the cinematic frame, thereby generating sensations of desire, curiosity, and anxiety in the characters. It argues that this sensory experience driven by off-sound mirrors the confusion and rupture of Korea’s modernization process in the 1960s. Although such effects emerge through the total interaction of visual images and diegetic as well as non-diegetic sounds, this paper focuses particularly on how off-sound functions as a decisive medium that triggers the maid’s desire and provokes the characters’ anxieties.
At the beginning of the film, the sewing machine and piano—initially heard as in-sound—become off-sound as the family moves into the two-story house. The disjunction between sound and image stimulates feelings of desire and unease, allowing the audience to experience a transition from the premodern sense of order and stability to modern confusion. Kim assigns distinct sounds to each floor of the house and modulates the relationship between sound and character, leading the audience to perceive and infer space and emotion primarily through what they hear.
The sewing machine sound from the master bedroom symbolizes the wife’s material greed, her self-punishing desire, and her control over Dong-sik, functioning as an auditory mechanism of psychological repression that constantly reminds him of his impotence as a patriarch. For Gyeong-hui, however, this off-screen sewing sound opens a possibility of “intrusion.” The sound fades as she ascends the stairs and disappears upon reaching the piano room, which then becomes a space of transgression for Dong-sik and an opportunity for seduction for Gyeong-hui.
Meanwhile, the piano sounds on the second floor express the characters’ inner worlds. Gyeong-hui’s elegant playing arouses the maid’s desire while concealing her own ambition to assimilate into the bourgeois order. The wife fails to detect this subversive intention. Conversely, the maid’s dissonant playing externalizes her anxiety and threat, awakening the couple downstairs and luring Dong-sik to the upper floor to fulfill her own will.
Through these sonic dynamics, Kim Ki-young uses off-sound to portray a chain of recognition, control, and confrontation among characters mediated by sound. The process visualizes the eruption, displacement, and collision of modern desires that ultimately lead to catastrophe. The audience, too, experiences emotional shifts through the exclusion of visual cues and perceives latent danger and anxiety via auditory means. Ultimately, the off-sound in The Housemaid acoustically evokes the desires and anxieties brought about by modernization, dismantling the predictable visual stability and enabling a sensory experience of the era’s tensions and fractures. In this sense, The Housemaid represents one of the most significant examples of auditory attraction in 1960s Korean cinema, offering a sensory embodiment of modern anxiety and highlighting sound as a crucial element in understanding Kim Ki-young’s auteurist vision.