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PYONGYANG WATCH
North Korea as trashfilm
roadshow
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Trying to follow North Korea leads down all
kinds of unexpected - and often dodgy - alleyways. Even
on the hermit Kimdom, there's a lot of stuff out there.
And much of it, in unlikely corners, I fear I miss.
Item: A, well, weird book that plonked through
my letterbox recently. It was sent by the editor of a
local arts magazine I subscribe to, here in Yorkshire,
who vaguely recalled that I have a Korean interest. He
had been sent it for review. So if not Yorkshire Arts'
cup of tea, one hopes that Asia Times Online will do the
trick.
I'd never heard of the publisher,
Headpress, which is just down the road in Manchester. By
its own account, Headpress deals in all that is
underground and "transgressive". Recent books include
Slimetime: A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies and
I Was Elvis Presley's Bastard Love Child. Not
exactly my scene.
But a nice line in titles.
Ditto Trashfilm Roadshows: Off the Beaten Track with
Subversive Movies, by Johannes Schoenherr. The
author's name translates as "lovely guy", which might
mislead. An ex-punk who grew up in East Germany - his
best ever job, he says, was as a gravedigger in Leipzig
- he was expelled to the West in 1983. Ever since, he's
made a career as a kind of film guerrilla: seeking out
all that is weird and tasteless on celluloid and showing
it wherever he can, in Europe, America and Japan.
This is crazy stuff, both on screen and off.
Schoenherr certainly takes risks: wrestling with
clapped-out cars and projectors - not to mention
truculent punters and feminist protesters - to show
far-out movies in seedy venues in dubious areas peopled
by "schizos", heroin addicts and more. He seems to get
off on all this, recounting each alarming episode with
jaunty nonchalance - and many an F word. Quite a riot.
But the last and longest chapter is about North
Korea. That figures. As in much else, Pyongyang films
are - well, different: in a class of their own. Not, of
course, the same sort of bizarre as Schoenherr's usual
fare. (In his index, Woman Warrior of Koryo comes
between Whoregasm and Zombie Hunger.)
So off he goes, just like that. A contact with
DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) diplomats
in Berlin who rent the latest Western hits - for the
Dear Leader's viewing pleasure, he suspects - gets him
invited to the Korea Film Show. This, when he arrives,
turns out to be arranged solely for him - plus a young
Swiss, Nicolas Righetti, who is making a film about
North Korea (while trying to convince his suspicious
hosts that he isn't really).
This duo's japes
and scrapes in the people's paradise make for a fun
read. There are lots of pictures, too. Seeing our hero
posing at Mangyongdae, the late Kim Il-sung's sacred
birthplace, in black shirt and jeans and chest-length
hair, you do wonder if North Korea quite knew what it
was letting itself in for.
Mind you, there is
cynicism on both sides. Having grown up under communism
- he was even a Young Pioneer - Schoenherr has a good
nose for what one might call Red bull (and we ain't
talking beverages, of which there is much imbibing).
Thus he swiftly grasps the pecking order of the various
minders, and the kinds of deals each is trying to make
to shore up his position. Even in Pyongyang, life's a
hustle.
He's perceptive too, if hardly polite,
on Kim Jong-il's much vaunted cinematic skills. Thirty
years ago the Dear Leader authored On The Art of the
Cinema, a 330-page tome whose chapters include such
pearls as "Each Scene Must Be Dramatic" and "Make-up Is
a Noble Art". As Schoenherr notes, the tales of Kim
interfering and changing things are typical movie-mogul
stuff - except he began as a "brat" aged seven.
But in a further twist peculiar to "on-the-spot
guidance" Pyongyang style, anything ever touched by the
Leader's sacred hand goes into a glass case. At the
Korean Film Studio, this puts cameras, floodlights, tape
recorders and more out of use. As he remarks: "A visit
by this guy must have been a nightmare!"
Irreverent he may be, but Schoenherr delivers.
His pitch is to show North Korean films in Europe, and
he does. To his fury, they won't give him
Pulgasari, Pyongyang's very own Godzilla movie;
doubtless because its South Korean director, Shin
Sang-ok, was kidnapped on Kim Jong-il's orders but later
fled.
Still, he ends up with "a whole bunch of
over-the-top propaganda pictures and some fairly good
action movies", which he shows in Sweden, Germany, and
Italy to mixed reviews. Most lack subtitles, so he has
to drive to all the venues with a rented digital title
machine. He doesn't make any money, surprise.
But he gets his reward: a return invitation to
Pyongyang, this time for a real film festival. Again he
has adventures, seeing a youth beaten and arrested who
"bore a glare of such utter hatred that it brought a
chill to the spine". (This from a man usually unfazed by
any horrors, filmic or real.) Behind the bland masks of
loyalty, North Korea surely has its share of tough kids
living beyond the reach of the system.
The book
ends like a movie. Trying to lose his guide, our hero
runs into none other than his compatriot Dr Norbert
Vollertsen: since expelled and now battling for refugee
rights, but then (in 2000) still an aid worker in North
Korea. Johannes and friends pile into Norb's white jeep,
and off they speed - "gangsta rap blaring from the
speakers": the mind boggles - all over town, wherever
they like. In Pyongyang!
Kind of like riding off
into the sunset. Fade to credits. A B-movie of a book, I
suppose - but one whose odd angle offers real insights.
Some people tut-tut when North Korea is portrayed as
Planet Weird. But Johannes Schoenherr is a world expert
on the bizarre. If it's weird enough for him, who am I
to argue?
Aidan Foster-Carter is
honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern
Korea, Leeds University, England.
(©2003
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