SEOUL - You know you're looking at
propaganda when you see a cute little white dog
prancing through the apartment of the physicist
father of 11-year-old Kim Song-yon - as if dogs
come with the nice kitchen and furniture for
middle-class North Koreans.
Or, judging
from the straight-faced observation that "North
Korea is divided into three classes - workers,
peasants and intellectuals", and all are treated
equally, are we to believe that all
North
Koreans have cute little doggies, even those so
driven by starvation that in truth they would die
for a nice slab of dog meat?
The message
is even more skewed when Song-yon's mom, a figure
of doting concern, just like moms everywhere, asks
her, "Why do you eat so little?" The answer in
this case, of course, is that diligent Song-yon is
preparing for the Mass Games, a three-week
extravaganza played by a cast of thousands, before
many more thousands of spectators. She can hardly
contain her excitement and sense of discipline as
she sallies forth for another day of grueling
exercise outside Pyongyang's cavernous May First
Stadium.
British documentary filmmaker
Daniel Gordon no doubt sees the irony of the
question in a country where hunger is an everyday
fact of life for almost everyone outside the elite
of the ruling circle, the front line of the armed
forces - and, of course, boys and girls in
training for a synchronized show that requires
strength, stamina and the grub to fuel all that
running, jumping and leaping.
However, he
chooses not to dwell on the issue of famine in
North Korea, any more than he asks what Song-yon
and her loving family eat every day, much less
whether they live in a world apart from the vast
majority of their persecuted countrymen and women
- or, indeed, whether actors are playing the role
of real people.
Gordon is persuasive, as
was evident when the Discovery Channel this month
presented his one-hour film, A State of
Mind, aired originally by the British
Broadcasting Corp in late 2004 and then last year
by the Public Broadcasting Service in the United
States.
In all the interviews he has given,
he appears at pains to show how much freedom he
had, how non-staged were his conversations. In one
interview, he goes out of his way to claim the
minders whom he admits are always with him "had no
editorial input or influence".
They didn't
have to. There was no way Gordon was going to come
up with a film - directed, written and narrated
all by him - that would fall short of the
standards needed to play on North Korean state
television. What is remarkable about the revival
of the film on the Discovery Channel is the
timing, in the aftermath of the North Korean
missile launches early this month and an
inexorable drift away from even a superficial show
of a budding free-market system.
The debut
of the film on Discovery was preceded for weeks by
two or three plugs an hour in which viewers were
told to hold their breath for what would be an
unimpeded look into real life in North Korea.
Instead, through Song-yon and 13-year-old
Pak Hyon-sun, we get a look into the North Korean
mindset that's almost as skewed as, well, Gordon's
previous North Korean-approved epic, The Game
of Their Lives, about the heroics of the North
Korean soccer team that defeated Italy 1-0 in the
1966 World Cup tournament in England. (In that
film, Gordon gave the impression that the seven
veterans of the North Korean team whom he
interviewed had led almost normal lives, venerated
by a grateful nation, an image quite different
from that refracted by defector Kang Chol-hwan in
The Aquariums of Pyongyang.)
The
depth of the tragedy of North Korea - the refugees
fleeing to China, the public executions, the
routine torture, the banishment of thousands to a
vast gulag - escapes the slightest passing notice,
though surely Gordon could have thought to mention
such suffering in his narration.
Some
ironies do come through, though, as when Hyon-sun
allows that when she was "young" she "hated
groups" and "my only thoughts were to keep running
away". Gradually, she tells us with pride, "Group
power develops and individualism disappears."
Gordon might want us to believe - though
he certainly doesn't say so in the film or in the
interviews I read - that he piled on images of the
rigors of training to show the authoritarian
cruelty of North Korean society.
Song-yon's "English lesson" has her
asking, "Why are the US imperialists attacking
Iraq?" and concluding, "These Americans squash and
suffocate our country."
She and Hyon-sun
live for the day when "the general", Kim Jong-il,
will watch them, but, disappointed when he never
shows up, one of them says, "My friends and I
understand" the great leader is too busy with
affairs of state.
The games depicted in
the film were staged in 2003. What Gordon neglects
to mention, among other omissions, is that Kim did
show up at the Mass Games in October 2000 when he
surprised visiting US secretary of state Madeleine
Albright and her sidekick Wendy Sherman, ushering
them into the stadium with no advance notice of
the propaganda barrage they were about to witness.
(Perhaps the Dear Leader figured, seen one, seen
'em all.)
For purposes of credibility, the
film toward the end does show a power outage as
Gordon is filming inside the home of one of the
girls. "Even in the central district of
Pyongyang," he informs us in a display of
cinema verite, "most nights are spent
without electricity at some point in the evening."
Hey, we knew that. We've all seen the
satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula at night
- the North all black, the South lit up by blazing
lights everywhere. And a lot of us have been to
Pyongyang and seen the same extravaganza, put on
by North Korea every year, with all the images of
thousands holding flashcards in the stands and
thousands more pirouetting and prancing on the
playing field below.
This documentary,
highly acclaimed by tail-wagging interviewers and
feature writers when it first came out, offers no
new insights, though, yes, the shots of all those
dancers going through their routines are pretty
dazzling. No denying that.
Journalist
and author Donald Kirk witnessed Mass Games
in Pyongyang at the Arirang Festival last October
and also during an "international sports and
culture festival for peace" in 1995.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
