Page 1 of 2 North Korea's Dear
Film Buff By John Feffer
The North Korean film projectionist is
thinking back on her earlier life. When she was
younger, she tells the camera, she dreamed of
acting. She wanted to play a heroic role on the
screen. Her eyes take on a wistful look. And there
is a hint of pain in her voice. In any other
country, this would be an ordinary show of
emotion. In North Korea, however, the ordinary is
extraordinary, for outsiders catch a glimpse of it
so very rarely.
The North Korean woman,
Han Yong-sil, is one of four film
projectionists featured in a
new documentary, Comrades in Dreams.
Directed by Ulli Gaulke, a young German filmmaker,
the documentary ties together the lives of cinema
lovers from four countries: the United States,
Burkino Faso, India and North Korea.
While
all the footage is fascinating, the material from
North Korea is unique. Films from and about North
Korea rarely pierce the carefully constructed
surface that the country and its citizens present
to the outside world. Yet here, captured by
Gaulke, Comrade Han reveals an individual
personality behind the ritualized propaganda that
she initially offers the camera.
Film has
played an unusually prominent role in North Korean
culture and history. Although it opens an
important window on to a closed society, North
Korean film has been a singularly overlooked
subject. North Korean films are almost never shown
in the United States. They rarely appear in
international film festivals. Few articles have
been written on the subject.
That all may
change soon, however. A French company has just
bought the rights to show the North Korean film
A Schoolgirl's Diary, reportedly seen by 8
million North Koreans, more than one-third of the
population. Scholars are beginning to comb through
North Korean films for clues about how the system
ticks. And documentaries like Comrades in
Dreams and the latest effort from Dan Gordon
and Nicholas Bonner, Crossing the Line, are
attracting attention at film festivals around the
world.
The US and North Korea are inching
closer together as a result of ongoing nuclear
negotiations. With normalized relations on the
agenda, information about North Korean society
becomes ever more valuable. But do North Korean
films ultimately reveal or conceal the reality of
the country?
Bring up the subject of North
Korean film and most people would be hard pressed
to name a single title. But nearly every article
about North Korean leader Kim Jong-il mentions
that he's a film buff with one of the largest film
collections in the world. In fact, Kim started out
in the cinema world. The rise of the "Dear Leader"
to political leadership is linked inextricably to
his film career.
"Kim Jong-il used film to
prove that he was the legitimate guardian of his
father Kim Il-sung's legacy," explained Kim
Suk-young, a specialist on North Korean theater
and film at the University of California-Santa
Barbara. "Kim Il-sung was very keen on protecting
his legacy as a national father. So Kim Jong-il in
the 1970s used film to prove that he was the
legitimate heir."
These films helped
solidify his father's personality cult and
demonstrated that Kim Il-sung's successor, unlike
Deng Xiaoping in China or Mikhail Gorbachev in the
Soviet Union, would avoid any iconoclastic
reforms.
Kim Jong-il was not the first
person in North Korea to recognize the political
uses of film. The regime early on realized the
revolutionary potential of the medium. When it
took control over the northern half of the Korean
Peninsula at the end of World War II, the North
Korean Workers' Party under Kim Il-sung relied
heavily on Soviet assistance. The Soviets, having
pioneered film technique in the early days of the
Russian Revolution, offered cinematic help as
well.
From the very start, however, North
Korea showed its independent streak by not
following the Soviet model. "Even at its very
beginning," writes historian Charles Armstrong,
North Korean cinema "was diverging from its Soviet
sponsors' aims by creating a distinctive cinema
rooted in melodramatic emotionalism, a sentimental
attachment to the Korean countryside, and the
alleged values of peasant life, and a nationalist
politics centered around the person of Kim
Il-sung".
To merge Soviet communism with
North Korean nationalism - all rolled into the
package of Kim Il-sung's personality cult - film
was the ideal medium. As Kim Suk-young explains,
it is much easier to send films throughout the
country as a propaganda tool than, for instance,
relying on traveling theater groups. More
important, Pyongyang could control the form and
content from beginning to end. Political speakers
sent to deliver propaganda to the masses might
succumb to improvisation. Theater actors might
give an unintended interpretative spin to their
lines of dialogue. But movies allow for total
control - or as close as the regime could get to
total control in the cultural sphere.
Re-imaging history Unlike Josef
Stalin, Kim Il-sung often clothed his political
instruction in narrative form. His multi-volume
autobiography, for instance, is full of stories
and parables. But nothing could compare to the
power of film to create resonant images and
stirring nationalist messages.
For
instance, in the 1960s film On the Railway,
set during the Korean War, the train-engineer hero
infiltrates the territory held by US and South
Korean forces and pretends to be a defector
driving his train over to the other side. He is,
like Kim Il-sung, a trickster who achieves victory
despite overwhelming odds. He doesn't do so on
behalf of the workers of the world, however. He is
fighting for the Korean fatherland and against the
foreign aggressor.
Other movies, such as
An Jung Gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi and Star
of Chosun, dramatize moments of Korean history
such as the 1909 assassination of a Japanese
colonial official and the life of Kim Il-sung.
Like the 1915 US film The Birth of a
Nation, these films present a rewritten
history that can replace authentic memory and
balanced scholarship. A government can censor
books. But film has the appearance of reality and
can more seductively change how a citizenry
understands its past.
Kim Jong-il put his
stamp on North Korean filmmaking with his
involvement in productions such as Sea of
Blood and Flower Girl. These films,
adapted from revolutionary operas credited to his
father Kim Il-sung, established a cultural
vocabulary similar to the opera productions that
Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) unleashed on the Chinese
population during the Cultural Revolution (so
memorably described in Anchee Min's memoir Red
Azalea).
The language of these
operas-turned-films, which both describe the
atrocities of the Japanese colonial period,
defined the parameters of acceptable cultural
discourse. The images became iconic, like the
Biblical tableaux that appeared in classical
painting and formed the visual vocabulary of
pre-modern European culture.
By the late
1970s, having established his bona fides
with his father, Kim Jong-il perceived that North
Korean film had hit a dead end. At that time, he
already possessed an extraordinary collection of
world cinema. He understood the widening gap
between the international and the national. To
bridge the gap, Kim Jong-il sought help from
outside.
Revolution lite One of
the most popular films in Bulgaria in the late
1980s was North Korea's Hong Kil Dong
(1986). A classic tale of a Korean Robin Hood, the
film introduced Hong Kong-style action to the
Soviet bloc. The ninja moves and soaring
kicks dazzled East European audiences. "Hong
Kil Dong attracted hundreds of thousands of
people to the cinemas across Bulgaria," writes
Todor Nenov. "It was almost impossible to get
tickets for it, unless you booked them two or
three days earlier!"
Borrowing from Hong
Kong action movies was only one of the ways that
the North Korean film industry revived itself in
the 1980s. Kim Jong-il borrowed more directly from
outside when he arranged for the abduction of
South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee in 1978. Six
months later, Kim abducted her estranged husband,
famous South Korean director Shin Sang-ok.
Before the pair managed to escape in 1986
during a stopover in Vienna, Shin Sang-ok
introduced many new innovations into North Korean
film. His most famous films during this period - a
North Korean version of Godzilla called
Pulgasari and a retelling of the famous
Korean folk tale of Chunhyang called Love,
Love, My Love - added science fiction and
musical romance to the North Korean repertoire.
It is difficult to know whether the
entertaining aspects of Hong Kil-Dong and
Shin Sang-ok's movies distracted North
Korean
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