Page 2 of 2 North Korea's Dear Film
Buff By John Feffer
moviegoers from the political
messages or made those messages easier to absorb.
The historical and fantastical settings allowed
for greater leeway in presenting stories. Although
the screenplays nod in the direction of the
People, the writers needn't lard the narrative
with adoring references to the country's leader or
address the tasks facing contemporary North Korean
society.
The contemporary love story in
Traces of Life (1989) is by contrast
entirely subordinate to the political message of
building a
utopian society. The movie
tells the story of a grieving widow. Her husband
has died in a suicide mission that blows up an
invading South Korean ship. Guilty about arguing
with him on the night he left to make the
sacrifice, she exiles herself to the countryside,
where she becomes a farmer and eventually raises
rice production to unprecedented levels.
She thus transforms her love of husband
into love of country. When Kim Il-sung himself
comes to her farm and praises the collective's
success, her love achieves its apotheosis. The
love of the hero leader has absolved her of the
guilt she felt about not living up to the ideal of
her hero husband.
Romance in North Korean
films tends to be of the revolutionary not the
bourgeois variety. As Ri Hyang, the character in
Urban Girl Comes to Get Married (1993),
explains to her friend, she wants "a man with
perfume". Her friend, surprised, replies that "a
man is not a flower". Ri Hyang continues: she is
looking for "a man who creates his life with great
ambition, a man who is respected by people".
Although Urban Girl has a much
lighter touch than Traces of Life, the
message is the same: love should be reserved for
those who want and can build "paradise on earth".
If that means partnering with the fellow on the
farm who spends night and day working on a better
breed of duck, as urban girl Ri Hyang ultimately
does in the film, so be it.
Utopian
dreams Films in North Korea do not simply
carry messages. They model behavior. Han Yong-sil,
the projectionist in Comrades in Dreams,
explains that the audiences for her films learn
about new agricultural advances. And indeed,
Urban Girl features information about
livestock breeding and rice transplanting, and
Traces of Life provides information on
microbial fertilizer.
But the films don't
just supply technical content. They model
revolutionary virtues. Kim Suk-young points to the
popularity of amateur contests in which average
North Koreans learn the lines of famous movie
parts and then compete for the honor to present
their monologues at the finals in Pyongyang. "It
sounds very oppressive to us," she says, "but
there's comfort in identifying with those heroes."
In this way we see that North Korean films don't
simply reveal or conceal reality. They actively
construct North Korean society.
As a
projectionist on a model farm, Han Yong-sil also
struggles to live up to the examples set in the
films she shows. Her husband is far away on an
assignment to beautify Mount Paektu, the reputed
birthplace of the Dear Leader. This is an
important mission and, like the heroine of
Traces of Life, she knows that she should
subordinate her personal loneliness to the good of
the nation. Still, it is clear that she finds this
task very difficult.
Her display of
emotions reveals the normalcy of North Koreans.
Ironically, it is this very normalcy, because it
falls short of the revolutionary ideal, that the
North Korean government is loath to reveal to the
world. And so the outside world tends to perceive
North Koreans as slightly unreal, as mere
mouthpieces for government propaganda.
In
the 1960s and even into the 1970s, the utopian
themes in North Korean cinema went hand in hand
with the rising expectations of the population.
After the devastation of World War II and then the
Korean War, North Korea rapidly rebuilt itself.
The government prided itself on the various
industrial and agricultural advances that put it
on par with and even ahead of South Korea. By the
1980s, however, North Korea was stagnant. It had
fallen behind not only South Korea but even its
own previous standards.
It is interesting
that Kim Jong-il perceived that North Korean film,
too, was stagnant at this time. A kind of
cognitive dissonance must have begun to emerge
among the North Korean population. The government
and the films were portraying an ever-improving
society and yet the population must have been
noticing that reality was stubbornly not keeping
pace. In the Soviet Union, during the years under
Leonid Brezhnev, people could get their
entertainment elsewhere - foreign films, books,
samizdat publications. But North Koreans,
until very recently, did not have any
alternatives. And so the North Korean film
industry turned to escapism, like romance stories.
But even escapism has its limits, for
there is a utopian quality to Urban Girl
and Pulgasari as well. Perhaps in
response to the growing cognitive dissonance, the
North Korean entertainment industry has begun to
address new themes: divorce, love triangles, the
double and triple shifts of women. "These dramas
dealing with failure suggest that people are
craving something different," observes Kim
Suk-young.
Reaching out? The
North Korean government boasts of its world-class
film industry. But since a devastating loss in an
international film festival in Czechoslovakia in
the early 1970s, North Korea hasn't tried very
hard to promote its films abroad.
Pyongyang has, however, hosted its own
international film festival since 1987 and allows
visitors to its film studio. "North Korea has
never been shy about propagandizing its grand
achievements, and the film industry is not
something secretive," said journalist Ron
Gluckman. "You can visit the studios as part of a
tourist itinerary.
"I did so on my first
visit to North Korea back in 1992. I visited again
in 2004, and the equipment shown off was
definitely ancient. I suspect they have been
unable to keep up to date due to the economic
situation, and film has suffered as a
consequence."
More recently, the
government has allowed outside directors to make
films inside the country. Pyongyang
Crescendo (2005) follows the story of a German
conductor who spent 10 days in the North Korean
capital teaching music students. Dan Gordon and
Nicholas Bonner have produced three documentary
films: on the North Korean soccer team that made
it to the World Cup quarterfinals in 1966, on two
girls training for the mass games in Pyongyang,
and most recently on the US soldier James Dresnok,
who defected to North Korea in 1962.
The
Game of Their Lives, the 2002 soccer
documentary, showed that films could be made in
North Korea, said Nick Bonner. However, the
country isn't exactly issuing a general invitation
to the film world. "It is still very difficult to
film in [North Korea] and is certainly a
case-by-case situation," Bonner added.
With A Schoolgirl's Diary, the
North Korean film industry will try once again to
break into the international market. In this 2006
release, a teenager complains that her scientist
father is too busy to pay attention to her. It is,
according to reviews, a "humorous drama about a
rebellious teenage girl". It offers a picture of
the North Korean elite that, in the film, uses
computers, carries Mickey Mouse schoolbags, and
eats good food.
It shows a few flaws in
the system, such as deteriorating housing stock.
But these are, according to Bonner, the
"day-to-day flaws that fit the story line of
struggle during this time when great sacrifice is
needed to build a strong country".
Regardless of whether A Schoolgirl's
Diary attracts an international audience on
the merits of its story and its filmmaking, it
will be an important document of North Korea's
evolving society. It will also show what kind of
model behavior the government now wants to
inculcate in its citizens.
"We might have
to imagine the world with North Korea for another
25 or 50 years," Kim Suk-young concludes. "We
should look at film in order to understand and
co-exist and to have a glimpse of North Korea
instead of reducing it to a one-dimensional
propaganda tool."
John Feffer is
the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
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