Action!: A North Korean painting depicting Kim Jong Il watching a film being made. Photo: Alain Nog/Corbis via Getty Images
This month marks 50 years since North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il published one of the seminal books of his life. I don't mean his 1992 volume «Let's further strengthen our unanimous unity and give full freedom to the spirit of the Korean nation.» nor, in fact, «Let's make a new boom in agricultural production based on achievements in large-scale land conversion and irrigation construction», published in 2002, nine years before his death.
From Kim's hundreds of books, only one of these has gained some sort of twisted cult status: On the Art of Cinema, his 1973 guide to what kinds of filmmaking are desirable and therefore possible under his country's government.
Kim, then the 32-year-old son of Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung, who worked in the Arts Administration, assembled the book from a series of speeches he had already given to directors and screenwriters. As a young man, he was very active in the party's propaganda wing, producing many partisan plays and revolutionary operas, including The Sea of Blood (1969), set during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. Attributed to his father, this long-time favorite has been made into a two-part black-and-white film of the same name, also produced by the younger Kim.
There is no other film in his book that is so gratefully and so often cited as Sea of Blood. This is Kim's model for everything that cinema can do to strengthen the national principle of Juche, which roughly translates to «self-confidence.» “The image of the mother in Sea of Blood,” says Kim, “is a perfect example of a character whose growth into a revolutionary is due to the ups and downs of life.”
He seems to be obsessed with some dogmatic principles of storytelling — and he is not up to any «films with an untidy plot.» It's unlikely that he'd be the biggest fan of the all-around-anywhere-at-a-time metaverse, or even Thar's slippery slope.
Don't get (re)incarcerated: Mosaic at the Chollima studio in Pyongyang. Photo: Eric Laforgue/Alamy
Instead, he cites the 1971 socialist realist drama When We Pick Apples, about two sisters gardening, as an excellent paradigm for introducing and then resolving an ideological clash. “The younger sister finds it shocking to see so many rotting fallen apples and decides to save them for the people, as required by the party. The older sister leads an easy life and seems unruffled, as if she doesn't see apples.» Place your bets right now on which of the brothers or sisters will be the winner.
The extent of Kim's cinephilia is confirmed by the strange fate of South Korean film director Shin Sang Ok and his ex-wife and lead actress Choi Eun Hee. In 1978, while in Hong Kong, they were put on motorboats and then held captive by the North Korean state for five years because Kim needed their services to revive his country's flagging film industry. In fear of constant surveillance, they agreed, making a series of nationalist melodramas and the notorious Pulgasari (1985), a Godzilla spoof about a rampaging dragon with a social conscience.
Shin and Choi no doubt learned On the Art of Cinema from cover to cover as a handy guide on how not to go to jail again. Some of Kim's chapter headings — «Start small and end big» — seem pretty pragmatic, at least if you're after heartfelt propaganda. Others lean towards the superfluous: «Costumes and props must match the era and the character.» If you were going to explore, say, the early years of guerrilla activity in Manchuria, this guy's iPhone wouldn't slip past.
Kim is also a proponent of well thought out set design. “In one old film, the house of a musician who endured all sorts of humiliations and insults under the colonial rule of Japanese imperialism was not arranged in accordance with his standard of living. It had expensive embroidery and a huge mirror, which at that time corresponded to the standard of living only for the rich. The lower bound of two stars, judging by the sound.
For Kim, all films require the key element of a song—and not just an old song, but «musical masterpieces.» «Everyone knows 'My Heart Will Remain True' from Sea of Blood and 'Red Flower of the Revolution in Full Bloom' from The Flower Girl [a 1972 film set again during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s]. The more I listened to them, the more I wanted to hear them, and the more I sang them, the more I wanted to sing them. Kim died only a few years prematurely, otherwise Never Enough from The Greatest Showman would certainly have clawed at him.
When Fritz Lang's character in Jean-Luc Godard's Mepri (1963) comments on the CinemaScope process (for shooting widescreen films), he famously jokes that he's only good for two things: Snakes and Funerals. Kim does the same in her slower fashion. “Some people try to take advantage of the wide screen by presenting nothing but large images of objects and putting a lot of things in one frame. At the same time, they do not think about anything other than the scale and shape of the screen and ignore the requirements for the content that will be presented on it. » /> Kim's personal pantheon: Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part 2, 1985. Photo: StudioCanal/Shutterstock
Kim loved not only the nationalist blockbusters he personally produced; some kind of Western cinema also made its way into his personal pantheon. According to Sheen, he adored the series about Rambo, Friday the 13th and James Bond. When he came to power in 1994, he showed In the Line of Fire (1993) to his security team, an intriguing choice considering how former CIA agent Clint Eastwood is haunted by his failure to save JFK.
To criticize this text during Kim's lifetime might seem reckless, but from this safe distance, I think we can be allowed some moderate cautions about its repetitive monotony, intimidating callousness and lack of substance. In fact, I'm not sure I've read a book with less pleasure than perhaps Fifty Shades of Grey, or Martin Amis's Night Train.
And yet, on the last pages of On the Art of Cinema I stumble upon some extraordinarily poignant, truly prophetic words of wisdom for my own career. «You can't expect good results,» writes Kim, «from watching a lot of accumulated work in a few days on an accelerated program.» Even this film critic can hold such an opinion.
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