Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  the story of an ordinary mother in a farm village, who is widowed in the sea of blood resulting from a slaughter carried out by Japanese imperialism. The story gives a vivid account of how the mother, realizing the truth of struggle through ordeals, rises in a revolutionary struggle. With her three children to feed, the heroine has a hard time of it under the oppressive rule of Japanese imperialism. The elder son Won-nam joins the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Army in his early years, and the only daughter Gap-sun and the younger son Ul-nam are gradually awakened to the cause of revolution. The mother learns the truth of revolution, first under the influence of her husband and children and then educated by an anti-Japanese guerrilla political worker.

  One day, the younger son Ul-nam is cruelly murdered by the enemy while trying to save the political worker being pursued by a Japanese garrison troop. Firming up her will to resist in the depth of despair, the heroine indignantly rises, organizes a women’s association, goes among workers and gets explosives. After remarkable activities, she leads a popular uprising in support of an attack on the county seat by the Guerrilla Army and joins it. On the joyful day of liberation of the county seat, the heroine, speaking to the masses of the truth she has learned, makes an enthusiastic appeal to them to rise for the revolution.

  Kim Jong-il’s creative staff spent a year developing a screenplay based on a novelized version of the original play43 Young Kim quickly demonstrated his preference for late-night work regardless of the sleeping schedules of underlings, whom he expected to adjust to his hours. Staying in “a house beside a lake”—perhaps one of his villas—he worked with the creative staff on the screenplay. One night,

  the scriptwriters, who worked until late at night, were just going to bed when Kim Jong-il called them and handed back their manuscripts which he had been looking through. He asked them to bring him any other manuscripts which they might have. It was already 2:30 A.M., so they hesitated. One of them suggested that he should sleep.

  “Never mind, give me manuscripts you’ve written, if you have any. … You know, the President wrote this celebrated work, sitting up all night for several nights, taking time off in the intervals of the grim, bloody struggle against the Japanese. In that case, how can we allow ourselves to write the screen version of that masterpiece, taking as much rest and sleep as we want, satisfied with our comfortable conditions? I prefer to work in the peaceful, small hours. Give me manuscripts you’ve written, please.”

  His eyes were glittering with eagerness. The writers were swept by rising emotion and gave him their manuscripts. Taking the papers, Kim Jong-il again plunged into his work of revision. The night passed and the moonlight which played on the rippling water of the lake was fading in the grey dawn. The writers, too, sat at their desks a little longer. Soon they were overcome by weariness and started to doze.

  How much time passed no one knew. … One of them was awakened by the trickling of-water somewhere. The sound undoubtedly came from the washroom. The hands of the clock-were pointing to 4 A.M. He pricked up his ears to make sure where the sound was coming from, and there again came the sound of running water which was now mingled with noise of splashing. The writer stood up. He went to the washroom and was surprised to see Kim Jong-il washing his face in cold water. A lump suddenly rose in his throat. “He’s overcoming the fatigue caused by overwork.” The writer stood spellbound for some time, staring in reverence at the dear leader who was so devoted to his work of making the screen version an enduring piece to be handed down to posterity.

  Kim Jong-il also personally supervised the shooting of Sea of Blood. In September 1969, filming a scene depicting the burning of a hamlet, he ran hither and yon through the smoke making sure all the pieces fit together. He told off an actor playing a Japanese soldier who “ran about brandishing his sword, although he had just been slain by a peasant with an axe.” At another point, “he urged the cavalry to charge towards Ul-nam’s mother, who was frantically searching for her children, but they did not hear him. Immediately he rushed into the suffocating smoke and led the horsemen to where they should be.44

  Sea of Blood premiered later in 1969, followed in the next few years by other screen versions of Kim Il-sung’s “revolutionary masterpieces.” In 1970 came The Fate of a Self-defense Corps Man, whose main character is first pressed into betraying his nation through service in the Japanese imperialists’ self-defense corps. He soon finds the corps to be “a living hell of racial discrimination, insult and whipping.” A friend who tries to desert is executed. Mean-while, the Japanese drive the hero’s father like a beast, as he labors to help build a gun emplacement, and then they shoot him to death. The young man, previously without class-consciousness, then changes course, taking “the path of revolution to wipe out the aggressors.” The writers at first had trouble deciding on the central theme. Kim Jong-il settled it. The seed of the work, he said, was the inevitability of death, whether or not the young men joined the self-defense corps.45

  Note that the film offers a view of life complex enough to allow for a negative character to turn positive. One who has started as a traitor can become a shining revolutionary. That sort of twist would become a hallmark of the Kim Jong-il era in cinema, as compared with simplistic “revolutionary morality plays” that the North Korean studios had churned out earlier.46 This fact strikes a note of seeming irony: From what we are told about An Act of Sincerity—the play Kim Jong-il had denounced earlier as representing a treacherous maneuver by Kim To-man’s henchmen—the approach appears to have been similar.

  While filming The Fate of a Self-defense Corps Man, the cast and crew worked on location at Pochonbo in the mountainous northern part of the country. The weather was cold. Kim Jong-il “sent them a variety of foodstuffs and high-quality medicines, in addition to blankets, fur coats, fur caps and fur shoes for each member of the crew. He even sent them a letter. On receiving these gifts, the crew were choked with emotion.” Pulling strings to procure special favors on such a munificent scale for people involved in his pet projects—or for people in unfortunate circumstances, whose particular needs came to his attention and moved him—-was to become his pattern. The impulse to generosity seems to have been genuine enough, but in altruism and philanthropy his style was neither modest nor discreet. It appears his propagandists made sure he would get full public credit for every kindness.

  At that time Kim was promoting a “speed campaign” to step up output in the film industry paralleling similar campaigns elsewhere in the economy. He telephoned the Pochonbo location every day around midnight or in the early morning to check on progress, urging “that the shooting be done at lightning speed.” The daily shooting quota-was 80 meters of film, but “thanks to Kim Jong-il’s solicitude and trust” the crew averaged 250 meters a day— even though the cameramen “had to work while breathing on the lenses to warm them.” A film that normally would have taken a year to complete was shot in forty days. “The beacon of the speed campaign, which was raised by Kim Jong-il, spread like wildfire to all units of the film industry and astonishing feats were performed, one after another. In 1970 alone, the cinema workers produced several dozen first-rate films”—an achievement that gave the lie to the evil counterrevolutionaries’ claim that “higher speed results in lower quality.”47

  Kim by all accounts was genuinely tireless in his pursuit of the revolution in filmmaking. He chose the themes of films such as The Flourishing Village and A Worker’s Family, both of-which won the country’s People’s Prize. In the latter case he looked over film already shot and determined that the creative staff had not grasped the seed. “The stress must be put on the fact that a worker must never forget his origin and that even though he knows his origin, he would degenerate if he did not unceasingly revolutionize himself,” he told them. “The seed of the film should be derived from this idea.” They re-worked the characters and the sequences accordingly. That, says an official account, is how the film “became a work of great social impact, with people crying about the need for re
volutionizing society.”

  Not satisfied with merely telling the staff-what to do, Kim “would also work, scissors in hand, throughout the night in a narrow editing booth or in a darkroom.” The story is told of an inexperienced director who himself worked late into the night before he finished inserting a scene according to Kim’s instruction, then went to bed. Later the man was awakened and summoned back to the studio, where he found Kim Jong-il reediting the film with scissors. Kim had gone through nine reels and had been at it for some four hours. “The film has been developed well,” he told the “utterly perplexed” director, explaining that he had “cut out some scraps of the scenes which might be dull. I am not sure you will be happy with what I have done. …”

  “Dear Leader!” mumbled the director, who was “deeply moved.”

  Finally, Kim Jong-il put the scissors down and walked out, saying to the director, “Comrade director, look through it again carefully.”

  Then he left the studio. The car carrying Kim Jong-il glided out of the studio gate and disappeared into the darkness, which soon melted into grey light.

  The director returned to the room and, as he looked through the film which had just been reedited by Kim Jong-il, he was overcome by another surge of emotion. Scenes which were similar and redundant had been cut out and the recording of boisterous orchestral music and a long chorus in the finale had been removed. Because this had been done the emotional development now had pace and force and it left one in a thoughtful mood. The director felt as if he was watching another film altogether. He blushed in spite of himself. In order to accentuate the emotion in the finale, he had intertwined similar, meaningless scenes and backed them up by prolonged orchestral music and a chorus. Now the director realized that he had simply followed the conventional canon of editing. There suddenly rang in his ears the words which Kim Jong-il had so modestly said when bidding him fare-well—“Look through it again carefully.”

  Thus Kim, although still a very young man himself, played the big daddy role, with his filmmakers cast as children. “In keeping with the proverb, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ Kim Jong-il was extremely exacting while being infinitely kind to them as well. With such fatherly attention, Kim Jong-il helped them in their work.”48

  The role of the movie-going masses he envisioned as even more childish: to watch his films and, through watching, fully internalize devout reverence toward his own father as the father of them all, in accordance with the “monolithic ideology.” His efforts paid off, in terms of both propaganda and art. Audiences definitely noticed an improvement. Some of the films produced under his supervision drew favorable reviews not only from the captive North Korean audience but from outsiders, as well.

  Kim Jong-il’s takeover of North Korean opera in the late 1960s was as blunt and, for those in the industry, as initially humiliating as his earlier move to abolish the filmmakers’ “esthetic review” sessions. He attended the opening of a new opera. While he watched the performance, “his face clouded.” When the curtain came down, he gathered the writers and asked them “whether they would follow the old manner they had adopted. Faced by such an abrupt question, they were unable to say a word. Turning to the bewildered artists, he explained the defects of opera one by one and said that the time had come for them to put aside operas of this kind—in which the content is shackled to the form and which do not appeal to contemporary esthetic sense.”

  Korea had its own classic opera form. However, due at least partly to Soviet influence, the traditional form had declined in favor of European-style opera. Viewing European opera as an aristocratic form, Kim Jong-il like-wise was not interested in bringing back the traditional, decidedly un-revolutionary Korean opera. Rather, he was determined to create a new type of opera, starting with operatic versions of Sea of Blood and the other “revolutionary masterpieces” that he had made into movies. He would replace the Western-style arias and recitatives with juche elements, including songs sung in verses or stanzas, as in Korean folk ballads. Another juche element would be pangchang, offstage solos, duets and choruses that narrate, or project an inner voice, and set the mood. Pangchang is described as “unique in opera.49

  In reality there is offstage singing in European opera. Take Il Trovatore, for example. But it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the North Korean claim by saying that Verdi and others were ahead of Kim Jong-il there. When I had a chance to experience it in person, attending a performance of The Flower Girl in 1989 (I’ll say more about that performance in chapter 20), I found pangchang peculiarly affecting—differing subtly but significantly from the usual offstage singing in Western grand opera and in stage musicals of the Broad-way type.

  Kim put himself into the development of Sea of Blood as an opera just as he had done with the earlier movie version. Says an official biography: “The unremitting application which he brought to his task can be shown by the following figures: he listened to over fifty songs on nine occasions before selecting the song of the village youths in Act 1; as many as ninety songs on seven occasions before selecting one for a duet in Act 2; and over one hundred songs on six occasions for the duet between the mothers of Bok-dol and Chil-song in Act 3.”

  The creative staff did not quite understand how to use pangchang, so young Kim “specified where pangchang should be used and what its content should be.” For example, in a scene in which the illiterate heroine’s son, Ul-nam, is teaching her how to write, the composers wrote separate songs for the two of them to sing. “But Kim Jong-il, when he saw the scene, claimed that it had no general appeal and that the deep feelings of mother and son should be brought into relief, not through their songs, but by the use of pangchang.” In the resulting re-written scene, the two study silently-while the offstage pangchang chorus “conjures up the spiritual world of the mother and son in a way which neither songs nor gestures could bring out:”50

  The mother’s voice echoes through the dark sky;

  A flood of stars lights the sleepless night.

  Nourishing the flower bud in her heart,

  She pictures a new and joyful world.

  The mother who has known such a bitter life

  Learns one, then another letter this night.51

  By all accounts, when Sea of Blood premiered at the Pyongyang Grand Theater July 17, 1971, in the presence of the Great Leader himself, it astonished the theatergoers with its power. “Everyone in the audience became deeply moved and stood to applaud Kim Jong-il,” said a former member of the elite who defected to South Korea. The production made Kim Jong-il’s name and helped to solidify his status as the most likely successor to his father.52

  The afterglow lasted for some time. A caption attached to a photo of Kim Jong-il taken on April 6, 1973, describes him as expounding “the principles of creating the Sea of Blood–type revolutionary operas.” It is one of the most appealing photos of him. Standing in what looks to be his office, smiling and gesturing as he addresses note-taking journalists, the thirty-one-year-old cultural czar appears confident and enthusiastic. Now he is no mere privileged kid, relying solely on his father’s authority to lord it over his elders, but a mature young master of a field in which young people typically can shine, one who not only knows but loves his subject.53

  In his work with the cinema and opera, Kim Jong-il seems to have achieved—for once in his life—the delicate combination of toughness and solicitude needed to call forth his subordinates’ best work. It may be that he had been studying his father’s leadership techniques closely, and learning from them.

  The propaganda goal toward which Kim Jong-il directed the new type of opera and all the other arts (he also gave his attention to improving dance, orchestral music, stage drama and novels, among other forms) was, of course, quite another matter. “Works which do not cater to the Party’s requirements are of no use at all,” he bluntly told fellow propagandists in 1974.54 His most outstanding achievement in art and literature, said a Pyongyang biographer, was “his brilliant solution to the question
of portraying the leader.” He ordered establishment of three creative centers of first-rate writers and artists: Paektusan Productions, April 15 Literary Productions and the Mansuadae Art Studio. These “were entirely devoted to the portrayal of the great leader.”

  When A True Daughter of the Party premiered, “it had little appeal. One day, after he had seen the opera, Kim Jong-il said that the reason for its failure was that loyalty to the Great Leader was not brought into bold relief and that there was no appropriate theme song.” He wrote the lyrics for one himself:

  Where is the fatherly General

  When the Big Dipper lights the sky!

  Where can Supreme Headquarters be with its light-flooded windows?

  Where he’s sure to be!

  From this dark forest far behind enemy lines,

  We’re wondering where the General is now.

  As the chilly autumn wind blows

  We yearn for his warm care.55

  The biggest test of his early career was managing the festivities marking the year when Kim Il-sung turned sixty. For that, Kim Jong-il gave some lyricists and composers their marching orders fifteen months in advance. They were to come up with a hymn entitled “Long Life and Good Health to the Leader,” to be sung at a banquet on New Year’s Day 1972. They set to work. “Many songs were written but none of them appealed to Kim Jong-il.”

  With the deadline approaching, Kim Jong-il visited the composers late at night, listened to their latest offerings, but was exasperated that they still did not get it. “I trust and cherish you at heart,” he told them. “Why don’t you understand me? Think, the leader will be sixty years old in the new year. So I made up my mind to present him with this song on the morning of New Year’s Day, but you seem to be far from understanding me.” The composers, of course, dropped their eyes, feeling ashamed. Then Kim Jong-il continued: