* * *
CULT SITES IN North Korea barely conceal that they are mere façades. The act of naming and the stories are more important then the materializations. In the cinematic arts, on the other hand, façades are in service of the illusion. In a film, you can’t walk around a log cabin and identify its obvious flaws. In the darkness of a movie theatre, you don’t have a body — you are two eyes being drawn into the world of the story without resistance.
Going to the movies is not a voluntary activity in North Korea — it’s the duty of every citizen. In the country’s annual official report on film, the rules are laid out together with statistics on screenings. It is logical that a leader like Kim Jong-il, who devotes so much of his energy to myth-building, would invest heavily in filmmaking as a tool to shape citizens. But his interest isn’t only out of necessity; one realizes it is also the leader’s personal passion and desire.
Even Kim Il-sung was a dedicated film buff. The party’s elite could watch any film they liked, even if it had been made by the enemy. In isolation, they could enjoy Shin Sang-ok’s melodramas. As early as 1958 Kim Il-sung had said: “The cinema should have great appeal and move ahead of the realities.” He saw how Stalin’s image had radically changed over time in the Soviet Union and how after his death Mao was devalued in China. With the help of cinema, Kim Il-sung felt he could secure his posthumous radiance. By appointing his cinephile son as his successor, the great opera, the work of art that was his life, would be passed down through film. Kim Jong-il was a patron, a producer of something that could be refashioned and replayed for all eternity.
A FEW YEARS before the kidnapping of Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok, Kim Jong-il wrote a book about film called On the Art of the Cinema. It was here that Kim Jong-il established that art, literature, and film should be Juche-focused. It’s not easy to parse what this means. Kim Jong-il discusses everything from the script to the skill of the cinematographer, make-up artist, editor, and scenographer, as well as the importance of music and engaged acting, but the advice consists mainly of general and meaningless statements: “One must aim high in creation,” “Make-up is a noble art,” “The best words are filled with meaning and are easy to understand,” “Each scene must be dramatic,” “Begin on a small scale and end grandly,” and on and on.
Kim Jong-il says that an actor’s interpretation of a character must be based on his own experiences and empathy. At first this sentiment may seem like a crack in the wall of ideological bunkum — putting the actor in a position where he must fully inhabit his enemy. He uses the example of an actor who is supposed to play a Japanese policeman — that is, a bad guy — and tries to imagine the character’s backstory. But, according to Kim Jong-il, this is the wrong approach: a depiction of the enemy must emerge from the feeling of genuine hate — a hate that is as large as the love for your own people and the working class.
ACCORDING TO HIS official biography, Kim Jong-il displayed his understanding of film as a seven-year-old when he observed that the snow falling in a movie looked like cotton balls. It is also said that over the course of his life he took part in the production of 800 feature-length films, 400 children’s films, and 1,000 documentaries. And his personal archive is thought to include more than 15,000 titles, exclusively in 35mm prints.
A 2005 article in Film International describes how North Korean diplomats in Berlin helped stock Kim Jong-il’s film archive. Mr. U Kun-chol — the secretary of economic affairs at the Office for the Protection of the Interests of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which had been housed in the North Korean embassy’s concrete colossus in East Berlin before the wall fell — went trundling along to offices of the local film distributors. He carried with him a long list of movies that he wanted to have transferred to 35mm. He was given the cold shoulder everywhere he went.
U Kun-chol didn’t give in. He sought out contacts in the alternative Berlin film scene, and in 2000 Johannes Schönherr, a trash-movie collector and pornographer well known in underground circles, became his closest collaborator.
With the help of an interpreter, Mr. U called Schönherr almost every day. Initially, he was in acute need of a fifteen-part film series about the Yakuza wives, as well as a German TV movie about the life of Catherine the Great. This was the first in a long line of requests for films about European royalty, and he was prepared to pay any price.
Mr. U would never admit that these films were going to be sent to Kim Jong-il. Instead, he insisted that the staff at his office in Berlin was made up of devoted connoisseurs of cinema and no less than 35mm prints would do. When Schönherr explained there was no soundtrack for the 35mm version of Catherine the Great, and that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to make a screening copy, Mr U would not be deterred by such trivialities.
“No problem, we’ll pay,” he said. “Don’t give up, make sure to get a hold of that film.”
Also high up on the wish list was the 2000 South Korean blockbuster Shiri by Kang Je-gyu. The film is inspired by the true story of the North Korean agent Kim Hyon-hui, who was trained from the age of eighteen as part of a plot to sabotage South Korea. In 1987, she and a fellow agent placed a bomb on a South Korean passenger plane that was flying from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. The plane exploded and all the passengers died. The order was said to have come directly from Kim Jong-il with the aim of discrediting South Korea’s security measures in advance of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
In Shiri, the stunning female protagonist goes through a training program similar to that of the real agent, Kim Hyon-hui, including learning a deadly karate chop, target practice, and extreme physical exercises. She is sent to Seoul to assassinate various political dignitaries and military bigwigs. She is an angel of death wearing blood-red lipstick and a trench coat, and her long-distance shots to the head are clinically precise. The purpose of the attack is to create chaos that will pave the way for a reunification of North and South, thus creating a new Great Korean Empire.
For Kim Jong-il, obtaining a copy of Shiri must have been the final, vital link in a chain of events that he himself had initiated. He’d ordered an attack, engaging the help of a beautiful agent, and the event had inspired a lavish feature film with a juicy plot that he now could sit back and enjoy with a snifter of cognac. This is the kind of thing that makes a leader feel powerful: your life has a purpose and your actions make such an impact that they are staged and forever mythologized.
KIM JONG-IL WAS eager to discuss film with Choi Eun-hee. He couldn’t stress enough the importance of cinema as a conduit for national fellowship. Madame had free access to both the film archive and Kim’s private screening room. The archive was generally only accessible to the ruling family, but in a way, Kim Jong-il considered her part of the family. He seemed to have forgotten that she was connected to them by force.
Certain films in the archive were used to instruct North Korean filmmakers, and one of these was Shin Sang-ok’s Evergreen Tree, which ironically was the same film that General Park considered South Korea’s national epic. Madame could watch what she liked, but she was encouraged to study propaganda documentaries about North Korean history and Russian films set during the revolution. One of the films Madame was ordered to see was called This Shouldn’t Exist, which showed poverty, crime, and “bad behaviour” among North Koreans. This cautionary tale was intended to help prevent people from behaving inappropriately, but it gave a glimpse of life beyond the propaganda.
After a while, Madame Choi could express her opinions quite openly to Kim Jong-il. She explained to him that she found the film version of Kim Il-sung’s opera Sea of Blood poorly produced and clumsily costumed. She asserted that revolution wasn’t the only theme in the film; love was too, for example.
On one of these occasions, Kim Jong-il cryptically replied: “We’ll resolve this when director Shin arrives.”
* * *
THE BUS TAKES us back to Samjiyon Airport, and the final
forty kilometres are driven on the perfectly straight military roads that the Japanese built in 1939. Another military airplane — a somewhat newer model than the one that brought us here — is parked on the runway in the forest clearing. When we climb on board, one of the Värmlanders says: “It smells like manure. It’s just like home.”
The stewardesses are wearing Air Koryo uniforms and serve us each one glass of beer during the flight back to Pyongyang. We get used to the manure smell. Ms. Kim takes care of the matsutake mushrooms that have been with us since the visit to Mount Chilbo. She holds the basket on her lap; white plastic bands with red text have been wrapped around their stalks.
Also on the plane is a man in an air force uniform. He takes the seat farthest back in the plane, between two stewardesses. He jokes loudly with the two women and has a hard time keeping his hands to himself. Then he moves to sit down next to us and shows us a small photo album of his family. He lives in a lovely apartment. His wife is wearing a pink blouse and a pearl necklace in the pictures, and his son is about ten and has a drum kit. With a look of contentment he points to the photo of his son and says: “Fat.”
IF YOU DON’T count the parking lot outside the Yanggakdo Hotel, we have yet to set foot on the streets of Pyongyang. During the bus ride from the airport, Mr. Song tells us that now, finally, we’ll be going out into the city to look at some important sites.
“But remember,” he says. “Never stray from the group. Ask if you want to take pictures.”
It’s late in the afternoon when we roll into Pyongyang. We stop near the Monument to Party Founding. The group rushes off the bus and scatters in all directions. Mr. Song and Ms. Kim try to call Elias and Oksana back, but they are already on their way down into the subway.
Mr. Song breaks into a sweat but maintains his composure. After rounding us all up, he shepherds us to the monument. The view is panoramic: you can see the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace, one of Pyongyang’s largest theatres, and the Taedong River farther off. A row of schoolchildren in red Youth Corps uniforms march past; the line seems never-ending. An overcrowded tram passes by, so crammed that people are clinging on to the back and sides.
“No pictures!” Mr. Song yells.
* * *
EN ROUTE TO the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, we pass the Potonggang Hotel, owned by Pastor Moon Sun-myung. It’s remarkable that Moon, who is an incredibly wealthy cult leader, has allied himself with the powers in North Korea. The pastor is from the North, but was put in a work camp in 1948 for evangelizing. In 1950, during the Korean War, he was released from the camp when its guards fled as UN troops advanced.
In South Korea, Moon laid the foundation of his religious movement with a combination of charismatic authority, business sense, and self-mythologization. Within the Unification Church, as his movement is called, he was later given the status of Resurrected Jesus. The cult focused its recruitment on young people, often naive students who were then put under great strain with a combination of hard work, little sleep, and surveillance. In 1971 the enterprise moved to the United States, where he managed to build up a financial empire that now donates large sums of money to American right-wing organizations. Moon founded the Washington Times in 1982, which became a soapbox for extreme right-wing Republicans. It was also one of the few newspapers to be granted a long interview with Kim Il-sung. In 1992, the entire staff was flown to Pyongyang to produce the issue in honour of the leader’s eightieth birthday. The interview was nothing more than an obsequious display for Kim’s benefit.
Pastor Moon managed to grow close to Kim Il-sung and became good friends with those who held high positions within the regime. Large financial transactions from the church’s business dealings had laid the foundation.
There seems to be a strong resonance between Moon’s ruling strategy and that of the Kim clan — notably Moon’s mass weddings and North Korea’s mass events, but most of all the cult of personality and the deification of an individual — and the two leaders also have similar views on their disciples’ moral obligations.
In 2004, Moon appeared at an awards dinner at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. — an event that he and his wife, wearing crowns and burgundy robes, turned into a coronation ceremony. By then he had already established intimate contact with Kim Jong-il, who had taken over his father’s business alliances and friendships. With this alignment of the heavenly bodies of the Moon King and the Sun King, the Unification Church’s future in North Korea was secured. Hotel Potonggang is still the only sign of Moon in the city, but the pastor has been given a ninety-nine-year lease on the village of his birth, where he is planning a great expansion: establishing the holy city of the Unification Church.
* * *
FROM A DISTANCE, the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium looks like a giant parachute that has landed in the Taedong River and hardened into concrete. With a capacity of 150,000, this is the world’s largest arena. A war is being waged here — not with weapons, but with theatre. The enemy is Hollywood, and to triumph over Hollywood the “world’s greatest performance,” as the program states, must be created. And we are going to bear witness to it.
The Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang, as it is called, is performed every year with different themes. This year, the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of North Korea, the theme is “Prosper Ye Motherland.” As Song Sok-hwang, the director of the Mass Games, said in an interview: “The U.S. imperialists are trying to stifle us. They create a negative image of North Korea. I hope Arirang helps to counter that.”
“Arirang” is a 600-year-old Korean folk song that is essentially a woman’s lament over the loss of a lover and her hope of seeing him again. During the performance, the song is used as a metaphor for the longing to be reunited with the South; in other contexts and depending on the political situation, it has taken on completely different meanings. During colonial times Arirang (1926) was made into a silent movie and it is considered to be the first film to articulate Korean nationalism. In time, it became a national treasure. After Korea’s liberation from Japan, the only copy in existence disappeared. Later, a Japanese collector with 50,000 films in his archive claimed that it was in his possession. Kim Jong-il was prepared to pay any price for Arirang, but the man replied that he would dispose of the copy only by order of the Japanese emperor.
THE ROOF OF the stadium is open, and we see how swiftly darkness falls and how the stars in the sky emerge. The seats on the opposite side fill quickly, with row after row of young boys in white shirts. Their heads look like black balls rolling along the rows of benches. A wondrous logistical feat has them in their seats in ten minutes. Each of them holds a 170-page catalogue of coloured paper. Thirty thousand schoolboys take their places as part of this giant, living screen, where each individual represents one pixel.
Ari and Trond are buzzing with anticipation. They stand and start waving a North Korean flag. Our ever-present videographer turns his camera on them: he can’t miss this.
The stands fill up with people wearing the brown Home Guard uniforms. Soon, a great mass of people have arrived. Their uniformity makes us think of soccer fans; but unlike soccer fans with their waving and shouting, this group is silent.
They’ve put us Westerners together in a middle section. There are probably 200 of us here. A group of Germans are mounting telescopic lenses on tripods, breathless with anticipation. One of them wears a black dress and heavy chrome chains around his neck. Another wears shiny leather pants; the back of his head is shaved but he sports long, bleached New Wave–style bangs at the front.
The children on the other side of the stadium start to stamp their feet in unison. Together, they let out a blood-curdling howl that swells over the stands in a wave of sound, creating what feels like the world’s largest live surround-sound system.
Ten thousand girl-gymnasts in red, yellow, and blue costumes spill out onto the grass field and form gro
ups. With their coloured papers, the schoolchildren in the stands create alternating horizontal and vertical fields of colour. At every transition, they let out a wave of screams that sets an uneasy atmosphere in the stadium. After having flipped through the colour catalogue like an old-fashioned television running through test images, they finally seem to “get reception.” The words “60 years of the motherland,” flanked by a bouquet of flowers with long, graceful garlands, materializes against a light-blue background. Next up is a panoramic image of Mount Baekdu shrouded in mist. Heaven Lake shifts between turquoise and green, and the slopes of the mountain are the colour of the gloaming. On the field, the gymnasts stand in formation, emulating a hundred-metre-long North Korean flag spread out on the ground. It moves as if blown by a gentle wind.
We watch the performance breathlessly. We have a hard time making sense of our impressions and understanding what it is that we are seeing. This is perhaps the most remarkable visual experience we have ever witnessed. The images created on the stands opposite act as a backdrop to the abundance of events on the grassy field. Laser projections and layers of animation accentuate the details on the schoolchildren’s pictures. Strings of tens of thousands of small lamps create intricate patterns against the night sky. Sequences of moving images are projected onto the sheets of paper that the children are holding. There are melodramatic scenes of loss, separation, and reunion. Arms reach for each other and are torn apart. People weep from sorrow and happiness. An epic drama is played out using interludes of musicals, gymnastic routines, acrobatics, and parades. At one point, the schoolchildren create the image of two guns, a symbol of the fight against the Japanese. At another point, the symbol for an atom.
Actors of all ages participate in the show. A segment with small children doing a dance routine dressed as eggs transitions to a scene depicting the power of factories and the machinery of war. Cuteness is mixed with familiar Communist iconography: clenched fists, farm machinery, water-driven power plants, and smiling workers arm in arm with doctors and soldiers. The performance is like a giant pop-up book chronicling North Korea’s sixty years of suffering and progress. But most of all it is asserting unity, which is created by the synchronized movements of the masses. A hundred thousand people are performing tonight. How many more are involved in the transport, catering, costumes, scenography, music, medical care, security, and technical support? A significant portion of Pyongyang’s population must be involved, on or off stage. Anyone who’s not involved and who is able-bodied is in the audience.
All Monsters Must Die Page 8
