Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (52 page)

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 revolutionizing 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