Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (51 page)

Kim Jong-il had been fascinated with movies from his childhood, brought up on viewing sessions in his father’s mansion that leaned heavily toward Russian movies. As that fascination converged with his interest in women, the avid film buff had begun hanging around Pyongyang’s film studios, dating actresses.
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According to an official account, he told his father as early as 1964—the year of his university graduation—that all was not well in North Korea’s tin-seltown. Kim Il-sung thereupon called a party politburo meeting at the Korean Film Studio, with the studio staff in attendance. There the elder Kim gave a speech complaining that opportunists within the communist movement were kowtowing to a cultural offensive launched by the imperialists. He wanted a radical change. The industry must produce many high-quality movies, artistic yet ideologically compelling. Filmmakers must chart a straight path, repudiating two extremes: “the art-for-art’s sake doctrine of the revisionists and the leftist tendency to stress only ideology while ignoring artistry.” The themes of the films must fall into three categories: (1) Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese struggle, (2) the Korean War and (3) inspiration for workers to make “great revolutionary advances in socialist construction.”

After the speech, the audience “gave a standing ovation for a long time, looking up at President Kim Il-sung and Comrade Kim Jong-il. … It was from that time onwards that Kim Jong-il’s energetic guidance of cinematic development began.”
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While still in his twenties Kim Jong-il rose in the party Central Committee hierarchy to become deputy director of the propaganda and agitation department (under his friend Kim Guk-tae again, according to some reports) and then department director. Working as a propagandist gave the Great Leader’s son an official excuse to continue his interest in the cinema— which eventually would prove a virtual obsession. On one level, he simply wanted better quality from a young and struggling back-water movie industry that was far from meeting the technical standards of Moscow, much less Hollywood. On another level, he was determined to root out of the movie industry the counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, feudalistic, revisionist, flunkeyist influences that those wicked fellows purged in 1967 had planted in earlier years to distract the people from worshipping Kim Il-sung with the proper single-hearted, single-minded unity. This would be a flip-side version of the Hollywood blacklist.

Kim Jong-il started by abolishing an annual January convention of
filmmakers from all over the country to evaluate the previous year’s film output from the standpoint of artistry. Kim decried the esthetic review for its failure to stick strictly to pushing the ideology of one-man rule. He called it a “platform which was utilized by the babblers in order to demonstrate their intelligence.” Anti-party counterrevolutionaries in charge of cinema development for the party had dreamed up the session in a plot to “restore outdated self-indulgence, so as to liberalize’ cinematic creation.” Instead of studying Kim Il-sung’s thoughts on art and literature, speakers at the meeting had dwelled on theories from outside. They had even gone to the length of “suggesting the introduction of so-and-so’s system of direction and so-and-so’s system of acting from Europe.”

Officials hearing his complaints were “bewildered,” never having seen any harm in the get-togethers. But, now that he mentioned it, they “felt as if their vision was opening up.” Kim Jong-il then opened their vision a little wider, decreeing that “from now on you must not use the words ‘esthetic review.’ Instead we must hold a meeting for the study of the great leader’s artistic and literary thoughts.” Now they got the picture, and “the officials and artists left the room, bitterly reflecting on their inability to distinguish right from wrong.”

Some days later Kim Jong-il presided over the first meeting for the study of the Great Leader’s thought
on juche-oriented
art and literature, convened in a movie studio. He humiliated the first speaker who took the floor, attacking the man’s use of foreign words such as the “moral” of a story and “suspense” when there were perfectly good words in Korean to get the meaning across. Bidding the “bewildered” speaker to sit down, he expressed disgust that “the flunkeyist and dogmatic habit is even repeated in this place where we are studying the Great Leader’s
juche-oriented
art and literary thoughts. It is appalling.” Without discarding that habit of “parroting” others, the filmmakers would “never be able to make films which will genuinely do a great deal for the Korean revolution, films which will be loved by the Korean people.”

In order to make a clean sweep of past errors, “Kim Jong-il sternly ordered that all the files on the ‘art review’ meetings be burned. All those present at the meeting were struck by the intelligent leadership of Kim Jong-il.” After the meeting, all the papers and reports presented at previous “esthetic reviews” were indeed burned, so that a new start could be made based on the theories of Kim Il-sung.
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Although Kim Il-sung had staged skits and plays and disseminated tracts during his anti-Japanese struggle, he had not made movies. Thus, the pickings were slim for filmmakers looking for guidance from the Great Leader’s holy writ. Kim Jong-il was happy to step into the breach and propound his own theories, always describing them as developments of his father’s ideas.

At the first meeting for the study of the Great Leader’s thought
on juche-
oriented art and literature, according to official accounts, and on other occasions as well, the junior Kim laid out his
chongja
or “seed” theory. He had “discovered for the first time in history the seed of the work of art, its nucleus.
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In fact his demand that writers and directors “grasp the seed” of a work was another way of directing them to choose a theme that could be expressed in just a few words and stick to it. To that extent, of course, Kim Jong-il’s idea was by no means new. But the principle of focusing tightly on a clear theme probably is the one that writers—professionals included— most often forget. (I, myself, while reading his thoughts on the “seed,” realized that parts of my manuscript lacked focus and needed re-writing. Thanks, Dear Leader, for the useful reminder.) Kim’s dwelling on the principle could only be a positive influence on North Korean screen-writing and film direction and editing, from the technical standpoint.

Content was a different matter. Kim Jong-il wanted artistic people to grasp seeds that would promote the regime’s ideology, especially one-man rule. Talking to the makers of the film
Five Guerrilla Brothers
in 1968, he complained that they had killed off a character, making him the victim of an enemy plot to poison the guerrillas’ salt supply. That went against what was or should have been the seed of the work: “that the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army would be ever-victorious as long as the headquarters of the revolution existed.”

Kim Jong-il also complained that the real prototype of the character the filmmakers had killed off did not in fact die in the salt incident. And he insisted that “our literature and arts must portray historical facts strictly in accordance with the principles of maintaining party loyalty and of being historically accurate.” (Note that party loyalty was to take precedence over historical accuracy.) “You must not fake, in a careless manner, what is not found in life, and present scenes that vary from the truth, simply for the sake of the arts. In dealing with historical facts, you must discard, as a matter of course, what is of no substance; but you must not discard-what is of essential significance, interpret it as you please or invent something.”

That is good advice. I think it was taken to heart, to some extent, in the factual basis apparent in many of the stories told about Kim senior and junior in books the regime published from the 1980s on, at least until Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994.

But Kim Jong-il only selectively followed his own advice. The “headquarters of the revolution” to which he referred in his critique of
Five Guerrilla Brothers
was meant to be understood as the seat of Gen. Kim Il-sung, that lofty being destined to become North Korea’s Great Leader. In historical fact, Kim Il-sung’s headquarters was no more the headquarters of
the
revolution than were the headquarters of any of a number of other guerrilla fighters and political leaders, based in other parts of Manchuria, in
China proper, in Korea itself or elsewhere, who were Kim’s revolutionary equals or betters.

The unspoken rule seems to have been that writers should avoid lies about small, easily ascertainable facts and stick to Big Lies—such as Kim Il-sung’s purported leadership of the entire “revolution” from the 1930s on and South Korea’s invasion of the North to start the Korean War. Kim Jong-il did not in so many words, for publication, address the importance of the Big Lie for the regime. However, he did endorse fictionalizing historical facts: “The arts, even though based on actual situations, must not reproduce facts and instances automatically; they must identify those which are of essential significance and generalize them,” he said, in the same talk in which he had emphasized fidelity to the facts. Unfortunately, he said, the unimaginative moviemakers he was addressing were “unable to make full use of this wonderful creative capacity”
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What his seemingly conflicting advice may have boiled down to is: Stick to the facts if fabrication would be easily detected—but if a lie would serve the maintenance of the regime, then tell the lie and overcome people’s disbelief through dramatic force and constant repetition.

To get the filmmakers headed in the right direction, Kim Jong-il decided to lead them in making films based on some works—plays or skits—from the period of the anti-Japanese struggle in Manchuria. In each case those were works whose original authorship was ascribed to Kim Il-sung. The first of those was
Sea of Blood,
which is

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 play
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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.
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