A Kim Jong-Il Production Read online

  The baby born to the Kims in February 1941, like all the children born in the Soviet camp, was given a Russian name. Yura, as he came to be known—short for his full Russian name, Yurei Ilsenovitch Kim—was joined two years later by a younger brother, Shura, and in 1946 by a sister, Kyong-Hui. Of the three children only she was born in liberated Korea—liberated, that is, by the Americans and the Soviets, not by Kim. A Russian name for her was not needed.

  Kim Il-Sung never fought the Japanese from Mount Paekdu, as the story of his son’s birth claims, and far from leading the liberation of his homeland, he was assigned to a Russian army camp in Khabarovsk, in the far east of Russia, and sat the event out entirely. As for Kim Jong-Il, he wasn’t given the keys (or rather, the guns) to the country when he was ten years old. He wasn’t properly considered a potential successor to his father until he was well into his thirties. He was an overprivileged, aimless young man who did not serve in the military and demonstrated no excellence in any field of bureaucracy or economics. He never won an election and was no champion of the people of North Korea, who didn’t hear his voice for the first time until a full decade and a half after he had taken the reins of the country. But what Yura Kim did have was a sense of narrative, of drama and of showmanship, of mythmaking and its power. All of which he learned not by studying politics, or religion, or history.

  No, what Kim Jong-Il learned, and what he then built in North Korea, he learned from the movies.

  5

  Kim Jong-Il’s First Loves

  Jong-Il fell in love with cinema the very first time his parents took him, as a young child, to the DPRK’s brand new Korea Film Studio in Pyongyang. In the early years following the division of Korea, the two states had become competitive about absolutely everything, including the cinema, and a race was on to make the first postwar “liberated” Korean film. The North Koreans lost that race when Choe Yong-Kyu’s Hurrah Freedom was released in the South in 1946, but they were easily winning the battle for quality. While South Koreans made films independently, in a slapdash and often rudimentary manner, Kim Il-Sung insisted that all film projects in North Korea should be placed under state control, and should act as the state’s shop window. “Of all the arts,” Lenin had said, “cinema is for us the most important,” a sentiment with which Kim Il-Sung agreed. Following the Soviet example, he decreed that film should form a core part of the “ideological guidance” of the people, entrusting it to the newly created Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party, North Korea’s central unit of government. Under Soviet tutelage, with Moscow providing both funding and technicians to teach filmmaking skills to North Koreans, Kim Il-Sung created the National Film Production Center and the North Korean Theater and Film Committee, which together formed the core of the film apparatus and answered to the Propaganda and Agitation Department. Their mission was to create a North Korean film industry; the first North Korean movie would be called My Home Village.

  Little Yura loved going to the Korea Film Studio. He accompanied his mother and father on studio visits as often as he could. Maybe it was a child’s simple fascination with what must have seemed like a gigantic toy set, or maybe it was, already, the lure of complete control over a world and the people inhabiting it. Maybe the isolated boy saw in the movies sudden access to an untold number of worlds other than his own, a form of freedom. Whatever it was, Yura loved it.

  My Home Village is legendary in North Korean cultural history, not least because, as the official North Korean propaganda tells us, it reveals the first signs of Kim Jong-Il’s cinematic genius. In the oft-repeated story, Yura attended a preview screening of the movie, aged only seven, and—like a young Jesus in the temple—started dispensing notes to the filmmakers present. “The film showed winter scenes of the falling snow,” the official version recounts. “At this sight [Yura] shook his head dubiously and told an official of the film studio that he wondered why no snow was found on the heads and shoulders of the characters while it came down copiously [around them].… The official blushed with shame in spite of himself.… [Yura] noticed that a bad job was made of trick shots.” He even pointed out that the fake snow was clearly made of balls of cotton wool, “too crude” in his opinion. Thanks to the young prodigy, the scenes in question were reshot adequately before release. (It’s worth noting that the Soviet filmmakers supervising the film had been making movies with weather effects for decades, and that as early as 1925 Chaplin had used salt and flour for snow in The Gold Rush, rather than cotton.)

  The film, released in 1949, tells the story of the liberation of Korea—not by the Allies, not by the Red Army, but, single-handedly, by the Korean guerrilla fighters and their unseen leader: Kim Il-Sung. The film invented the “Korean Revolutionary Liberation Army” and set forward the myth that would become state doctrine. Not only did Kim Il-Sung chase the Japanese out of Korea, My Home Village says, but no one other than Kim Il-Sung could have. The film was much more technically advanced than anything being made in South Korea, thanks to the guidance of the Soviet filmmakers. All of it was put to the service of glorifying Kim Il-Sung as defeater of the Japanese oppressor and liberator of the Korean people.

  The movie was a huge success with its audience, which it found mostly through a network of “mobile film groups,” which traveled through the North Korean countryside with a print and a projector. Film was still an exciting novelty to many Korean peasants, and the people filled the screenings with barely contained anticipation. Many of them, especially in rural areas, had never experienced the marvel of moving images, let alone images telling their history, or more accurately a version of it they aspired to. The film tapped into what every Korean of that time longed for after decades of degradation and oppression. It ignored the reality, ignored the collaborators, ignored the grating humiliation of being liberated by the Soviets and Allies rather than by their own means, and presented instead the exact fantasy the people wanted to believe in. This fantasy is what Kim Il-Sung would build his dictatorship on for decades to come.

  The film’s very first shot—the very first motion picture image in North Korean history—is of Mount Paekdu, the holy volcanic mountain that is Korea’s spiritual cradle, which the Kims would appropriate for themselves over the next half century. The film’s makers couldn’t travel to Paekdu, so My Home Village opens, fittingly, not on the real thing but on an unconvincing scale model.

  * * *

  Yura saw the final cut of My Home Village with his mother, at the film’s very first public screening, one of his last and most powerful memories of her; she died just a few months later.

  Her loss left an overwhelming absence. His mother had been the one steady presence in Yura’s life and he loved her deeply. He was a shy and quiet boy who played alone at home. He liked to dress up in his custom-made child’s military uniform and march around the pond in the backyard, barking orders and swinging his arms as stiffly as he could. In pictures taken at home, Yura always has a huge smile on his face, especially if his mother is near him; he looks happy and at ease. (He felt less of a bond with his father: the Supreme Leader was often away, busy building a new nation, and—unbeknownst to Yura but painfully clear to Jong-Suk—filling his free time with the many younger women he took a shine to.) Yura’s younger brother, Shura, had died two summers earlier, at four years old, drowning in the center of a pond while Yura watched helplessly, and his mother’s death, so soon after his baby brother’s, devastated Yura. When asked, decades later, who the most influential person in his life had been, Kim Jong-Il answered without hesitation, “My mother, may she rest in peace. My mother would never have imagined the way I turned out. I owe her a great deal.”

  His early memories of the movies became ineradicably tied to his memories of his mother, binding them to her in a way, attaching him even further to the silver screen—to those images that seemed to control and hold on to time, to halt its passing, even to defy death. The memories of his mother, of happiness and playacting, and of the cinema, bec
ame bound together in his future official biographies. (Though Kim Il-Sung remarried, Jong-Il hated his stepmother, and he would later erase her and his three half siblings out of official history). Not all the stories were factually accurate, but the adult Kim Jong-Il had a hand in their writing, and they carried a deep psychological truth. He painted the past in a way that intimately links together the cinema and wanting to please his mother, as if his love of cinema were also his love for his mother. A little like Laurence Olivier, who always felt he was acting for his beloved mother, who had died when he was twelve; or Ingrid Bergman, who linked wanting to be an actress with playacting as a child in the clothes of a mother who had died when she was a toddler and whom she didn’t remember; Kim Jong-Il soon started making movies, in a way, as an attempt to recover the lost love of the woman who had given birth to him and loved him, but was torn from him much too soon.

  * * *

  His mother’s early death was often given as an excuse for Yura’s difficult behavior as a young man. Without a maternal guiding hand, the Premier’s son became accustomed to the shrinking, bowing deference of all around him. He spoke back to teachers and resented all forms of authority. He was prone to bursts of anger and bad temper. He coasted on his status as the Supreme Leader’s son. Yet he could be charming with his peers, and his hedonistic tendencies earned him popularity as an undergraduate student at Kim Il-Sung University. At a time when a bicycle was a luxury attainable by only the best-connected North Koreans, the sight of Yura zooming in and out of campus on his imported motorcycle was legendary. He threw the best parties, sponsored the best movie screenings, dance performances, and music concerts. Being his friend meant having access to worlds of which other students could only dream. He was active in university extracurricular activities—especially in organizing anti-American demonstrations, which were rumored to be the best place for students to meet girls—and he was put in charge of his class’s graduation party. He threw himself into every activity with energy and passion: that was his style. The elite at Kim Il-Sung’s court used words like playboy and dilettante to describe him. At twenty years old, Yura was decades away from the iconic Kim Jong-Il who wore ridiculously big square glasses and had a closetful of identical khaki jumpsuits. Young Yura wore trendy black frames and a tunic, usually dark blue, sometimes black, with a narrow Mao collar. His shoes were black, polished to gleam. If he wore a coat it was a long, thick wool overcoat, urbane and smart, rather than the awkward parka of later years. He liked motorcycles, fast cars, expensive cognac, and sleeping with actresses.

  Kim Il-Sung didn’t know what to make of his son. He had tried to interest Yura in matters of state, even taking him to Moscow in 1959 on a state function, but Yura had stayed behind at the hotel during most of the meetings and official events. The early 1960s were a heady time in North Korea, which had established itself as the more secure and affluent of the two Koreas. In Pyongyang there were rumors that the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung was, already, turning his mind to the grooming and eventual appointment of a successor. After Stalin’s death a decade earlier Kim Il-Sung had been openly critical of the Soviet Union’s new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, whom he felt was disgracing the principles of communism, tearing down statues of Stalin and opening trade talks with the West. With all the nationalist talk coming out of the Workers’ Party’s official news agency, it became increasingly awkward for the Supreme Leader’s own son to be walking around with a Russian name. Kim pressured Yura to choose a Korean name and to stick with it. So, one morning, Yura came into class and made an announcement.

  “I am no longer Kim Yura,” he told his classmates. “I have changed my name to Kim Jong-Il. Call me by that name from now on.”

  * * *

  The future leader’s very name was a calculated composition. In it Yura had combined his mother’s and father’s first names, Jong-Suk and Il-Sung becoming Jong-Il, thereby directly linking him to both the Great Leader and the Mother of the Nation. Although few noticed it then, this was far more than just a Korean stage name. It was legitimacy.

  Still, the new Kim Jong-Il cared as little about his studies as the old Yurei Ilsenovitch Kim had. What he cared about was movies.

  The Central Film Distribution Center, which housed the government-owned film collection, became Kim Jong-Il’s regular haunt. He spent full days and nights there, watching movie after movie. Jong-Il had never traveled much outside of North Korea’s borders—only to Russia, and Manchuria during the Korean War—nor would he for the rest of his life, with the exception of a summer stay in Malta in the early 1970s, to learn English, at which he did poorly. In his life he had very few glimpses of real people and their daily lives, at home or abroad. For the young man who would become leader one day, with power over armies, commandos, nuclear warheads, and the lives of millions of people, the movies were his portal to the outside world. All he knew of it—of the Americas, of Africa, of Europe—came either from a government report or from a movie.

  Jong-Il quickly exhausted the Film Distribution Center’s catalog. He craved Western movies, most of which weren’t distributed on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, let alone in distant North Korea. There was no way to legally rent, purchase, or import them. Jong-Il took it upon himself to acquire the films by any means necessary, launching what was both his first film operation and his first illegal activity: he created a network to bootleg and smuggle them.

  In the typically over-the-top style of an obsessive movie buff, he gave his “distribution” setup the dramatic name of Resource Operation No. 100. Under the supervision of First Deputy Foreign Minister Yi Jong-Mok—who could not disobey the Leader’s son, but must have wondered why his time was being wasted setting up a film piracy outfit—North Korean embassies around the world, from Vienna to Macao, were fitted with professional copying and dubbing equipment. Local embassy staff borrowed 35mm projection copies of the newest films, allegedly for private screenings at the embassy, and without watching them—they were not permitted to—made copies. Every acquirable new release was obtained, from Hollywood movies to Japanese gangster epics, comedies, and soft-core erotica, so many of them that the embassies were overwhelmed and dedicated print facilities had to be built in Prague, Macao, and Guagzhou to handle the volume of film reels coming from embassies everywhere. The reels were then put in diplomatic pouches and shipped to Pyongyang, where they were translated and dubbed into Korean, the dubbing performed by professional actors of the government’s film studio, and each final, exclusive copy was then sent on to Jong-Il, either at the Film Distribution Center or at his residence in Pyongyang. In all, the Pyongyang movie library staff swelled to about 250 full-time employees: actors, translators, subtitle writers, dubbing experts, printers, and archivists.

  Resource Operation No. 100 remained in operation throughout Kim Jong-Il’s life, and these first films became the basis of his gigantic personal film collection. Jong-Il obsessively watched every single one of them. His cinephilia was a concern to his father and his father’s entourage. It seemed unhealthy. But increasingly Jong-Il perceived, behind all the stories, exotic settings, and beautiful people, the riveting potency of the moving pictures. They created a rare heightened focus as one sat cut off from the outside world in that dark room. Every image, every cut, every camera angle, every sound, every focus rack—every one of the filmmaker’s choices—was a suggestion, the whole film a series of subtle suggestions subconsciously manipulating the viewer to a specific thought, feeling, or experience. The power they had on him, Jong-Il saw, was a power they would have on others, too. It was a power he wanted to wield.

  * * *

  Suddenly the younger Kim became active in the student arm of the Workers’ Party, focusing on ideological training and propaganda. He started attending his father’s cabinet meetings and party conferences, even if only as an observer. Before he finished university he did his compulsory military service, completing it in two months instead of the ten years legally required of every other North Korean male. He di
dn’t need so long, propaganda literature explained, because “in the span of eight weeks Comrade Kim Jong-Il mastered the entirety of military tactics and guided the other students in learning real-time battle tactics and leadership skills,” and the training camp he attended has since been turned into a historical shrine. The military training was a mere formality, a box that needed ticking on his revolutionary CV. All he took from it was a lifelong fondness for guns. He loved shooting rifles and pistols as soon as he was introduced to them, and had a personal shooting range built for himself, which he visited regularly for the next four decades. His shooting instructor, Ri Ho-Jun, went on to win the gold medal in 50m rifle prone shooting at the 1972 Munich Olympics, North Korea’s first-ever Olympic gold medal, and later became Jong-Il’s closest personal bodyguard.

  Another important person entered Jong-Il’s life around this time: his uncle, Kim Yong-Ju. Uncle Yong-Ju was eight years younger than his brother Il-Sung. “In the official Kim family mythology,” writes DPRK expert Bradley Martin, “Yong-Ju is described as having spent his childhood in terror, fleeing search parties. Kim Il-Sung wrote in his memoirs that, while he himself battled Japanese troops, the Japanese authorities hunted for Yong-Ju as part of their attempts to pressure rebels. They distributed photographs of the youngster, Kim Il-Sung said, so ‘my brother had to roam aimlessly, under a false name and by concealing his identity, about cities and villages all over the three provinces of Manchuria and even in China proper.’” Ever since then he had been a survivor. Yong-Ju grew up to study economics and philosophy at Moscow University and became a devoted Marxist. He was a smarter, more profound man than his elder brother. A stern-looking man with a high forehead and downturned mouth, his eyes narrow behind thin wire-rimmed eyeglasses, Yong-Ju was not especially fond of the shrill nationalism and overbearing narcissism Kim Il-Sung was starting to use as tools in consolidating his power, but he was loyal, devoted to the cause of the Workers’ Party, and had become the head of the Central Committee, the main organ of government policy making. He had his brother’s ear, and whenever talks were to be held abroad it was Uncle Yong-Ju that the Great Leader sent to represent him. He was North Korea’s number two and widely accepted as the Leader’s most likely successor. Now, either following his own instincts or at the request of his brother, he became Kim Jong-Il’s guardian angel, protecting him from any negative consequences of his indiscretions and failings but also keeping him disciplined and making sure he fulfilled the minimum duties required of him. No one had ever had the courage to reprimand the Supreme Leader’s son before. Every now and then, just often enough, when Jong-Il returned to the army camp after fobbing off training to watch foreign movies, his supervisors were waiting to punish him with a physical beating. The order to do so always came from Uncle Yong-Ju.