A Kim Jong-Il Production Read online

  When Jong-Nam was five, Hye-Rim’s sister, Hae-Rang, moved in with the Kims, at Jong-Il’s request, to help look after the child. Ever since the boy’s birth, Hye-Rim, locked away inside the residence compound, had suffered from insomnia and depression, nervous disorders that would cling to her for the rest of her life. A widow, Hae-Rang brought her two children, who were older than Jong-Nam, with her. The whole family lived in what she called a “luxury prison” for the next two decades. They were forbidden to speak of the family outside of the villa. One friend of Hye-Rim’s, a dancer called Kim Young-Soon who had performed for the Great Leader, spoke of her friend’s relationship with Kim Jong-Il publicly just once. She was arrested with no warning and, without a trial, was sent to the notorious Yoduk prison camp to do hard labor for nine years. When she was finally released, after ten years of imprisonment, her guard’s parting words were “Sung Hye-Rim was never Kim Jong-Il’s concubine. They never had a child. These are all fabrications, nothing but lies. Talk about it again and you will find no mercy.” Kim Young-Soon’s parents and two sons died in the camp alongside her.

  Hae-Rang, in spite of herself, liked Kim Jong-Il. “He has a talent for making people feel at ease when he wants to,” she said. He would crack jokes, often at his own expense. “He is a cultured man and respects knowledge. He enjoys beauty. I’d see his face relax comfortably when he saw something humble and unpretentious. On the other hand, if he saw something shabby and gaudy, he’d yell unmercifully.” When displeased, he was volatile and violent. “When he is happy, he can treat you really, really, really well. But when he’s angry he can make every window in the house shake.” He had screaming and throwing fits when frustrated. Hae-Rang, like others, blamed his upbringing. “He grew up on his own in a place surrounded by unlimited power and luxury without interference from anyone, motherly love and care.… Unlimited power, lack of education, the absence of a mother, and that totalitarian society produced his personality.… Had he grown up in a poor home,” she speculated, “he would have been an artist.”

  He was hard to live with. “The contradictions in his personality can be confusing and incomprehensible,” Hae-Rang said. Words she used to describe him include “romantic” but also “extreme,” “harsh” and “very dangerous.”

  “There are as many interpretations of [Kim Jong-Il’s] personality as there are witnesses,” agrees North Korea expert John Cha. “People who have come in close contact with him have completely different views of him.” Jong-Il’s longtime sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, described him as “a warm person with many hobbies, [who] always wears a smile,” but “when something goes wrong, he yells and screams … like a madman.” His bodyguard Lee Young-Kuk, at first in awe of Kim, eventually called him “extremely cruel,” “impatient and sly.… Inside, he is always scheming, making secret plans. And he is very clever.… There are two sides to him, always.” Jong-Il made snap decisions regarding the people who worked for him, hiring, dismissing, or punishing them on a whim. He utterly despised liars, in spite of being one himself. One Party member remembers the young Kim Jong-Il giving his staff a lecture praising Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Gestapo and one of the heads of the SS during World War II, for his “simple and accurate” reports to Hitler. When disagreed with, he threw tantrums; Lee, the former bodyguard, says one of Jong-Il’s mottos was “If the enemy gives you a problem, yell louder than him, and he will back down.” He was quick-tempered, narrow-minded, jealous, insecure, and often cruel.

  He was also very, very careful. It was around this time that he had decided he was going to be the one to succeed his father and take over the running of North Korea, and his private life was his weakness, his fragile corridor. The way to the leadership, Jong-Il had found, was simple: in a country where life depended on pleasing Kim Il-Sung, he would have to be the one to please Kim Il-Sung the most. Soon, he would accomplish this through his greatest passion, about to become his most effective weapon: film.

  7

  Inside the Pyongyang Picture Show

  Kim Jong-Il’s film world was, almost without a doubt, one of the world’s most surreal and, on a national policy scale, influential.

  Cinema’s purpose in North Korea had always been to inculcate the right thinking into the people. Unlike Soviet cinema, which was seen as a tool to “enlighten” the masses, North Korean cinema did not seek to educate, inform, or lift the people’s knowledge of historical class struggles or the importance of equality and collective ownership. The films, especially under Kim Jong-Il, existed to drill the regime’s core principles into the populace: that the Supreme Leader Kim Il-Sung was the greatest man who had ever lived; that loyalty to him and to the national “family” was a greater virtue than any other; and that the Korean people were a purer race, more virtuous and valuable, than any other. Only a Korean could have been the Supreme Leader, the Sun of Humanity, and since the Supreme Leader was the most Korean of Koreans, anything less than blind obedience to him made you a traitor to your nation, your race, your very blood. Follow him, however, and the Workers’ Paradise becomes reality.

  In the first few years following the DPRK’s founding in 1948, Korean society was rural and malleable. Ideology would reach the people not through books or debates in cafés, but on a projection screen. Film was cheap and easy to control, with the exact same print of the exact same film being shown everywhere during the same release window. It was popular, a novelty, entertainment as much as it was art or education. The people were enthusiastic about it and unlikely to notice they were being fed propaganda—or if they did, at least they were likely to enjoy the experience. Where books and newspapers were read privately, film viewing was a public, collective experience, perfect for a socialist society looking to inculcate a collective consciousness in its people. And where a book was written by one person, films were a collaborative endeavor, less likely to go off-message and, in North Korea at least, impossible to make and distribute without state approval. The complex logistics of making films meant they could be controlled by the state as no other art form could.

  But when, following the end of the Korean War in 1953, Kim Il-Sung had rid himself of all rivals, he had also sent home all possible foreign influencers in government, including in culture and the arts. Left to its own devices, isolated from innovations elsewhere in the world, and limited by the needs of propaganda, North Korean film spent fifteen years churning out the same tedious stories of selfless factory workers and exemplary farm girls.

  With Jong-Il in charge, technical quality increased dramatically. North Korean filmmakers knew nothing of the state of cinema outside their borders, but Jong-Il had seen every new release of the last decade. The year he took over at the North Korean studios, 1968, was the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, and Once Upon a Time in the West; the world’s biggest stars were Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen. The Dear Leader, as the Party had lately started encouraging the people to call the Premier’s son, spared no expense in bringing his industry up to speed—flying in equipment, refurbishing the film studios, informing his crews of modern styles even if he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let them watch foreign films for themselves.

  But while Jong-Il had both unlimited money and wide-ranging knowledge as a film viewer, he had absolutely no practical experience of filmmaking itself. Choe Ik-Gyu, the studio’s former head, did, and he became Jong-Il’s right-hand man and closest collaborator. Seven years older than Kim and taller, Choe was a thin man with a high forehead, receding hairline, flat nose, and prominent Adam’s apple. Big glasses, lightly tinted a smoky yellow, and a serious, doglike facial expression gave him the faint look of a Sean Connery–era Bond villain. He wouldn’t have looked out of place carrying a briefcase full of stolen state secrets in You Only Live Twice. He became Kim’s closest creative partner; he has even been described as Kim’s “film tutor.” Kim had grown up on a gluttonous and unrestricted diet of worldwide film. Choe had a formal arts education and had learned filmmaking under the rigorous Stalini
st Soviet model. They complemented each other perfectly. Until Kim Jong-Il’s death Choe could be seen in official pictures, standing close behind his leader, applauding him along with everyone else.

  Kim and Choe’s first collaborations—Jong-Il as producer and supervisor, Choe as director—were huge successes with audiences and became so important in North Korean cinema history that they are known in the country as the Immortal Classics, beginning with the epic Sea of Blood and culminating in the 1972 drama The Flower Girl. The Flower Girl was Jong-Il’s baby: he helped write the script, cast the unknown teenage girl who played the film’s lead, supervised its editing, and was on set almost every day supervising filming and deciding on shots and staging. The film, again based on a play allegedly written by Kim Il-Sung while a Japanese prisoner in 1930, tells the story of Cot-Bun, a girl from a rural village during the Japanese occupation who sells flowers to help support her family. Her father is dead, her mother ill and toiling day and night in the employ of a tyrannical landlord, her brother in a Japanese jail, her sister blind after having had boiling water thrown in her face by the landlord’s wife. The “plot” is a succession of cruel turns of fate dealt to Cot-Bun and her family until, just as she is finally about to give up, she is rescued by her liberated brother and Kim Il-Sung’s Korean Liberation Army. The Koreans are all exemplary, bound by solidarity and compassion, the Japanese and their collaborators sneering and sadistic. Over and over the characters long for “someone precious, like in the old tales,” a messiah—Kim Il-Sung.

  The importance of The Flower Girl in North Korean cultural history is almost impossible to exaggerate. The film was a gigantic popular success, both in North Korea and in China, the first time a North Korean film found a large audience abroad. It won a special prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, the first international prize for a North Korean film (and, until the early 1980s, the only one). Its star, Hong Yong-Hee, was so iconic that her face was plastered on murals across Pyongyang and on the North Korean one-won banknote. In 2009, when the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited Pyongyang, it was Hong Yong-Hee who greeted his plane. The celebrated Chinese author Tie Ning describes the experience of seeing The Flower Girl in her novel How Long Is Forever?: “A North Korean movie named The Flower Girl was playing at theaters in major cities across the country. This movie practically drowned everyone in tears.… Sitting in front of me was an adult crying so hard that he hit his spine painfully against the back of the seat. He became hysterical and made a lot of noise, but no one complained because everyone else was too busy crying.”

  The Flower Girl also cemented Choe Ik-Gyu’s place as Jong-Il’s most trusted creative collaborator. From now on Jong-Il entrusted Choe not just with films, but with the creation of the state’s highest-profile public events, such as Kim Il-Sung’s birthday celebrations and Day of Liberation marches. Choe would be instrumental in creating the awe-inspiring, huge-scale displays of synchronized unity that developed into the famous Mass Games. The modern North Korean state, which is a production, a display performance of its own, owes as much to Choe Ik-Gyu’s taste and talents as it does to Kim Jong-Il.

  * * *

  A year after The Flower Girl was released Jong-Il published On the Art of the Cinema, a treatise based on speeches he had given his directors and screenwriters over the previous five years. (“Marx worked for four decades to complete Capital,” the official Party news organ informed the People. “By contrast, it only took Comrade Kim Jong-Il two to three years to write On the Art of the Cinema.”) The book summed up his filmmaking philosophy and producing policies. He dismissed the idea that, to be masterpieces, films had to be big epics “dealing with immense historical facts.” Instead he instructed that “a masterwork should be monumental not in size but in content” and encouraged his writers and directors to favor character over plot, emphasizing “the different fates and psychology of persons … rather than the events themselves.” He pushed for realism (“officials and creators should always remember that truth is the lifeblood of an artwork and that especially films, a visual art, should describe life truthfully in every detail”) while also asking for emotions and events to be heightened to a histrionic, melodramatic pitch. He suggested films be based on everyday stories of the sterling members of the People, or even on popular songs (forty years after Arthur Freed had based Singin’ in the Rain on a popular tune). More important than any of that, however, Kim’s greatest contribution as a critical thinker—the one North Korean schoolchildren were taught to associate with how he advanced culture and the arts—was what he called the “seed.” The seed was a film’s “main nucleus and ideological kernel … as a farmer selects and sows a good seed and tends it well to reap good fruit, so the seed of a film should be chosen correctly and its depiction deepened on that basis to produce an excellent work.” The seed was the propagandistic message the film was designed to promote and inculcate in the audience, and which every scene, line of dialogue, and aspect of performance should serve. Jong-Il used the term almost constantly, from conception to distribution. The Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn supposedly stated that his movies didn’t have an agenda—“just write me a good comedy,” he said; “if you want to send a message, use Western Union”—but Kim Jong-Il could not have felt more differently. His message, sent in every single film, was simple: Kim Il-Sung—the Great Leader, the Outstanding Marshal, the Sun of Korea—was the liberator and protector of the People; the People could not exist without him; there was no higher virtue than obeying and serving him like a father, and disagreeing with him made you, deeply and insidiously, un-Korean. Everything from the choice of behind-the-camera talent to the selection and writing of stories was determined by how it served the myth of Kim Il-Sung. Where, in the past, a character might have done his heroic deeds “for the Party,” now the same character’s dialogue was rewritten so that he had done it “for the Leader.” Virtually all films were set between 1920 and 1953, so that they could repeatedly show a world blanketed in darkness and suffering—until Kim’s men, like the cavalry in a western, rode in to the rescue. Emphasizing the collective good was paramount, and stories of individual fulfillment and heroics, so common in the West, were banned.

  Jong-Il’s duty as the head of the film studio, as he saw it, was not just to make better movies. His creative work was his way into his father’s heart and his trust: he would operate, essentially, as if he were Kim Il-Sung’s publicity guru. On the silver screen the People’s Republic won the war over and over again. Kim Il-Sung, the films said, had saved the nation—was still saving the nation every single day.

  * * *

  Kim Il-Sung loved the films his son made for him. Their depiction of him as a saint and hero fed his ego. The partisans who had fought alongside him, and who now wielded serious influence inside the Workers’ Party, ate them up as well.

  The author Bradley Martin tells the story of how he once asked a North Korean official what the Party would do after the death of President Kim Il-Sung. The official replied, “If he dies—erm, I mean, when he dies—we’ll find another leader.”

  What would happen after he died had actually been on Kim Il-Sung’s mind for some time. He had watched as Khrushchev and Brezhnev had turned their backs on Stalin, how Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng were minimizing Maoist principles and opening China to free-market dynamics. Stalinists were being removed from power in Poland; a popular revolution had taken Hungary by storm in 1956; Václav Havel was fostering dissent in Czechoslovakia. Kim Il-Sung was concerned with what would happen in North Korea after he had passed away. The only way to preserve the Workers’ Paradise, he saw, was to appoint a successor and consolidate that person’s power before his own death. He had to choose someone close and loyal—not just so that they would remain true to his aims and ambitions, but also so that they would not be tempted to hurry their own coronation by getting rid of him before his time.

  A blood relative seemed safest. That left only three serious candidates: his
younger brother, Kim Yong-Ju, and his own sons, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Pyong-Il. Uncle Yong-Ju was more experienced and better educated, had already been working at the top level of the Party for three decades, and had actually been a part of the fight against the Japanese. Pyong-Il was young, driven, and took after his father. It was Jong-Il, however, who understood his father best of the three. He saw that the very traits Uncle Yong-Ju deplored in Il-Sung—his ego, his narcissism, his desire to be seen as Korea’s modern-day emperor and messiah—were the very things to feed to receive his father’s favor. The Sun of Korea, as Kim liked to be known, had eliminated rivals and purged entire families and political factions to hold on to power. He had had novels and multiple-volume biographies written about himself to amend history in his favor. He didn’t just want to be the leader of the nation: he wanted to be the nation. Jong-Il understood that his father would not choose as his successor the man who promised to be best for North Korea or for the people. His father would choose the man who promised to be best for Kim Il-Sung, even after Kim Il-Sung himself was dead. Like all shrewd politicians, what Kim Il-Sung cared about was the future as much as the present: he cared about legacy.