A Kim Jong-Il Production Page 8

  His son set out to ensure it for him. Along with cinematically idolizing and deifying his father, he would prove that no one else was more devoted to Il-Sung. In a country where Confucian values still held powerful sway and where filial loyalty was everything, this would become Jong-Il’s public persona, his brand. The good son. The worshipful son. The humble son, who would set an example for the people by loving the father and never daring to question him. Though Jong-Il was ruthless in his quest for power, his most remarkable trick was that he managed to do it while retaining a reputation as someone who was not especially keen on power anyway. “He was jealous and cunning,” Hwang Jang-Yop, one of Kim Il-Sung’s close advisers, said. “I could see that he craved power.… He has always organized everything in secret and executed his plan in secret. That is his specialty.” He stayed in the background, portraying himself as respectful, artistic, and devoted. When foreign dignitaries visited, Jong-Il always hung back, letting his father take center stage, only sending fruit baskets to the guests’ rooms along with a note to express his best wishes. He never spoke in public. All the while, Hwang said, “he singled out people near Kim Il-Sung. Arguing that these people were not loyal and citing doubts about their ideology and competency, he would relentlessly attack and remove them,” replacing them with close allies of his own.

  Jong-Il’s first recourse was rarely violence. He liked to plant recording devices in people’s offices and homes, learn what they liked (a certain foreign car, a kind of brandy, maybe a preferred ethnicity of prostitute), and then try to buy them. If that didn’t work, the same information could be used for blackmail. Only when pushed, or insulted, did Jong-Il resort to violence. In those early days, when he was still widely underestimated, it happened often. Vice Prime Minister Nam-Il was crushed to death by a passing truck in a country with virtually no cars, his death mentioned only briefly in the back pages of the official Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, in spite of his having been a national hero. Former Vice President Kim Tong-Kyu was snatched out of the blue and sent to a prison camp, without being told his crime, and died there. He was joined by several other men, mostly army generals and Party dignitaries, charged with “gross incompetence” and “factionalism.” The guilty men all happened to have been part of Uncle Yong-Ju’s inner circle.

  In September 1973, the Party Central Committee had convened for an emergency meeting at the behest of Kim Il-Sung, and elected his son Kim Jong-Il to membership of the Politburo. In the same meeting Jong-Il was named the new Party secretary for organization and guidance, replacing the outgoing secretary, his uncle Kim Yong-Ju. Uncle Yong-Ju was made vice premier, an honorary post in a country where honorary posts are considered “the mark of a failed life.” He spent the next twenty years under house arrest.

  Around the same time Jong-Il introduced his father to two pretty young things from his performance troupe. He knew his father’s taste. Jong-Il’s aging, despised stepmother found herself isolated and out of influence, unsure what, exactly, had caused her fall from grace. Her son, Kim Pyong-Il, was sent into exile, in a series of postings to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Finland. The whispers in Pyongyang were that Jong-Il’s wiretaps in his half brother’s office had turned up conversations in which Pyong-Il had openly been talking about replacing his father, and all Jong-Il had had to do was to deliver the recordings to the Great Leader. And just like that, in the race to become the new leader, Kim Jong-Il was the last man standing. Skeptical key officials still had to be won over, possible hidden opponents rooted out and eliminated. A very, very long game still had to be played, for twenty years would pass between now and his official assumption following Kim Il-Sung’s death, twenty years during which, if he let his guard down, his own life would be on the line. “He’s on a speeding train,” Hye-Rin’s sister, Hae-Rang, said. “Any move to stop it or get off, and it will crash.”

  * * *

  The North Korean film industry, citizens were told, was fast becoming the most advanced in the world, with Jong-Il as its blazing torch, lighting a creative path never walked before. In fact, the Korea Film Studio was home to the most absurd, wasteful practices anywhere. Charles Jenkins, a former United States soldier who defected to North Korea in 1965 and lived there until 2004, was one of the people given a glimpse into Kim Jong-Il’s surreal movie world. Jenkins, one of four U.S. defectors residing in North Korea in the 1970s, was shuffled from job to job by his Korean guards, who seemed unsure of how best to use their Western “guests.” One of the U.S. defectors’ jobs had been to transcribe random English-language audiotapes, word for word, which were then translated into Korean by a Pyongyang interpreter. There was no image, just sound, and the Americans received only a few minutes at a time, to hide from them exactly what they were listening to. But one day Jenkins recognized the dialogue from a Walt Disney movie and realized he and the others were part of the team creating subtitles of foreign movies. Jenkins transcribed several dozen movies which he occasionally identified—Kramer vs. Kramer and Mary Poppins were two that he knew—but most of which he never learned the titles of. The films were being prepared for Kim Jong-Il, most likely as part of Resource Operation No. 100, the film bootlegging operation he had begun when still a student.

  In the late 1970s Jenkins and the other defectors were again enlisted to aid Jong-Il’s cinematic endeavors, this time on camera. Until now, Westerners had been played by North Koreans in caked white makeup and wigs, speaking Korean with an odd, made-up accent that was meant to pass for American, British, or Continental European. Now Kim had at his disposal four actual Americans to play his pantomime villains and profiteers. One day Jenkins’s live-in guard came to tell him that he had been “cast” in his first movie role, an epic multipart saga called Unknown Heroes, playing “the evil Dr. Kelton, a U.S. warmonger and capitalist based in South Korea whose goal in life was to keep the war going to benefit American arms manufacturers.” Jenkins’s head was shaved and his face covered in heavy makeup. He shot his part and was returned to his residence. Since no American names could appear on a DPRK motion picture, Jenkins was given the stage name Min Hyung-Chun.

  Jenkins was called upon again numerous times throughout the years, until as late as 2000, to play different roles in North Korean movies and television shows. There was such a shortage of foreign faces that the families of diplomats and visiting businessmen were drafted when possible, too, a limited stock of ill-fitting uniforms, wigs, and detachable facial hair mixed and matched on them so that they could play as many villainous parts as possible. Jenkins was eventually given a medal for his creative work. “You had to appear in two installments of Unknown Heroes to get a medal,” he recalled.

  Even he, who had no previous film experience, could see the North Korean film industry was “a joke” when he first got involved in it. “They didn’t bring any common sense to planning the filming. For example, they would often film the scenes in the order that they appeared in the script rather than in the order that made shooting more efficient. If, say, there was a scene at Claus’s office, then a scene at my office, and then a third scene at Claus’s office, they would film it in that order, breaking down Claus’s office and rebuilding it after filming my scene rather than just filming both of Claus’s scenes in a row and then filming mine.… I actually think that even the North Koreans couldn’t have been that stupid. I suspect part of the reason they filmed it that way was because they were often writing the story as they went, all the way up to the day of shooting.” Synchronized sound was still rudimentary in Pyongyang, fifty years after the first Hollywood talkie, so dialogue was often badly dubbed in postproduction. The most popular actors regularly disappeared from screens from one day to the next: declared guilty of some obscure offense, they were never seen publicly again; their faces were cut out of old films, rendering the films unintelligible.

  The propaganda got in the way of good storytelling, too. Jong-Il had decreed a set of peculiar visual codes: South Korea and Japan, if shown, always had to be shown in rain, never
sunshine, and preferably at night. It is, of course, always sunny in the Workers’ Paradise. American characters were not allowed to look normal and must have one or several over-the-top physical features—a limp, perhaps, or muttonchop facial hair. The Supreme Leader—with the exception of a film biography of him, made in 1982—was never shown, only spoken of. The heroes were always young, plump, rosy-cheeked girls or young, strapping men. Because all films were shot on the Korea Film Studio back lot, which consisted of one stock South Korean street, one stock “colonial days” street, and one stock “Japanese city” street, every single scene set abroad or in a certain time period seems to take place on exactly the same street of the same city—whether, for instance, the film calls for Seoul in 1975 or a small South Korean village in 1949. And because Kim’s crews had a limited stock of equipment to work with, the movies all had an identical film grammar: flat lighting, no zooms, specific shot sizes matching specific emotions, and specific story beats across every picture, regardless of genre.

  North Korean audiences, who knew no better, ate the films up. Cinema going was compulsory. If there was no cinema in your town, the local factory or Party office would be turned into one for a new film’s release, and every adult and child was required to attend a showing as well as a postviewing “criticism session” afterward to ensure they had correctly absorbed the film’s key message.

  By the 1970s, Kim Il-Sung’s regime was demonstrating aspirations to global importance. His diplomats were forging ties with left-wing governments and socialist parties in Europe, and consular “missionaries” were being sent to countries throughout Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean to preach the cult of Kim Il-Sung. In culture, too, efforts were being made to improve North Korea’s international standing. Kim Il-Sung’s works were translated into a dozen languages and leather-bound copies shipped abroad, and Pyongyang’s circuses and opera troupes were touring China and Eastern Europe with their most impressive shows, the stage version of Sea of Blood among them.

  These initiatives met with varying degrees of success. Embarrassingly for Jong-Il and his acolyte Choe Ik-Gyu, however, the failings of North Korean film were never more evident than when the movies were sent abroad. At a time when the United States was giving us The Godfather, Star Wars, and Jaws, and Asian cinema was exporting stars like Bruce Lee and Amitabh Bachcan, North Korea was stuck in a time warp. Domestic audiences might have swallowed everything they saw on film as fact, but the few foreigners who saw local films laughed at their simplicity and cringed at their tediousness.

  For Jong-Il, this was a serious and important failure. He had improved his nation’s cinema, and he had made sure it contributed to the regime’s control over the people. But south of the thirty-eighth parallel, Park Chung-Hee’s government had turned South Korea into an export country. South Korean products, from textiles to electronics, were everywhere in Asia, and Seoul’s prestige had grown accordingly. South Korean films and music, too, were beginning to receive international attention, scholarship, and respect. Kim Jong-Il, who was responsible for the entirety of North Korea’s cultural output, all of it state controlled, was falling dangerously behind.

  * * *

  It was Akira Kurosawa who changed Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee’s life—indirectly, unwittingly, and twenty-eight years before the fact.

  After the humiliation and isolation of World War II, Japan had made it a policy goal to establish itself as a “leading cultural country,” using the arts to improve its image and raise its prestige abroad. Cinema was selected as the best cultural shop window. One of the ways the Japanese government intended to establish its cinematic prowess was by winning awards—and, at the time, the major European film festival awards (Cannes, Berlin, Venice) were as prestigious as it got. But, half a decade after the end of the war, not only had Japan failed to win a prize, it was putting itself in embarrassing situations trying to do so. In 1951 the Cannes Film Festival sent an invitation for Japan to enter a feature in that year’s competition, only for the Motion Picture Association of Japan to realize that the one production it felt suitable had ripped off a novel by French writer Romain Rolland, something French cinephiles on the Riviera were sure to notice and, with their adoration for auteurs, equally sure to get up in arms about. A short film was humiliatingly submitted instead. Some weeks later the Venice Film Festival came along with an invitation for a Japanese submission. This time the Motion Picture Association had no problem submitting the Rolland-based film—only to have to pull it again when it came to light that Toho, the film’s producer, was so broke it couldn’t afford to make a 35mm print with Italian subtitles. The Japanese were about to regretfully turn down their second opportunity in two weeks, likely ruining any chances of being invited again in the future, when, unexpectedly, a little-known Italian lady by the name of Giuliana Stramigioli, head of an Italian film company’s operations in Japan, called in to suggest a small independent film she had recently seen, the “strangeness” of which she had liked. The film was Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

  Rashomon had almost not been made. It was considered so offbeat and weird that Kurosawa’s usual employer, the Toyoko Company, bound to make any script the director brought to them while under contract, had fired the filmmaker rather than embarrass itself by paying for it. It took another producer, Masaichi Nagata, to get Rashomon made, almost by accident. Nagata, a businessman who was best known for his cheap, unoriginal, but wildly successful genre pictures, nonetheless had a fascination with prestigious artists and a longing to be associated with them. When Kurosawa became available Nagata offered him a distribution and production contract that allowed him to make any film he chose. Kurosawa chose Rashomon. When Rashomon was explained to Nagata he refused to make it and tried to break the contract, only giving in because of Kurosawa’s stubborn insistence.

  Now, with the film just completed, here came Signora Stramigioli, suggesting it should represent Japan in Venice. Nagata was horrified. He was sure the film would be a humiliating failure. But Stramigioli seemed sure, and in the 1950s a foreigner’s opinion held quite a lot of weight, so Rashomon headed to Venice—and won the Grand Jury Prize. The win caused national jubilation and kicked off a string of Japanese victories at prestigious film festivals, including awards at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin in the following two years. In 1954, having learned his lesson, Nagata sent another one of his films, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell, to Cannes, where it won the Grand Jury Prize on its way to winning two Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film. The Japanese people started to take film festivals seriously, some critics even beginning to compare them to the Olympic Games and exhorting Japanese filmmakers to enter and win each and every one of them for the glory of the motherland. If a film was sent to Cannes or Venice and failed to win a prize, the filmmakers returned home to issue groveling public apologies and pen articles with titles like “What I Learned at Cannes About Producing Prizewinners.”

  Following Rashomon’s win, the world had taken notice of Japanese cinema. By the 1970s, when Kim Jong-Il was leading his country’s studios, Akira Kurosawa was working for 20th Century–Fox, and up-and-coming American directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese were name-checking him as an influence and one of their favorite filmmakers. In both Koreas, where filmmakers had always sought to emulate Japanese cinema and where the government, like Japan’s, saw movies as a potentially vital cultural export, producers dreamed of ways to repeat Kurosawa’s success and become national heroes themselves.

  This was the kind of recognition Kim Jong-Il craved.

  * * *

  If he was to impress his father and to fulfill his own lifelong dream, Jong-Il needed to make a mark internationally. He had the ambition and the resources; what he lacked were the experience and filmmaking talent. But in a country known as the Hermit Kingdom, where no one on the inside was allowed out and no outsiders were allowed in, where could he find it?

  It was then, in 1977, that Kim Jong
-Il came up with his master plan.

  All he needed was one thing—or, more precisely, one person—to pull it off.

  8

  A Three-Second Kiss

  Shin Sang-Ok had it all. He was making films loved by millions, revered by the critics, showered with awards; his film company was the most successful in his country’s history; he was rich and healthy; and he had two children with the most beautiful, outstanding woman in all of Korea, a woman he had loved and craved since their first conversation. Yes, Shin Sang-Ok had absolutely everything a man could want.

  And he might have kept it, too. If only he hadn’t kept wanting more.

  * * *

  The 1970s were a difficult decade for everyone in South Korean cinema. Millions of Korean households now had television, the economy slowed after the 1973 oil crisis, and the government’s regulations had become so demanding and confusing that most filmmakers spent more time trying to beat the system than they did actually making films. The entire country, in fact, was adjusting to increased governmental oversight. President Park’s administration was growing rigid and paranoid in panicked response to repeated North Korean attacks and provocations. In 1968, Kim Il-Sung’s men captured the American warship USS Pueblo, killing one of the crew, and launched a failed commando raid to assassinate Park. Nine months later a hundred North Korean commandos landed on the east coast of South Korea and tried to spark a revolution, also in vain; in 1970 North Korean agents planted a bomb at the site of a scheduled speech of Park’s, but they botched that as well. Four years later, a North Korean assassin killed the South Korean First Lady with a bullet he had intended for her husband, a tragedy that devastated Park Chung-Hee. That same year, South Korean forces discovered an underground infiltration tunnel dug under the DMZ by North Korean operatives. Two more tunnels were later discovered. All three were large enough to accommodate four columns of infantry soldiers, as well as any number of five-ton trucks and 155mm Howitzer guns. Unbeknownst to the public, around this time Kim Il-Sung had traveled to Beijing to request Zhou Enlai’s support in a second Korean War. He was refused, but it seems Kim had planned on putting those tunnels to use sooner than anyone realized.