The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Kim Jong-il’s guide to cinema
In print for 50 years, the late North Korean leader’s odd contribution to film criticism explores the niceties of making movies under a totalitarian regime
It’s 50 years this month since the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il published one of the seminal books of his lifetime. I’m not referring to his 1992 tome Let Us Further Strengthen Our Single-Hearted Unity and Give Full Play to the Korean-Nation-First Spirit; nor, indeed, to Let Us Bring
About a New Upswing in Agricultural Production on the Basis of the Achievements in the Large-Scale Land Realignment and Irrigation Construction, published in 2002, nine years before his death.
Of the hundreds of books Kim put out there, only one has gained a form of perverse cult status: On the Art of Cinema, his 1973 guide to what types of filmmaking are desirable, and therefore possible, under his country’s government.
Kim – then the 32-year-old son of Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung, working in arts administration – assembled the book from a number of speeches he’d already given to directors and screenwriters. As a young man, he’d been highly active in the Party’s propaganda wing, producing an assortment of guerrilla plays and revolutionary operas, including Sea of Blood (1969), a rabble-rouser set under the Japanese occupation in the 1930s. Credited to his father, this long-running favourite was converted into a twopart black-and-white film of the same name, which the younger Kim also produced.
There is no other film in his book that gets so appreciatively, and ever so frequently, cited as Sea of Blood. It’s Kim’s model for everything cinema might do to reinforce the national principle of “Juche” – roughly translated as “self-reliance”. “The image of the mother in Sea of Blood,” Kim maintains, “is an excellent example of a character whose growth into a revolutionary is conditioned by life’s vicissitudes.”
He seems obsessed with certain dogmatic principles of narrative – and has no time for any “film with an untidy plot”. It’s unlikely he would have been the biggest fan of the metaverse-hopping Everything Everywhere All at Once, or indeed the slippery slope of Tár.
Instead, he cites a 1971 socialrealist drama called When We Pick Apples, about two sisters working in an orchard, as a great paradigm for presenting, then resolving, an ideological clash. “The younger sister considers it shocking to see so many fallen apples rotting and makes up her mind to save more of them for the people, as required by the Party. The elder sister leads an easy-going life, and seems unperturbed, as if she could not see the apples.” Place your bets now as to which sibling comes out on top.
The extent of Kim’s cinephilia is proved by the bizarre fate of South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, and his former wife, and leading lady, Choi Eun-hee. In 1978, while in Hong Kong, the pair were bundled onto motorboats, then held captive by the North Korean state for five years, because Kim needed their services to revive the flagging fortunes of his country’s film industry. In terror of constant surveillance, they obliged, making a series of nationalist melodramas, and the notorious Pulgasari (1985), a Godzilla knock-off about a rampaging dragon with a social conscience.
Shin and Choi no doubt memorised On the Art of Cinema cover-tocover, as a handy guide to how not to get re-imprisoned. Some of Kim’s chapter headings – “Begin on a Small Scale and End Grandly” seem fairly pragmatic, at least if hearty propaganda is your bag. Others tend towards the superfluous: “Costumes and Hand Props Should Conform to the Period and the Character.” If you were out to explore, say, the early years of guerrilla activity in Manchuria, there would be no slipping an iPhone past this guy.
Kim’s also a stickler for wellobserved set design. “In one old film the house of a musician who was suffering every manner of humiliation and insult under the colonial rule of Japanese imperialism was arranged in a manner that did not conform with his standard of living. It contained an expensive piece of embroidery and a huge mirror, which were actually only
Beside the nationalist propaganda he made, Kim also loved Rambo and Friday the 13th
appropriate to the living standards of the rich at that time.” Low end of two stars, from the sounds of things.
For Kim, all films demand the crucial element of song – and not just any old song, but “musical masterpieces”. “Everyone knows My Heart Will Remain Faithful from Sea of Blood and The Red Flower of Revolution Is Kept in Full Bloom from The Flower Girl [a 1972 film, once again set during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s]. The more one heard them, the more one wanted to hear them, and the more one sang them, the more one wanted to sing them.” Kim died just a few years too early, or Never Enough from The Greatest Showman would surely have got its claws into him.
When Fritz Lang’s character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) comments on the CinemaScope process (for shooting wide-screen films), he famously quips that it’s only good for two things: “Snakes and funerals.” Kim makes the same point in his rather more sluggish way. “Some people attempt to exploit the advantages of the wide screen by presenting nothing but large images of objects and crowding a lot of things into a single frame. In doing this they are thinking of nothing but the scale and form of the screen and ignoring the requirements of the content to be presented on it.”
Kim didn’t only have a fondness for nationalist blockbusters he personally produced; some Western cinema sneaked into his personal pantheon, too. According to Shin, he adored the Rambo series, Friday the 13th and James Bond. When he succeeded to power in 1994, he showed In the Line of Fire (1993) to his security detail – an intriguing choice, given how Clint Eastwood’s former CIA agent is haunted by having failed to save JFK.
Critiquing this text in Kim’s lifetime might have seemed foolhardy, but from this safe distance I think we may be allowed some mild caveats – about its repetitive monotony, bullying humourlessness and lack of pith. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve read a book with less pleasure, except perhaps Fifty Shades of Grey or Martin Amis’s Night Train.
And yet, in the closing pages of On the Art of Cinema, I stumble across a few extraordinarily acute, indeed prophetic, words of wisdom for my own career. “Good results cannot be expected,” Kim writes, “from reviewing a multitude of accumulated works in a few days under a crash programme.” Now, that’s a sentiment that even this film critic can get behind.