Book Review: A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power – Paul Fischer
Ford, G. (2015). A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power by Paul Fischer, Asian Review of Books, 27 July.
Meiji Japan found that one way to shorten the learning curve in technology was by importing “live machines”—foreigners hired for their knowledge and expertise. But in the late 1970s, Pyongyang found a further refinement when it skipped the hiring phase and apparently abducted those it wanted to revive the North’s flagging film industry. Kim Jong Il first ordered the kidnapping of South Korea’s leading actress Choi Eun Hee from Hong Kong in January 1978 and subsequently her estranged husband, the equally famous Director Shin Sang Ok, six months later. A Kim Jong-il Production tells their story set against the backdrop of the North Korean Film Industry.
But to start at the beginning, after liberation from Japan in 1945. Kim Il Sung—like Lenin—was an advocate of the power of cinema. After the DPRK’s founding in 1948, ideology was to be projected on the screen. Film was both cheap, controllable and collective. For the vast majority of the then predominantly rural population it was a revelation. The North’s first movie “My Own Village” was made in 1949 by the newly-created National Film Production Center funded by Moscow, who also trained the technicians. It tells a story of the single-handed liberation of Korea by the partisan guerrilla fighters led by an unseen Kim Il Sung. The Korean War and its aftermath saw the North’s soldiers being screen supermen as again and again small groups of the Korean People’s Army bested both the Americans and the South Koreans by guile and guts. The war movies slowly gave way to “socialist realism” in the 1960s with not so hidden exhortations in such films as “My New Family” to be satisfied by one’s lot in the countryside and not to hanker after life in Pyongyang.
By the mid-1960s, the war films were old and “socialist realism” tired; Kim Jong Il then arrived on the scene with his adoration of the silver screen and thousands of movies at home. He was responsible for the making of “Sea of Blood” (1968)—an epic re-telling of “My Own Village”— and “Flower Girl” (1972) that proved an enormous success not only in the DPRK, perhaps unsurprisingly, but also in China.
There were films of National Reunification featuring twin sisters torn apart by the war with the one in the North leading a proud and happy life while her twin sister suffers in the South.Then a 20-part espionage and conspiracy series “Unknown Heroes” (1978-81) based around the Korean War where the westerners were played by Pyongyang’s four US deserters who had crossed the line from the South. But the audiences were becoming bored even if historical costume drama worked for a while; all of which rehearses Johannes Schönherr’s definitive North Korean Cinema: A History (2012).
Kim increasingly despaired of the home grown talent suffocated by orthodoxy and isolation. The solution was the “live machines”.
Fischer points out that both Shin and Choi had North Korean connections. He had been born in Chongjin in the far northeast of the country and went as a student to Tokyo to study painting before returning to join his family in early 1945 when they had moved to Seoul.
Choi, just breaking into acting, found herself on the wrong side of the frontline in the capital in 1950, as the war washed back and forth in its first nine months, and became an entertainer for her erstwhile enemies for over a year before been taken by South Korean troops and put back to work entertaining their army instead. Life as an entertainer was less brutal in the North. Choi was raped by a military policeman.
In the South after the war their careers took off after the two hooked up together as Director and Star; they made dozens of movies together. Shin was for a while virtually the South Korean film industry on his own. But then he fell into good company that turned very sour. He became close to South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, but as Shin pushed his luck the relationship ended and Park effectively closed Shin’s film studios leaving Shin and Choi close to bankruptcy and desperate. It was then they were serially kidnapped.
They were held separately for almost five years. Choi in luxury at Kim’s parties and Shin punished in prison until they were put together—and to work—by Kim Jong Il in 1983. Shin worked his magic with a series of groundbreaking films that ranged across the genres, nationalistic dramas, socialist-realism tragedy, romantic melodrama, and a martial arts film.
They had the audiences in raptures and riots. The films were so popular people died in the crush to see them. This increasingly created both artistic and geographic space. They were allowed to travel outside the North initially to Moscow then Berlin and finally the West. Their first film was “Emissary of No Return” (1983) which was shown—with them present—at the London Film Festival. Nothing was too much trouble or expense. When they wanted a closing shot of an exploding train for the climax of “Runaway”(1984) there were no special effects. Kim just provided a real train to blow up.
Their last film was “Pulgasari” (1985) a heavily symbolic monster movie. Here an old dying blacksmith imprisoned by the evil King makes a small doll out of rice that is miraculously brought to life by the blood of the blacksmith’s daughter. The doll transforms into a metal eating monster that unites with the peasantry to overthrow the King. But then turns on the farmers and eats their farm implements threatening them with starvation until killed by the blacksmith’s daughter.
“Pulgasari” was a winner at least for Shin and Choi. Kim Jong Il saw it as a potential breakthrough into the international market. They were allowed to Austria to ostensibly look for coproduction funds to make a blockbuster “Genghis Khan” that would cost more than the first “Star Wars” movie had in 1977. In March 1986, they fled from their hotel to seek asylum for them and the $2 million Kim had entrusted them with in the American Embassy in Vienna.
Their escape was an overnight sensation, but it was the last act. They were left alone and adrift. Seoul was less than fully convinced by their stories. In the US Disney gave Shin a final chance, but his “3 Ninjas” trilogy got worse by the episode and it had started badly.
Paul Fischer tells the tale well and it’s a fascinating story. One can only wonder if he’s naive in taking all of their stories at face value. Certainly the end is more convincing than the beginning. While the borrowed tales of Kim Jong Il to embellish the story are exactly that, tales borrowed from authors with their own agendas whether as cooks or bodyguards, poet laureates or Washington insiders.
After Shin, the North Korean film industry had a Stakhanovite period of quantity rather than quality. Now Pyongyang produces DVD players rather than DVDs largely colluding in the spread of South Korean soaps and movies. Their new “live machines” are European volunteers making co-productions reminiscent of “Billy Elliot” (2000) where in “Comrade Kim Goes Flying” (2012), a joint British-Belgian-North Korean production, a coal miner wants to become a circus artist and get the man. She does!