From Director to Dictator: Kim Jong-il on the Art of Cinema

Back in the early 70s, years before he decided to launch Taepodong missiles towards Japan and Hawaii, Kim Jong-il was North Korea's culture minister — a job given to him by founding Prime Minster Kim Il-sung, or as Kim likes to call him, dad. Tasked with creating a national cinema that embodied the spirit of the people's revolution, Kim would regularly visit movie sets to "oversee" the production of films, and some have credited him as the director of such classic films as The Flower Girl and Sea of Blood. In 1973, Kim wrote his treatise on film — the 330 page On the Art of Cinema, which, sadly, is less a study of the art form than it is a rulebook for all aspiring North Korean directors. It's interesting to note that Kim never found a director who could actualize his vision, and as a result kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and forced him to make propaganda films for over eight years. With the pint-sized leader rapidly working his way towards the top of the Public Enemy list, I thought it would be an excellent time to purchase and read through this masterwork. To call Kim's writing dry would be an understatement. From its opening sentence ("This is the great age of Juche.") to its on-the-nose chapter headings ("In Creative Work One Must Aim High"), it's soon obvious that we're not faced with a page-turner. But beneath the propaganda about ideas as seeds, working-class revolutionary heroes, and how dramatic conflict should be settled in accordance with the law of class struggle, there are a few passages about Hollywood and the studio system that ring true (and are perhaps even more valid today than they were in '73). Two of the more interesting ones: "A film which merely aims to make a profit by showing off the stars' faces cannot be real art. The capitalist cinema, which promotes a few 'popular stars' to curry favor with the audience, is in essence a reactionary art form which reduces the stars to puppets and the film to a commodity. There cannot be a genuine creative spirit, and the beautiful flower of art cannot bloom where actors sell their faces and even their souls." "In the capitalist system of filmmaking, the 'director' carries that title, but in fact the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents. [The director] is a mere worker who obeys the will of the industrialists whether he likes it or not." Chris Columbus comes to mind. Yet if stories out of North Korea are true, Kim is a die-hard film fanatic who has a private vault of over 15,000 films, many of which are the so-called capitalist film he denounces. (One can only wonder if he's seen Team America.) Though the book is bogged down in ideological arguments on proper communist art, many of Kim's rules aren't far removed from what you'd find in a Syd Field book. He's a champion of method acting, encourages originality, stresses the need for screenwriters to have an excellent grasp of language, and places great importance on the use of music. (As evinced by the chapter, "A Film Without Music is Incomplete.") The book closes with a few chapters on film criticism, which Kim sees a collective endeavor. Critics are meant to come together and collectively assess a film purely on its adherence to Juche-oriented ideas, and the director's understanding of Party policy. (Sort of like what Armond does.) For fun, passages from On the Art of Cinema can easily be applied to current releases. To wit: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: "A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response. Only when the storyline flows naturally and logically can the film rouse the ideological and emotional sympathy of the audience, and make their hearts beat faster. If it does not convince the audience of the truth through the natural flow of the story, it is not art." The Break-Up: "If the characters' behavior in a given situation is determined by the whim of the writer, and not by their own will and conviction, they will not seem like living people and will fail to arouse a genuine emotional response. Actions which have no basis in logic or the characters' rationale are no more than the imposed movements of marionettes." Any Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer/Roland Emmerich film: "Introducing some stunning occurrence or the total impact of something completely strange and unheard of in the hope of evoking meaningless exclamations of wonder is a vulgarity which is incompatible with art created for the people." On the Art of Cinema can be ordered from Amazon.

Comments

[real american]

Communist.
Consider yourself with one reader less.
And I will be forwading this link on to homeland security. God bless America!

[Filmbrain]

Mom?

[A. Horbal]

Dear Mr. Filmbrain,

This post vastly improved my afternoon. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Andrew Horbal

[Filmbrain]

Thank you comrade Andrew.

[HarryTuttle]

Is it April's fool joke?

"One can only wonder if he's seen Team America"

That's the reason Taepodongs were invented...

[Filmbrain]

No Harry, it's a real item.

In fact, he wrote a book about musical theater as well.

[tlrhb]

Beautiful, Filmbrain, beautiful. I second that A. Horbal emotion.

[Kza]

"Critics are meant to come together and collectively assess a film purely on its adherence to Juche-oriented ideas, and the director's understanding of Party policy. (Sort of like what Armond does.)"

Ouch!

:-)

[Noel Vera]

Cool, man. Can't imagine actually sitting down and reading the damned thing, tho...

[April]

Fascinating entry. Who knew that Hollywood had so much to learn from Kim Jong-il? What I'm really puzzled over is that first comment. Is "America First" for real? Do people like that really exist?

[Filmbrain]

April -- No way to know for sure about that first comment. I suspect (or at least hope) it's a joke. However, the IP address of the poster comes from Red State USA, so I can't be too sure.

[Rahat]

Kim Jong-Il's love of film is truly fascinating, and one has to wonder how much he's been influenced by films in his decision-making process. I wonder if he's a fan of Dr. Strangelove...

[burritoboy]

I think this post is actually pretty relevant to our historic moment -

leaving aside Kim's own nonsense, the West has viewed cinema from the Communist era in a very hard and essentially imbecilic ideological light. The reality, though, is that there are so many different interpretations of Marx that I find there's much more ideological diversity within Communist films than there usually is within Hollywood films.

I actually find the ability of auteurs within Communist countries far more persistent, wily, sophisticated and serious about understanding the institutional barriers to their art than directors under capitalism have been (except for limited exceptions like Godard).

[Filmbrain]

Good point Burritoboy.

However, one could say that a fixed set of barriers, while limiting, leaves no question as to the space a director must work within. It almost forces creativity, especially if there are at digs at the very system they are forced to work under. I've seen this many times in East German films.

Not having to worry about things such as market forces, trends, test audiences, etc. does provide a type of freedom that directors under the studio system are rarely afforded.

I've only seen one North Korean film, so I can't speak much for how things played out there.

[Thom]

I wonder how many others will have the patience to read through all of Kim's manifesto, Filmbrain; thanks for taking one for the team. :-) Superb post. I also commend your statement that a fixed set of barriers can force actually creativity. I've had an ongoing argument with a friend about that. He contends that rules only stifle creativity. I argue that such barriers can actually encourage filmmakers to invent new ways to say the same thing...which sounds like a lot like creative behavior to me. We usually break into fisticuffs at that point though.

[burritoboy]

"He contends that rules only stifle creativity."

The problem with film is that it's an industrial art - a writer needs only a writing instrument and a flat surface to write, a painter only paint and a flat surface - while film-making requires a fairly sophisticated device (the film camera), people or objects to be in front of the camera, and so on. Of course, you can make movies by just painting on film, but that's limiting in and of itself.

Moreover, film requires a comparatively more sophisticated distribution network for people to see it: the writer could write his book by hand, and photocopy it at Kinko's (or copy it by hand, I suppose). The painter can sell her painting directly. Unless you're having people watch your movie rerun on the viewfinder of your camcorder or something, you're going to have to transfer your film to some other medium, a process which usually involves an amount of electronics.

Of course, almost anybody in a communist country could do this type of economic analysis in seconds, while I doubt the majority of viewers within capitalism could ever do that type of analysis, no matter how much they're coached or educated.

[girish]

Re: barriers forcing creativity, Kiarostami has talked about the flourishing of Iranian cinema partly being a function of all the subject matter it couldn't address directly. Thus, many Iranian filmmakers used experiments in form to more effectively charge their content with ambiguity and richness.

And Hou has strongly characterized his own creative approach as driven by the setting of new and different "constraints" for each project. (There's an interesting chapter called "Hou, or Constraints" in Bordwell's book, Figures Traced In Light.

[HarryTuttle]

Staline and Hitler were very much into cinema too, were they most interested by art or propaganda?

You guys almost make it sound like repression is a "good thing" for art... if artists aren't motivated/inspired to do greater art when enjoying freedom it doesn't "justify" the existence of tyrany. ;)
Let's remember some masterpieces happened to emerge from freedom and wealth (Greek antics, Renaissance, Cubism...)

[Gregory CG]

The artist's life depends on one thing in order to function adequately: discretionary time. Which is as good as saying it depends on money.
It takes a lot of the above in order to enjoy it, too: to spend the hours watching movies, to spend the money going to overpriced film festivals, to live in a culturally vibrant city with an exorbitant cost of living, to buy hard-to-find region-free DVDs, etc. You could certainly argue that it's exclusive, if not elitist. (Neither of those things necessarily precludes decency, kindness, and openness, but they certainly decimate the numbers of a potentially artistic population.)
I think Harry appropriately reminds us that Hitler and Stalin were intensely curious about film (Hitler, the former art student). This is only to say that no politically powerful figure (i.e., no one with money more than it takes to feed oneself) is immune to the cultivated pleasures of artistic leisure, whether he's a fascist, Marxist, or civil libertarian. I don't care how many rules constrain/ed the likes of Eisenstein or Kiarostami; there's no denying they are/were both radically privileged members of their respective societies.
Kim Jong-il, bless his heart, is a freaky little man. I would not be surprised if he spends more time screening movies in his theater bunker than he does worrying about South Korea, Japan, or the U.S. I bet he has seen Team America, and I would also wager that he enjoyed it. I guess we'll all just have to wait until he starts his own film blog before we know the truth.
This is definitely your finest post, Mr. Film Brain. Witty, sharp, and fascinating. I loved Jong-il's unintended critique of Jerry Bruckheimer. Many thanks.

[burritoboy]

"You guys almost make it sound like repression is a "good thing" for art... if artists aren't motivated/inspired to do greater art when enjoying freedom it doesn't "justify" the existence of tyrany. ;)
Let's remember some masterpieces happened to emerge from freedom and wealth (Greek antics, Renaissance, Cubism...)"

I would challenge your idea of "freedom" - our idea of "freedom" is usually translated to mean a highly confined legal sort of freedom (freedom to elect your representatives, etc). The ancient Greeks had a more expansive view of freedom - economic freedom (i.e. a man was free only if he wasn't economically controlled by another), much more radical political freedom (direct democracy, not representative republics) and so on.

How this applies to the film creator is that both film creators under capitalism and communism can work only under the direction of a bureaucracy (and in both systems, the bureaucracies were equally boot-lickers of power).

How free one is under either ideological bureaucracy is really dependant on your ability to see other alternatives (even if you aren't free in action, at least one can be free in thought). If you don't know of any other alternatives, you truly are completely unfree.

The reality is that, under capitalism, knowledge of alternatives is often MORE (but more subtly) suppressed than under communism. At least theoretically, the communist regimes encouraged the entire citizenry to be conversant with the
thought of Marx and of the Marxists. That's some very powerful, deep, serious thinking there. The alternative potentialities is available through following the paths and openings the great Marxist thinkers leave open.

Conversely, the capitalist regimes do everything to sideline or bury any discussion of the rightness of the democratic capitalist regime. There's really never any serious examination of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes or Paul Samuelson or Gary Becker or Montesquieu -i.e. very few under capitalism can even begin to discuss the underpinnings of their regime. That means that there is no substantive alternative for most under capitalism - a true lack of freedom.