What I Am Reading: "A Kim Jong-Il Production" by Paul Fischer

This book makes use of a dramatic true story to cover the North Korean film industry. In 1978, Shin Sang-Ok, a leading South Korean film director whose career was on the skids, and Choi Eun-Hee, his ex-wife and starring actress, were kidnapped by agents of the North Korean regime. Kim Jong-Il, a big-time film buff, wanted them to produce movies for the North Korean state. After almost a decade in captivity, they eventually staged a dramatic escape, and their presence and then absence were important cultural events for the hermit kingdom.

Shin and Choi were the power couple of South Korean cinema in the years after the war. He was a middle-class auteur type who took over as the country's premier director early in his career; she was an actress struggling against patriarchal Confucian values. She got her career start first, after suffering abuse as a forced performer during the war she took to the screen; she was married to another man but was swept off her feet by Choi, and eventually the two married their careers together. They lived as a glamorous couple on the cutting edge of the arts, where she did not need to be tied down by repressive gender expectations.

The pair of them made dozens of movies together in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, as Shin ran his own major studio. Many of the films were critical and commercial successes. However, things were starting to wind down by the late '70s. Shin had run off with a younger actress, and this dalliance was made doubly-painful to Choi when he had a child with her, as Choi herself was unable to bear children. The two split up, and Choi, semi-retired, found some success in running her own acting studio. Beyond his messy personal life, Shin was profligate, and his studio's finances trended toward boom-and-bust. As the decade wore on, his films tended more toward exploitationist schlock to put money in the bank. North Korea stepped up its terrorism, kidnappings, and border provocations in this era, and the South Korean government of President Park Chung-Hee tilted toward an oppressive police-state in its responses. The country's economy was also faltering, while North Korea's was (believe it or not) going through a good patch. Shin's financial rulebreaking and flouting of censorship laws eventually wore out his welcome mat, and he had his license to produce films revoked.

Meanwhile, in 1978, Choi received an offer to extend her business and possibly direct her own film, and went to Hong Kong to sort out the details. There, on a lonely beach, she was kidnapped by North Korean agents, and placed on a freighter to the country. Shin, in the middle of trying to re-start his career in Hollywood, investigated upon being told of his wife's disappearance. He had done enough to convince the Hong Kong police that he himself wasn't involved when he was nabbed too, by the same agents in almost the same spot, just two weeks later.

Upon their forced arrival in North Korea, the two were (separately) put up in luxurious housing, and faced enthusiastic indoctrination on the virtues of North Korea. Both interacted with Kim Jong-Il, who was at the time head of the country's propaganda agency, among other state ventures, and was consolidating his grip on power to become the inevitable successor of his father, Kim Il-Sung. Choi, during this period, was into and out of her captors' favors unpredictably, sometimes invited to Kim's ridiculous parties and sometimes held in a more spartan compound, in a small house alongside other foreign kidnappees. Shin, meanwhile, played along initially, indulging Kim's efforts to involve him in the North Korean cinema. However, after an escape attempt where Shin stole a car and made a desperate drive for the Chinese border, he was held in a detention center for a few weeks; and after another attempt (poorly conceived) where he disappeared and hid within the villa he was confined to, hoping that his guards would leave to search, he was sent to a prison camp.

These camps are brutal, inhumane places, holding anyone the regime (however ludicrously) considers a threat. Here, Shin was mistreated like all prisoners, forced to sit still in "the torture position" for most of his day. The restless hustler had time to think, pouring back over his old films and lamenting his antisocial, mercenary viewpoint while making them. He vowed a social conscience in the future. Despite the conditions, he was still an important prisoner, not subject to all of the same terrors and executions as others who had committed ideological or economic crimes. He played up his feigned loyalty to Kim to jailhouse informers, and was given some basic amenities, including access to medical care. It took multiple years and a hunger strike, but in 1983 he was finally released, and returned to one of Kim's opulent villas. Here he was reunited with his ex-wife, a scene contrived by Kim for maximum drama and poignancy.

The two were of course overjoyed to see each other, and after confirming that their conformity with the regime was inauthentic, plotted their escape. In addition to their work making films, they were to be sent abroad as propaganda pieces to extol the virtues of the regime. During this process, they snuck a secret recording of Kim out through a Japanese friend they met; fortunately Kim did not suspect them in this leak (he apparently recorded all of his own meetings anyway). As the two were sent to other countries behind the iron curtain, they worked to convince Kim that their best propaganda use would be to set up shop in Vienna, in a neutral country, as proof of the authenticity of their defection.

To ingratiate themselves to Kim, they made movies. Film was the ideal propaganda medium for North Korea, as it was viewed collectively in a centralized space and, initially, was too complex for people to produce on their own. The absence of other entertainment created a “nation of cinephiles.” However, the country's isolation during the Cold War led to the stagnation of their industry, and Kim knew it. The dictator's son was a huge film buff, and his first step toward being anything other than a spoiled playboy was to take over the country's film-making apparatus in 1968, collaborating with leading director Choe Ik-Guy. Kim had access to foreign films, and for a time revolutionized North Korean cinema with the latest western techniques. Kim even wrote a book entitled On The Art of Cinema, which was covered in a book on dictator literature that I read a couple of years ago. Kim's film production proved his worth to his father, and tightened the country's propaganda net over its citizens, who lived controlled, Orwellian lives in the roles their government had assigned to them.

Even with Kim's involvement, the film industry in the country was farcical. Their writing was formulaic, their production and dubbing were incompetent, they were shot on a same few lots, portrayals of Americans were cartoonish, and they ended up incomprehensible when they needed to cut out a performer who was being sent down the memory hole. An example of this is given in an intermission: Woo In-Hee was an actress who did not conform to either Confucian gender roles or the obedience expected of party members, dressing down the informers who criticized her sexual liberation during a weekly self-criticism session. She was demoted to work as boiler operator, but her return to acting was hastened by an affair with Kim himself. However, this second chance was burned when she was caught sharing her affections with another young lover, and the entire film studio was driven to a gun range to witness her execution in 1981.

Kim knew that there was only so much he could do culturally within the confines of the dictatorial regime he helped run, where maintenance of a cult of personality was important to his power structure. Films were enough to keep his own people indoctrinated, but he craved international recognition and respect. This was the goal of his kidnapping of Shin and Choi, and for a time, they delivered. They put their passion for film-making into their projects. Their films for the first time involved a story other than the glory of Kim Il-Sung and the evils of American capitalists. They portrayed love and sex and western music and fun and a life outside the confines of North Korea, and their viewers loved them. Young people even started to put up pictures of their star actors and actresses, though not on the same wall as the Kim icons. The change in North Korean culture brought about by this injection of color and joy and life is touching, but I have to assume that there is at least some bias in the tale, since the information comes from defectors, those inclined to oppose the regime anyway.

Finally, in 1986, after a movie called Pulgasari (a Godzilla ripoff) that was trash, but loved by Kim and the North Korean public, the plan for a studio in Vienna was green-lit. The next film planned was one on Genghis Khan, who had never had an East Asian portrayal. Kim also needed the money - his massive expenses for his own and the ruling class' life of luxury was a massive drain on the country's finances, propped up by the secret services' operation of a massive criminal empire. Kim was not leader yet, but had eliminated any possible competition for the job, and as the economy sank he was moving from doctrinaire Communism and a cult of personality to the Juche philosophy, more similar to nationalism.

As Choi and Shin went to Vienna, they put their plan into action, with all of their ducks in a row since they would not get another chance. Vienna was a city that saw considerable Cold War espionage and was a hub for defectors. They arranged for their hotel to get word to the American embassy to expect them, and achieved distance from their minders with the "need" to create media authenticity. They had done previous press conferences for the regime, but the presence of obvious guards led to skepticism of their sincerity. They arranged for a Japanese journalist friend to meet them with a taxi, then hopped in and gunned it. They bribed the taxi driver to have his dispatcher throw their guards (pursuing in another taxi) off the trail, and arrived at the American embassy. Running past the traffic, they jostled each other to get through the door, and were welcomed by the staff, having arrived earlier than expected. After eight years, they had made it out.

Shin and Choi were debriefed by American intelligence, and lived for a time at a safe house in Virginia. Choi was retired, but Shin tried to launch another comeback. He made some failed films and some Disney Channel schlock for a little while, then returned to South Korea, where some still conspiratorially believed he had been an authentic defector. He died in 2006, and Choi died in 2018, after this book was written. Kim Jong-Il died in 2011 of course, having ascended to the position of leader after his father died in 1994. This was just in time for the state to face major economic collapse, coming from its isolation at the end of the Cold War. Amid famine, starvation, and the endemic corruption, the North Korean people gathered in houses to watch imported movies on DVD and VHS, risking death and imprisonment for glimpses of the outside.

This is important as part of the book's overall thesis. "Produced by Kim Jong-Il” doesn't just refer to the movies that he "commissioned" from Shin and Choi. North Koreans lived in a "theater state," with highly ritualized and symbolic practices. These include thanks for the Great Leader and Dear Leader for their food, with rare meat rations on the leaders' birthdays. People were sorted into reliable and unreliable social castes, with different roles open to each. Kim, brought up in a life of luxury where nobody told him "no," seemed to think that he was doing Shin and Choi a favor, despite his knowledge of the outside world gleaned from his beloved foreign films. The kidnapping and escape were the epitome of a regime shaped, in a unique way, by film.