What Kim Jong-il taught an Australian filmmaker about propaganda
An Australian filmmaker's journey to North Korea has resulted in a controversial book that explores the late Kim Jong-il's fascination with film – and deadly propaganda, writes Geoff Winestock.
by Geoff Winestock
Filmmaker Anna Broinowski is in a hurry because she is off to Spain to run another of her courses about how to make North Korean propaganda movies. She will teach a session at a conference in Barcelona on the cinematic techniques of Kim Jong-il. She has previously run a similar session in Rotterdam.
Broinowski's claim to fame as an authority on the unusual topic of neo-Stalinist propaganda is the three weeks she spent in Pyongyang in 2012 making the movie Aim High in Creation, a profile of the North Korean film industry.
She was able to cajole the North Koreans into giving her unusual access to some of their best filmmakers to talk about their craft and, incidentally, to film images of normal life in what is usually portrayed as the sterile fortress of the axis of evil.
The light-hearted film drove some right-wing commentators livid with rage, however. Columnist Piers Akerman gave Broinowski a characteristic serve in NSW's Daily Telegraph, accusing her of wasting Australian taxpayer dollars to make a film that airbrushed the blood of the regime's victims out of the frame of history.
So Broinowski is worried it might add insult to injury once it gets out that she is now running seminars for earnest European lefties about North Korean agitprop. "Piers Akerman would have a field day," she tells me as we chat in a pub in the Sydney suburb of Paddington.
Broinowski denies that she was a naive "left-wing shill" and she says the 2014 movie was critical of the North Korean regime, albeit admiring of its filmmakers. But she is back on the promotional circuit because she has now written a book based on her experiences in North Korea called The Director Is the Commander, which tries to fill in the political and social background that was perhaps missing from the film.
"I am much prouder of the book than the film," Broinowski says.
GAMBLE ON GAS
Among the many weird things about the Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il who died in 2011 is that he was an avid cineaste. In fact, Kim Jong-il trained and worked as a filmmaker in the 1960s before he took over the family dictatorship business.
Once in the job, Kim continued to take a special interest in filmmaking and funded an industry that ranged from World War II epics to copies of Japanese Godzilla films. He even wrote a book on the art of cinema. I scan the English translation Broinowski pulls out of her bag; it reads like the Quotations from Chairman Mao except it also has tips on camera angles.
The conceit of her 2014 film was that Broinowski travels to North Korea to get coached by the last remaining masters of neo-Stalinist propaganda on making an Australian propaganda movie about ordinary citizens rising up to stop coal seam gas. Perhaps the film could never have been made if Broinowski had not disarmed the North Koreans with this odd story.
But by sticking to that script the film failed to ask more interesting questions about what the writers and directors thought about the regime and how it warped their art. One thinks of Anna Ahkmatova, writing poems for Stalin to save her son from the Terror.
The book fills this gap by adding in some interviews that did not make the final cut. The most interesting are with North Koreans who defected to South Korea and hence can now talk much more freely. She interviews a talent agent whose famous client, a South Korean actress, was kidnapped by Kim Jong-il and then forced under duress to be his leading lady.
Jimmi, who before defecting studied at drama school in Pyongyang, explains how he was allowed to watch carefully edited versions of foreign films to learn technique. He offers some wry comments on filmmaking and responds politely when Broinowski asks about the techniques to use in her anti-CSG film project. But eventually the translator stops and says, "I feel so stupid … He left North Korea because three of his acting friends were executed."
Equally interestingly, the book documents the atmosphere of paranoia for foreigners in Pyongyang and the obsessive control the North Koreans exercised over filming. She was refused permission to film in an ordinary cinema and taken instead to a Potemkin village cinema that was a showcase for the film arts.
NO STRANGER TO CONTROVERSY
Broinowski is no stranger to this sort of controversy. She comes from a diplomatic family and grew up in Asia, which led to her first documentary on Japan, Hell Bento. Her Japanese was useful on her latest project because older North Koreans can still also chat in their old colonial language.
She is probably best known for the 2007 documentary Forbidden Lie$ about Norma Khoury, the author whose artistic hoax tricked many in the West into believing she had fled Jordan after an honour killing of her best friend by Islamic bullies. The hoax was exposed by The Sydney Morning Herald but Broinowski's film followed up with a psychological portrait of Khoury as con artist.
That hoax story played well in the West but Broinowski says Arab countries loved the film because it showed how the West was willing to believe lies about Islamic society.
Broinowski admits Aim High in Creation was an odd cocktail. "Unfortunately the combination of Kim Jong-il and coal seam gas in the same film was altogether too bizarre for the film to have a marketable box," she says.
Still, she says it is making a comeback and has just been sold on Netflix, which she attributes to a new wave of cult interest in North Korea ignited by the hacking of Sony for its role in funding the movie The Interview.
I cannot help thinking of Team America: World Police, the 2004 action movie satire by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, which features a marionette Kim Jong-il and a bunch of airhead Hollywood celebrities who think art can resolve geopolitical conflict. ("Use your acting, Billy.")
Still, Broinowski defends her choice to accept all the compromises of making a film in North Korea. She says that in the guise of talking about CSG she was able to sneak into North Korea photos of ordinary Sydney families and give people there an insight into the political process here. And she says it was worth it giving people in the West a different image of a country which the media usually smears with the flippant mockery.
She says many South Koreans who have seen the movie, especially those who still have relatives in the North, have thanked her for showing life in their divided homeland without the distorting propaganda.
"I believe in cultural diplomacy and peaceful ways of interacting with countries if they are to change, rather than militarism. It is more civilised than engaging in tit-for-tat propaganda wars," Broinowski says.
The Director Is the Commander by Alison Broinowski is published by Penguin.
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