Spot Light on North Korea Part Two by Ella Harris and Eve Marguerite Allen

Spot Light on North Korea Part Two: The View from the West

Since the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011, North Korean cinema has received a surge of interest. The facts and fictions surrounding the North Korean cultural propaganda industries are as dark as they are bizarre. This three part article interrogates the construction and the function of the myths surrounding North Korea's global image by examining the film produced there. 

The ‘Othering’ of North Korea

The West’s recent fascination with North Korean cinema is perhaps unsurprising given that films are one of the only things that regularly manage to escape the country’s tightly maintained borders. Despite constant attempts, few people successfully ‘defect’ from North Korea and images of real life in the country are limited to what can be glimpsed from the border zones with the South, or related by those who have managed to flee. In an age of near total communication, life inside North Korea is perhaps the globalised world’s best kept secret; endlessly discussed but barely understood. So it is fascinatingly peculiar when from the depths of this sinister black hole what greets us is kitsch, B-movie Godzilla rip-offs executive-directed by Kim Jong-il.

Four Views of Cinema - Part Two: Searching for Ways of Experiencing Film by Charles Rees

Abstract

In this article Charles Rees offers his personal insights about how image and sound can be re-‘read’ in such a way as to transcend current narrative constraints. He offers examples of films which have influenced and impressed him, and extrapolates on ways in which cinema might develop in the future.

My four views stretch over a long period.

Each individual sees differently.

The Camera Image sees differently from humans.

Second View: Story-Orientated Blindness

This second view of Cinema was analytical. I was a film-editor in British Cinema – a phrase which the young director Francois Truffaut considered to be a contradiction in terms. It was exciting to cut film. I developed an abstracted way of looking at film that insured me against taking a story-orientated attitude. I would concentrate on the surface rhythms of a film, however tenuous they might be, banishing understanding of its content to the back of my mind. I treasured the way of seeing I had experienced at L'eclisse and needed to exercise and strengthen it. I might need it one day

for a visual film.

     The film eventually came as a television documentary,  Between Dreaming and Waking, about the Ruralist painter David Inshaw, directed by Geoffrey Haydon1. It brought the viewer towards nature through the sensibility of the painter, in a series of slow-tempo shots, mainly of the Wiltshire landscape, accompanied by natural atmospheres and a ‘soundscape’ composed by Mike Ratledge and Karl Jenkins. Occasional snatches of speech were ‘brushed across the frame’, in Haydon’s phrase. Here was contemplative material. Everything in the frame was deliberate, every colour, shape and texture. The natural sounds were clear and sometimes seemed definitive: we got from the BBC library ‘the best blackbird song’ that ended unusually emphatically to evoke the lure of women on the painter. My abstracted approach worked for the first time. I describe it in detail because it led to a discovery.