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.

Akerman 2 by Keifer Taylor

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

Spot Light on North Korea, Part One: Film and Propaganda in North Korea

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  North Korea’s global image by examining the film produced there. 

Prisoners of Film

In 1978 Kim Jong-il orchestrated the unusual and high profile kidnapping of two South Koreans who he brought to his personal compound in North Korea. A North Korean kidnapping alone is sadly unremarkable. Political kidnappings are an expected, if undesirable aspect of many coercive regimes. What is unusual, however, is that these particular South Koreans, Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband Shin Sang-ok, were not threatening political figures, but film makers. They were taken by Kim Jong-il not, as might be expected, because their films challenged the North Korean regime from across the border and he wanted them silenced, but rather because Kim had admired their film making so much that he was determined to have them make films for him. Kidnapping the pair was just the most efficient way to go about this.

Hotel Monterey: New Forms by Keifer Taylor

Hotel Monterey: New Forms

The initial screening of A Nos Amours’ Chantal Akerman retrospective marked my first venture into the prolific Belgian film director’s work. Having only seen La Chambre (1972) and caught glimpses of the venerated 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles I have remained a novice with only vague ideas of her aesthetic and thematic concerns.

My preconceptions were affirmed by the freewheeling shorts on the female psyche, Saute Ma Ville (1968) and - the less compelling - L’enfant aimé ou je joue á être une femme mariée (1971). The third was the austere Hotel Monterey (1972).

The Ister by Jessica Fletcher

The Ister

The Ister (2004) is a film of tangents, both intellectual and literal: the filmmakers, David Barison and Daniel Ross, use a trip down the Danube to loosely structure a series of reflections on Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Ister’. As befits a film whose central philosophical notion is that experience is about becoming, not being, there is a constant expansion of the parameters of debate. And so, alongside charting the vagaries of Heidegger’s thought through interviews with contemporary French philosophers, The Ister encompasses a history of Western philosophy, European politics, the geographical formation of land and Greek myth.