by Paul Fischer
For extras—bit players, background actors, walk-ons—were exactly what the North Korean people were. The word extra itself ideally describes the citizens in Kim Jong-Il’s gigantic masterpiece production. They were secondary, peripheral, nonessential. Disposable. There were millions more like them, and more created every day.
* * *
Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee woke up in this North Korea on March 7, 1983. Miraculously together, and freer than either had been in five years, they were also now the new leaders of the nation’s filmmaking industry.
The sun was high and bright in the sky as they headed down for breakfast. Five people—two female attendants, a male attendant, and two cooks—had been assigned to live with them in this house. Shin and Choi ate and made small talk. They had decided they would not speak freely inside the house in case it was bugged, saving all private conversation for unaccompanied walks around the grounds. Choi was horrified by the state of her ex-husband: he had lost weight, his ankles were swollen and misshapen, his face covered in psoriasis from months spent sitting in a dark cell, and his skin riddled with sores and ringworm scars. His eyes were ravaged, too; images on the television or on the cinema screen appeared blurry and soft to him. Reeducation had taken its toll.
Over the ensuing weeks they attended more of Jong-Il’s parties, sometimes several nights in a row. Shin quickly grew tired of these events, but unexpectedly, he found himself enjoying his conversations about cinema with the Dear Leader. Jong-Il promised not to impose political messages onto Shin’s choice of films, but admitted he would have to approve all proposed stories to make sure they were conceived “for the sake of national reunification.” His favorite stars were Sean Connery and Elizabeth Taylor, Jong-Il said, his favorite movies the James Bond pictures, Friday the Thirteenth, and, ironically, First Blood, the wildly successful adaptation of the very novel Shin had hoped to make before being kidnapped. The picture had finally been made in Hollywood in 1982, while Shin held the torture position in a dank, dark cell.
Jong-Il told Shin about his vast movie collection, confiding that he owned every film the South Korean had ever made, including, according to Shin, some for which Shin himself had no master copies.
The filmmaker found the young Leader a fascinating, contradictory figure. Shin had bled and suffered in prison next to men sent to do hard labor merely for reading a foreign newspaper; he had heard the tales of men volunteering to shoot their own wives to please the Dear Leader. Jong-Il seemed to take this level of devotion for granted. But then, at one party, ten pretty teenagers of the Joy Brigade took to the stage and jumped up and down squealing “Long live the Comrade Dear Leader!” with bright eyes full of tears, and Jong-Il waved his hand to make them stop. When they didn’t, galvanized by what they thought was false modesty, Jong-Il chuckled awkwardly, took Shin’s hand, and swung it back and forth as if to distract him from the chants of devotion. “Mr. Shin, don’t believe any of it,” he muttered. “It’s all bogus. It’s just pretense.”
* * *
Kim Jong-Il gave Shin and Choi six months’ “vacation” to go sightseeing before they began work. Now that they were allowed out, Shin and Choi were also able to observe more than the life of the elite. They were able, finally, to get their first, albeit controlled, glimpses of “real” North Korean society, the society the Kims built.
The country looked to both of them like the set of a dystopian Hollywood sci-fi film: devoid of color, with identical, utilitarian, and monochromatic houses of faded cement and limestone. The roads were empty, the buildings broken down and uncared for. Only the cult of personality was well maintained; Kim Il-Sung’s godlike face, painted in golds, yellows, and reds, smiling down from billboards, steles, statues, and mosaics on the drab green, brown, and gray of the fatherland.
The state had a relentless, dehumanizing interference into even the most mundane aspects of its people’s daily lives. North Korean adults were visibly weary. Women wore knee-length skirts and their shirts buttoned all the way up, with no makeup or jewelry. The men wore identical, slightly ill-fitting shirts and trousers made of shiny, synthetic vinalon, locally produced in Hamhung and cheaper than regular fabric. Everyone wore the ubiquitous red pin on their chest and, perpetually fearful of reprisals, no one asked too many questions or looked too long at your face. Perhaps most wearying of all, as the Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver, who spent several months in Pyongyang in 1970, recalled, the people “were fanatical in their promotion of their premier, Comrade Kim Il-Sung.… You could not say ‘Good morning’ or ‘Hello’ to them without their responding: ‘Yes, it is a beautiful day, thanks to the inspired teaching of our beloved revolutionary leader, Comrade Kim Il-Sung, who has filled our hearts with the truths of Marxist-Leninist analysis and daily supports in our borders and obligations’—that was good morning, and after six months it began to lose its novelty but not the power to bore.”
One place Shin was eager to visit was the Dear Leader’s film vault. His wish was quickly granted, and within weeks of their reunion, Shin and Choi were invited for a tour of the Film Archive, as it was now known.
A three-story building in the center of Pyongyang, the archive was as fortified as Fort Knox. Several security checks and a set of heavy metal doors had to be cleared to gain access to the building’s reception. “We were told that fifteen thousand copies of films were stored here,” Shin said, systematically compiled and filed over many years. Shin thought it likely that this was the largest personal film collection in the world. (According to one Russian diplomat, by 2001 the number of titles had swelled to well over twenty thousand.) “The width of the building was about one hundred meters, and all three floors stretching one hundred meters were filled with films,” Shin described. “The room with the best equipment was the one holding North Korean films. In that room every single North Korean film ever made was stored according to chronological order. The room boasted of a perfect temperature and humidity control system” so as to preserve the celluloid.
South Korean films and soap operas, considered especially politically sensitive, were kept in a separate section of the library, most of them acquired through business connections in Hong Kong; Shin and Choi couldn’t help wonder if these “business connections” were the same people who had helped abduct them or other people they had worked with over the years. True to Jong-Il’s word, every one of Shin’s fifty-plus films was there on the shelves.
Kim Jong-Il was so ever-present in his nation’s filmmaking history that many North Korean defectors today still speak of the films they saw as children as “a film by Kim Jong-Il” or “Kim Jong-Il’s film,” rather than by their writers, directors, or stars. On the Art of the Cinema was commonly considered a masterpiece and Jong-Il a genius artist and theorist of film. Here, inside all these film cans, was the source of all Kim Jong-Il’s knowledge about narrative and performance. And it was no surprise he was an unparalleled genius: only he was allowed to screen them.
Until now. As the archive manager led Shin and Choi back to the reception, he told Shin that, by invitation of the Dear Leader, he was welcome to visit the archive again whenever he chose and to watch as many of the films as he wished. Shin was acutely aware that no other filmmaker in the country had ever, or would ever, be allowed inside the archive, as many of the films in it depicted worlds in direct contradiction with the DPRK’s stringent ideological policies. Those policies had been created by Kim Il-Sung and were now enforced by Kim Jong-Il, who dearly loved the movies stored within it. The North Korean people were completely severed from the outside world, but the man who was isolating them most certainly and actively was not.
* * *
Now that they had seen the archive, Shin and Choi’s day trips switched back and forth from ideological education to professional research. Mr. Kang and Choe Ik-Gyu—“Director Choe,” as they came to know him—gave them a tour of the Korea Film Studio and of the offices of Kim’s creative staff at the Mansudae Creative Group. Regularly Jong-Il as
signed Shin or Choi to critique a premiere or a rehearsal at the Mansudae Art Theater or the Pyongyang Theater. In their spare time Shin and Choi watched as many of the films in Kim’s library as they could stomach, “in preparation for [our] meeting with Kim Jong-Il,” Shin said. “I intended to surprise and impress him.”
One day, on the drive back from inspecting a film-processing plant, Mr. Kang and Director Choe stopped at the Taedong River department store, better known as the Foreigners’ Store, where, using U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, British pounds sterling, or West German deutsche marks, Pyongyang’s few foreigners could purchase anything from groceries to electronics to cosmetics, all at shockingly inflated state-set prices. The store was another surreal experience, stocked with large numbers of uniform models of every product: a single shoe style in two or three colors, a single type of television, one type of dress in six colors, a limited range of symmetrically organized fruit and vegetables. The Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle, who visited Pyongyang several years later, found the experience of the Foreigners’ Store “like looking at an installation in a contemporary art museum.”
A few Korean-born Japanese were milling around the store, picking out items as gifts for their North Korean relatives. Choi chose a sewing machine and an electric iron, somehow also finding a necklace with a black heart-shaped pendant, a bronze figure of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus at its center. The words AVE MARIA were inscribed in small letters on the figure. Christianity was outlawed in the DPRK, but the staff of the store seemed completely ignorant of what the woman and baby represented (the vast majority of North Koreans had never heard of Jesus Christ, or, for that matter, Santa Claus, Elvis Presley, or almost any other iconic Western figure). The necklace reminded Choi of her new faith and of her lost friend, Catherine Hong. She picked it up and added it to her purchase pile.
Shin browsed in the electronics department for a while, picking up a solar-powered transistor radio. When he came across a microcassette recorder, an idea formed in his mind. He walked over to the counter and casually put down both items, the radio and the recorder. Kang asked Shin and Choi if they were done shopping and they replied that they were, so he nodded to the clerk and ordered her to pack their things and take them to the car.
Shin sat in the back of the Mercedes, the wheels in his head whirring at full speed. He and Choi needed a way to let the world know where they were, how they had gotten there and why; they also needed proof that their fantastic story was true. There were strict rules against recording or filming the Leaders of the Party, their violation punishable by death.
Shin Sang-Ok, however, had decided to do just that.
23
Lights, Camera …
The opportunity to record Kim proved remarkably elusive.
After a spate of parties, Shin and Choi now found themselves seeing less of Kim. For three months he was only intermittently in contact; he would call to ask their opinion on a play that was in development, or a Mercedes would turn up to take them to a film event. Now and again gifts would arrive from the Dear Leader: Estée Lauder cosmetics for Choi, a Rolex for Shin. Unbeknownst to them, Kim Jong-Il, paranoid about American spy satellites, had recently started spending just sixty-five to seventy days of the year in Pyongyang, dividing the rest of his time between his new countryside villas and resorts.
While they waited for Jong-Il to feel safe enough to return to the capital, Shin and Choi watched North Korean films—120 or so films in three months, Shin calculated—acquainting themselves with the country’s idiosyncratic filmmaking. He found My Home Village a very good film, though the quality had steadily gone downhill after that, with Sea of Blood and The Flower Girl the two possible exceptions. North Korean movies, Shin later wrote, “were not made for entertainment or for artistic purposes but were used as a political tool. Political power and moviemaking were inseparable.” And while the Soviets had employed much the same approach, in the process they had created timeless masterpieces and had innovated, unlike the North Koreans. This, Shin now understood, was the problem which he had been “hired” to resolve, and he set his mind to doing so, partly because he loved a filmmaking challenge, but principally because appeasing Kim Jong-Il was his and Choi’s only hope of ever escaping North Korea. Shin needed a slacker leash, more freedom of movement, and Choi had told him the only way to achieve that was to play along, by impressing their captor and pretending to aspire to the same goals.
Shin and Choi’s routine became the same day in and day out as, confined to the house, they watched an average of four films a day. The movies were chosen for them with no consultation and included films from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as two American films, Dr. Zhivago and, oddly, Papillon, about a Frenchman unjustly sent to a brutal penal colony in French Guiana, where he endures solitary confinement and eventually escapes after a first failed attempt. Shin never learned why those two particular films were chosen for them. Perhaps the answer was that both had been adapted from books, a popular trend in both Koreas at the time, especially the North, where original scripts were a rarity. But both films were fiercely individualistic in content. North Korean movies didn’t favor the love-against-all-odds theme of Zhivago or the one-man-versus-the-system message of Papillon. They couldn’t, surely, have been intended as examples?
The days ticked by. Shin requested meetings with Kim several times, in vain, and worried that he was being toyed with and ignored. In fact, Kim was touring China with his father. It was the first time the leader-in-the-making had shadowed his father on a state visit. When he returned in May 1983, a propaganda documentary covering the visit was brought to the villa for Shin and Choi, not to critique but, Shin thought, to make them aware Jong-Il was now more than just a Leader in name: he was openly involved in policy making. For two more months Shin’s pleas for a meeting went unanswered. Then, on August 19, the phone finally rang. As always, Kim opened with a question about Shin and Choi’s health, then he told Shin that he had set up their offices and work was ready to commence. He was sending a car to get them right away.
* * *
The car took them to the center of Pyongyang, to a two-building complex, one building five stories high and the other three. Jong-Il had moved into what had been his father’s offices seven years before, in 1976, when Kim Il-Sung had moved his own quarters to the opulent new Kumsusan Palace that Jong-Il had built for him. The building Jong-Il personally used was the smaller one, purposefully placed so that the taller one could block unwanted eyes from seeing what happened on the inside. Though luxuriously ornamented, with high ceilings, and what looked like marble floors, and elaborate granite reliefs, both buildings were in fact all iron and concrete. Their outside walls were almost a meter thick, designed to withstand bombs. The complex had seven entrances, an automatic gate at each of them, remote-controlled from a guard post on the inside. There were allegedly underground tunnels, wide as roads, leading from the building to one of Jong-Il’s villas in case he needed to escape at short notice.
Shin and Choi exited the Mercedes and were welcomed by several members of staff. The five-story building had been the home of the Paekdu Creative Group (Kim’s previous top filmmaking staff), but they had been moved out to make room for the new talent. The entirety of one wall in the ground-floor lobby was a mural of Mount Paekdu. Off the lobby was a large and comfortable three-room office for Shin and Choi’s personal use, with its own bathroom. The whole second floor was a state-of-the-art conference room, to be used only by Kim Jong-Il and his associates (at that point, Shin was told, Kim had yet to ever make use of it). The wall in that room boasted a mural of Kim overseeing the filming of Sea of Blood, his most famous “Immortal Classic.” The mural for the largest wall on the third floor was a medley of scenes from Sea of Blood, The Flower Girl, and Destiny of a Self-Defense Force Member. The rest of the floor was occupied by a huge screening room.
Shin and Choi spent the next few months getting settled in their offices and, as always, waiting for Kim. T
here was still no meeting planned. And then finally, on October 18, Shin’s fifty-seventh birthday, Jong-Il, who had a penchant for celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, called Shin in to wish him a happy birthday and ask him and Choi to supper. It would be their first formal meeting.
Shin made sure he had the tape recorder at hand.
* * *
Shin was prepared to talk cinema with Kim, but he also intended, for the first time, to ask directly why he and Choi had been kidnapped. He wanted reasons, but he also wanted evidence, in case he and Choi made it out of North Korea, that they hadn’t defected. Otherwise his and Choi’s accounts might not be enough to exonerate them. He needed proof direct from Kim Jong-Il’s mouth.
Secretly recording either of the Kims was an extremely serious crime. Shin had already spent time in a reeducation camp, and being caught now, after months of feigning cooperation and commitment, would eliminate all hope for the future. Without a doubt, he would be executed.
The plan called for the tape recorder to be hidden inside Choi’s handbag, with Choi starting and stopping the recording as needed. Before the meeting the couple experimented with how she could do this discreetly, what position the recorder needed to be in to get a recording of the highest quality, and whether Choi could get away with keeping her handbag partially open for minimal audio interference.