Illusive utopia: theater, film, and everyday performance in North Korea 9780472026890, 9780472117086

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and the Order of Names (page xii)
Introduction (page 1)
1. Hybridization of Performance Genres (page 33)
2. Time and Space in North Korean Performance (page 60)
3. Revival of the State Patriarchs (page 129)
4. Model Citizens of the Family-Nation (page 166)
5. Acting Like Women in North Korea (page 205)
6. Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dystopia (page 260)
Conclusion: Looking Back, Moving Forward (page 309)
Appendix: Notes on Sources (page 319)
Notes (page 323)
Bibliography (page 365)
Index (page 377)

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ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

THEATER: THEORY/TEAXT/PERFORMANCE Series Editors: David Krasner and Rebecca Schneider Founding Editor: Enoch Brater

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by James M. Harding by Suk-Young Kim

ILLUSIVE UTOPIA THEATER, FILM, AND EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE IN NORTH KOREA

Suk-Young Kim

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS «© ANN ARBOR

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2010 All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America © Printed on acid-free paper

2003." 201? “201k - WOIO:. . Ago St No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kim, Suk-Young, 1970[llusive utopia : theater, film, and everyday performance in North Korea / Suk-Young Kim.

p. cm. — (Theater—theory/text/performance) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-472-11708-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Theater and society—Korea (North) 2. Theater—Political aspects—Korea (North) 3. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Korea (North) 4. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Korea (North) 5. Performing arts—Social aspects—Korea (North) 6. Performing arts— Political aspects—Korea (North) _ I. ‘Title.

PN2939.1.K56 2010

792.095 193—dc22 2009038399

ISBN 13 978-0-472-02689-0 (electronic)

* FOR MICHAEL

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Preface

I have come a long way since the Saturday afternoon I sat curled up in a dark corner of our school movie theater, waiting in horror for the animation film to be over. On screen was a grinning red monster with horns sticking out of his head and sharp menacing teeth like knife blades. ‘The raging creature was destroying buildings and cars at will as he marched down the streets of Seoul. Thousands of people were running for their lives; friends and family members were separated in the pandemonium. I cannot remember the exact title of this film, but the evil and merciless red monster was the first image of North Korea that had ever been presented to me. I was only

one of many South Korean elementary school students required to watch anti-Communist propaganda films in the late 1970s. Films like this left a lingering effect on an impressionable preteen like me. ‘The dreadful memories of these films were magnified when as students we were required to write essays about our gratitude for living in the South and the need to work hard to unify the country and bring down the evil regime of Kim Il-sung. The impressions conveyed by this film were only a part of a much larger psychological paranoia that South Korea felt toward the North, feelings very much in keeping with how the Western world felt about the Communist bloc for most of the second half of the twentieth century. My personal Cold War occurred in the theater watching those films. While growing up, it never occurred to me that North Korean children my age could be enduring similar cinematic rituals and the same indoctrination process—the only difference being that we were their monsters. More than a decade later, in 1991, I found myself in a dimly lit dormi-

Vill « Preface

tory room in the main building of Moscow State University. I was one of the first generation of South Korean students to study in the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Across the table from me sat a couple of stu-

dents from Pyongyang, North Korea, surrounded by other South Korean students like me. Our mutual intense curiosity about each other brought us together for the first time. We sat down as complete strangers, but soon were talking to each other like old friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time and had much to catch up on. They told us the latest jokes from the North, and asked about our lives as college students in the South. These students were humorous, intelligent—and familiar. Theirs were the ordinary faces one might find on the streets of Seoul. By laws of both Koreas, it is still prohibited to have an unregulated meeting with those on the other side, and we were certain that our encounter would bring trouble if anyone found out about it. That was the only time I was able to talk to the North Korean students, but that tantalizingly short meeting with citizens from the unknown world left a strong impression on me. For the first time, the wondrously absurd nature of the division of Korea resonated personally for me, someone who did not have any family ties to North Korea. Why would such a natural meeting with students of my age, speaking the same language and with so much in common to share, be considered a breach of national security? And what was monstrous about them, these people we were taught so strongly to fear since infancy? I thank those students, whose names I cannot remember, for igniting my curiosity about North Korea. They planted the first seed for this book, for ever since our meeting, I have wanted to know more about their country— or better to say, “our” country. From entertaining mere curiosity about the “unknown” to immersing myself in an in- depth research project about the still “unknown,” I have been guided by an ever-increasing urge to explain the inexplicable. I wanted to see how in their daily lives the North Korean people under their current political leader act out astringent political indoctrination, or how they might potentially find their own idiosyncratic ways within an official ideology so formidable that it continues to divide us as it has for the past sixty years. But even with these questions guiding my quest, I wonder how far I have actually come, from that earlier self who sat in a movie theater watching the red monsters, immersed in a strange dark concoction of fear and hatred. I am clearly aware of my limitations as a researcher who grew up in South Korea, where anti-Communist propaganda used to, and still does, exert a strong hold on the nation’s psyche. It is my personal conviction that

Preface «+ 1x

scholars should strive for objective knowledge as much as possible, but Iam also aware that absolute objectivity is impossible to achieve, and there may

be moments in this book where my stance on North Korea has been unconsciously constrained by deep-rooted prejudices against the “unknown.” Therefore, the responsibility for any potential misunderstanding of that complex country, which is often oversimplified in the mainstream media, falls on me and me alone. Many people and institutions played a vital role in bringing this project to light. | am grateful to the Kluge Center and the Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress and its staff members, particularly Carolyn Brown, Paul Park, and Sonya Lee, for providing an ideal environment where I could

enjoy a rich array of archival resources and the friendly company of researchers from around the world. An American Society for Theatre Research Fellowship, an Association for Asian Studies ‘Travel Grant, an Acad-

emy of Korean Studies Research Grant, the Dartmouth Burke Junior Faculty Fellowship, and various funding sources from the University of California, Santa Barbara—a Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Academic Senate Grant—allowed various travels across the Pacific and the United States. ‘The Hellman Family Junior Faculty Fellowship provided much needed publication subvention. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following publications for por-

tions of this book that appeared earlier and in different forms: TDR 51.2 (2007) for “Springtime for Kim I]-sung in Pyongyang: City on Stage, City as Stage”; TDR 52.1 (2008) for “Gulag, the Musical: Performing ‘Trauma in

North Korea through Yoduk Story”; Palgrave-Macmillan for “Directing Tourists and Refugees: North Korean Regime’s Display and Concealment of National Bodies,” in Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, eds., Violence Performed (2008); Korea Economic Institute for “Guests of the Dear Leader: Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hi, and North Korea’s Cultural Crisis,” which appeared in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East

Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options (Washington, DC: Korea Economic Institute, 2008): and positions: east asia cultural critique for “Dressed to Kill: Women’s Fashion and Body Politics in North Korean Visual Culture.”

With their passion for learning, students in Korean Studies at Dartmouth shaped me into a better thinker. I was also fortunate to have joined a welcoming community of colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Leo Cabranes-Grant, Jody Enders, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Christina McMahon, Carlos Morton, Lisa Parks, Bhaskar Sarkar, Janet Walker, and Simon Williams in particular have always been generous colleagues. The

x « Preface

University of California Multi-Campus Research Group on International Performance became a ground to test out semibaked ideas, for which I am thankful, particularly Catherine Cole for her unwavering encouragement and Sue-Ellen Case for her thought-provoking challenges. LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press saw a potential in this project at a fairly early stage and remained faithful to it throughout various stages of production, and I am forever in debt to her for her kindness. Numerous teachers and colleagues in the fields of Asian and theater/ performance studies sustained me throughout what often seemed to be a never-ending process. Charles Armstrong, Gregg Brazinsky, Peter Carroll, Xiaomei Chen, ‘Tracy C. Davis, Li-cheng Gu, David Kang, Chuck Kleinhans, Susan Manning, John Merrill, Patrice Pavis, James Person, Don Oberdorfer, and Peggy Phelan all became a part of this project in various ways. [The voices of my beloved mentors, Seog Young-joong and the late Anna Lisa Crone, will always be heard in whatever I write. My family and friends provided constant support as well. I’d like to extend my particular thanks to R. E. Martin, who saw the early stages of this work, and my brother Young-eun Kim, who spent numerous hours documenting the visuals I used for my research. ‘Two anonymous friends donated photographs, giving the proper visual accompaniment to the book. Finally, Michael Berry has always been an inspiring presence, never failing to surprise me with his kind yet unflinching criticism. Nobody deserves more credit than he, and I dedicate this book to my best friend, colleague, and partner for life.

Contents

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and the Order of Names xii

Introduction 1 1. Hybridization of Performance Genres 33 2. Time and Space in North Korean Performance 60 3. Revival of the State Patriarchs 129

4. Model Citizens of the Family-Nation 166 5. Acting Like Women in North Korea 205 6. Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dystopia 260 Conclusion: Looking Back, Moving Forward 309 Appendix: Notes on Sources 319

Notes 323 Bibliography 365

Index 377

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and the Order of Names

All translations not otherwise credited are my own. All Korean terms are transliterated according to the Official Romanization of Korean (also referred to as Revised Romanization of Korean) system released by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2000. Exceptions are made for proper names (e.g., Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il, and Yoduk) and surnames (e.g., Kim and Park) well known in the English-speaking world by alternate Romanizations. In the case of these exceptions, the Official Romanization of Korean appears in parentheses after the first occurrence of the term. The order of surnames and given names appear according to the convention of the home country; hence Asian names (e.g., Mao Zedong and Kim Jong-il) appear with the surname listed first. All Chinese terms are transliterated according to the PRC pinyin system, and Russian terms are rendered according to the Library of Congress system. Exceptions occur when quoting others’ work, where the transliteration system originally chosen by the author is respected.

Introduction

The central square in Pyongyang (Pyeongyang) buzzes with patriotic commotion as millions of legs are lifted in one unanimous step. The procession of soldiers, workers, farmers, students, and ordinary citizens, all in immaculately organized regiments, turns around the gloomy corners of the gargantuan Stalinist buildings and heads straight toward the sacred center of today’s jubilee. Each regiment moves in unison while exuding unflinching zeal for the regime: young students, future soldiers, flaunt slogans like “Let us meet at the war front” and “We will become bullets ourselves”; farmers march around the gigantic moving platform displaying the models of the bountiful harvest for the year; veterans’ family members demonstrate with slogans professing their profound love for the leader, such as “We cannot live without you” and “We worship the Dear General like the sky.”

The marchers look weary and lean, wearing their best clothes, well adorned for the pompous occasion. Their facial expressions are intense, but their hollow gazes directed at the state leaders on a high podium betray the intensity. As the marchers pass by the sacrosanct leader Kim Jong-il (Gim Jeong-il), they wave their arms more frantically and proclaim even louder than before: “LONG LIVE THE DEAR GENERAL! LONG LIVE THE DEAR GENERAL!” Like the voice of a specter, the echo resonates over the gray city long after the marchers disappear from sight.! It is 2003 and North Korea is commemorating the fifty-fifth anniversary

of the foundation of its state. For half a century, the country has gone through vicissitudes from the glorious reconstruction of the war-shattered nation to the recent nuclear and economic crises. As the end of World War

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“Tha, i, ee ' Z | that the nation is a nonessentialist construction. This book takes into account that invention and imagination are the essential forces needed to project the idea of a nation for communities striving to define their unique identity. But whose imagination? Whose invention? Whose perspectives and voices do we take into account in narrating North Korean history and culture? The central nation-constructing matrix may diverge widely depending

8 ¢ ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

on the subject who imagines the nation and his or her political interests. Fspecially in North Korea, where the ability to narrate national history and consolidate community has been monopolized by a singular subject, it becomes even more imperative to ask questions about the considerable absence of historical agency of the people. Researchers need to see through the blunt walls of officially sanctioned narratives and identify the hidden multiple subjects and objects of national imagination. Concurrent with our defining multiple subjects and the objects, we need to give special attention to the specific mode in which the nation is imagined in twentieth-century Korea. The genealogy of this imagination exhibits how people and culture function as variables in the process of constructing the nation, especially in a country where a firmly established traditional system faced an inevitable and unprecedented transformation. The dynamics in the formation of nationalism arose from various sectors of society, and differed depending on class, gender, generation, and ge-

ographic locality, so as to construct competing categories. As Prasenjit Duara aptly points out:

Nationalism is best seen as a relational identity. The multiplicity of nation-views and the idea that political identity is not fixed but shifts be-

tween different loci. . . . Consequently, national self contains smaller “others”—historical others that have affected an often uneasy reconciliation among themselves and political others that are beginning to form their differences. And it is the potential others that are most deserving of our attention because they reveal the principle that creates nations—the willing into existence of a nation which will choose to privilege its difference and obscure all the cultural bonds that had tied it to its sociological kin.'¢

Duara notes that “smaller others” are easily overshadowed by the metanar-

rative of nationalism, which, under the guidance of a national patriarch, tends to sacrifice subaltern social sects for the purpose of rescuing the nation. As Edward Said remarked, anticolonialism could often overshadow the subaltern voices or invisible actors of a nation.!’ Likewise, Leela Gandhi reiterates Said’s conviction that “the intellectual strings of anti-colonialism can only be properly realized when nationalism becomes more ‘critical of

itself’—when it proves itself capable of directing attention ‘to the abused rights of all oppressed classes.’”'® Duara’s comment on the overpowering anticolonial desire to reconstruct the lost nation, which lacked self-criticiz-

Introduction + 9g

ing mechanisms and tended to ignore the need to acknowledge “smaller others,” aptly illuminates conventionally overlooked fissures in twentiethcentury Korean history. Based on the postcolonial theories articulated in Duara’s, Said’s, and Gandhi's works, this book identifies “the woman question” to be one of the most important—although persistently ignored—“smaller others” in the formation of a national self in modern Korea.'” The discussions of gender and nationalism will be carried out in tandem, with two concrete goals in mind. First, | employ gender studies to critique what nationalism generally ignored under the grand banner of the nation’s survival and reconstruction. Second, merging gender studies with the studies of postcolonialism and nationalism facilitates exploration of the continual existence of the traditional gender and family ideologies within seemingly revolutionized societies. As Neil Diamant has observed: “Modern state-led social change can actually be facilitated by ‘traditional’ inequality between the sexes, as a fairly rigid division between the sexes can make it easier for women to forge identities and communities based on common experiences and grievances.”*” The second strategy reveals what Diamant perceives as a paradoxical construc-

tion of women, which simultaneously signifies modernity and tradition within the Korean socialist state. The discussion of North Korean women as projected in theater, film, visual culture, and everyday performance is predicated on certain feminist theories and methodologies, which acknowledge the perceived gap between ““women’ as a discursively constructed group and ‘women’ as material subjects of their own history.””! In my view, it is not only useful but also necessary to differentiate these two categories, since identifying and ultimately mending the elision between them will help explain why there is a conspicuous discrepancy between the image of women as essential members of social production, depicted in theatrical and filmic representations of North Korea, and the traditional Confucian practice that limited women’s social mobility in everyday life. The notion of women as material subjects of history implicates the concrete local experiences of twentieth-century Korean

women living at a transitional moment of history, rapidly transforming from colonialism to socialism. This book takes the position that material conditions of women in a given historical moment—including gendered space, economic relationships, and social factors that determine women’s mobility—are illustrative of women’s potential to function as subjects in narrating social change. Thus in studying the family ideology in propaganda performances, this

10 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

book reaffirms that gender is a useful category for analyzing theater, film, and everyday performance in North Korea. Gender, in this sense, is not limited to sociohistorical analysis of men’s and women’s movements in North Korea (i.e., men and women as material subjects of history); it also functions as a crucial aspect of theatrical and cinematic representation (..e., men and women as discursively constructed groups). The appearance of women on stage and screen is one of the most striking innovations of North Korean performances as a sociocultural com-

modity. Compared to the pre-twentieth-century situation of Korean women of decent background, who were strongly discouraged from appearing in any public space, the vision of female characters on stage and screen, performed by actresses, was a revolution in itself from the perspective of gender politics.

While investigating concepts of women and femininity in the social sphere and in North Korean performances, this book attempts to avoid an approach exclusively centered on women. In contrast to a surge of academic inquiries on women and femininity, less attention has been paid to the studies of men and masculinity. Casting a sideways view on the Chinese case,

Susan Mann points out that the paucity of studies on Chinese men is particularly vexing because “bonds among men were key to success and survival for rich and poor; elite and commoner, in Chinese history.”’? Similarly, Korean men’s social identity was defined by the male network, which reached beyond the boundary of the traditional family. Hence, it is imperative that equal attention should be given in this book to the construction of male and female, masculinity and femininity as two aspects of one and the same question of imagining the nation.”’ In this respect, the ability of performing arts to glorify the state father Kim Il-sung as the founder of new

tradition and national culture legitimized the leadership vis-a-vis the woman question. At the same time, ordinary male citizens were theatricalized as secondary males, contrasted with the state fathers, often pushed to the peripheries of visual composition on stage and screen. Such was the distinctive reflection of the ideal Confucian state patriarch that persisted as the backbone of the new socialist culture. North Korean social practices adhere to the long tradition of family values and ideals, often recapitulating the Confucian political catchphrase of addressing the nation as a family unit. Once the various notions of family become the fulcrum of analysis, they are not a radical departure from the past or from the theatrical tradition. These practices of upholding Confucian ideals are the

Introduction + L1

most fundamental traditions of East Asian culture. ‘This ironically leads to the question: how revolutionary was the seemingly radical culture of the socialist states?

As Cumings claims, Marxism in North Korea merged with the traditional Confucian idea that “rectification of the mind must precede correct action, even to the point of committing the Marxist heresy that ideas determine human reality.”’* In a similar light, Erik Cornell observes how Marxist doctrines were subsumed by the theoretical guidance of Confucianism in the North Korean context: The official North Korean ideology has had other sources of inspiration besides Marxism-Leninism. It also contains strong elements of the East Asian heritage of ideas and a good dose of nationalism. ‘The dominating impression is that North Korean communism combines theories taken from Confucianism’s hierarchical worldview and Soviet Russian indus-

trialization ideology of Stalinist vintage, blended to form a unity, the specific Korean characteristic of which they are keen to point out.’ Marxism, which was to serve as an explanatory model of how and why the Western capitalist powers would face proletarian revolution, was doubly distorted when it finally reached East Asia.”° Thus, this project provides an opportunity to rethink the prevalent views of European dominance in cultural development and historical social change in North Korea. Only Propaganda

By launching a historical investigation into state-produced propaganda— stage performances, film productions, parades, mass games, and visual arts—as a unique entry point to understanding how otherwise little-known North Korean society and culture function, this book illuminates deeprooted cultural explanations for the survival of North Korean socialism. At the same time, the project is based on the premise that propaganda is a contested junction where political, social, economic, and cultural trajectories of the North Korean nation collide in an ever-transforming manner. On one level, North Korean propaganda performance reflects the state’s wishful desire to cultivate its ideal self-portrait. David Holm, in commenting on the Chinese Communist Party’s appropriation of folk art as propaganda, writes:

12 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

The general feeling is, of course, that propaganda is lies—in the words of Dr. Goebbels—and that therefore a study of propaganda will yield nothing of value except perhaps a moral lesson on the wickedness of the totalitarian regime. I would suggest that, on the contrary, propaganda is interesting—and revealing—precisely because it is an attempt to manipulate and persuade.?’

In accordance with Holm’s observation that propaganda is a transparent showcase of the regime’s intentions, this book looks beyond the political fa-

cade and pays close attention to how North Korean propaganda productions manipulate and persuade. Behind the blatantly fictional representation of an ideal self-image lies the modus operandi of the state; therefore, I regard propaganda as one of the available ways of understanding North Korea. What may come across as one-dimensional campaigns actually have a tremendous impact on society. The inquiry into how and why propaganda

works as a tool of manipulation and persuasion is a revelatory process through which the inner workings of North Korean society and culture loom from behind the facade. While I treat propaganda as an effective means to understand the formation of North Korean society and culture, I also acknowledge another view of propaganda as a dynamic dialogic process between creator and receiver. In her study of the erotic fantasies of fascism in modern literature,

Laura Frost delineates an alternative function of propaganda—complementing the aforementioned definition proposed by Holm—as “a form of communication that can express its creator’s inadvertent or unconscious investments (and fantasies) and that can also be read many ways and have unintended effects in its reception.”** North Korean propaganda can be a win-

dow into the agenda and inner workings of the state. However, such an instrumental approach is based on the naive belief that the state’s intention to manipulate and persuade symmetrically translates into actualization of the master plan. The actual operation of propaganda, even in a rigidly controlled society like North Korea, is much more discursive; it does not simply conform to the government's intentions. The foundational aspect of propaganda is arguably the North Korean people’s complicity with the propaganda machinery, without which the system could not have operated to the extent it has for half a century. In order to stage labor-intensive propaganda performances, the North Korean state has used forcible measures to ensure people’s participation.”’ In cases where there was a failure to send a required number of participants, the slackers

Introduction + 13

were immediately punished by reduced food rationing and other means of withholding basic necessities. Despite these practices that stripped people of basic human rights and dignity, at the same time, according to the interviews conducted, the North Korean people seem to have enjoyed the collective shaping experience of performance rehearsals. This book explores the multifaceted values and functions propaganda

holds in North Korea from a performance scholar’s point of view. In a narrow sense, this means that the primary case study of propaganda will be theater, including revolutionary operas (hyeongmyeong gageuk)’® and film productions*! and their parallel performance genres, such as mass games, demonstrations, and parades. In a broader sense, however, this means that the theatrical nature of North Korean society will be examined simultaneously. As will be illuminated in the subsequent chapters, film has been the preferred genre of the state. However, there is no strict sense of division between theater and film in North Korean performing arts, since most live stage performances are produced with the intention of being filmed for wider circulation among the population.” In order to guarantee that stage productions are seen throughout the nation, the North Korean propaganda bureau films them whenever possible. ‘The films and filmed stage productions, including five revolutionary operas, have become a dominant cultural form for North Koreans, since every citizen has to watch them as part of their mandatory education in revolutionary ideology and discuss how to emulate ideal stage characters during daily study sessions in schools and at work.*?

At the same time, these filmed productions provide materials for staging mass games and parades, which are the culminating annual celebrations of the state leaders’ birthdays and the rituals commemorating the foundation

of the state: On the birthdays of Kim Il-sung (born April 15, 1912), the founding father of North Korea, and Kim Jong-il (born February 16, 1942), the current head of the state, numerous mass games, stage performances, and street parades are performed throughout North Korea. ‘Thus, theater and film productions are not confined to stage and screen, but reach out to the daily lives of North Koreans and have become easily recognizable cultural experiences. Other visual media, such as posters’? and fine art, have also participated by endlessly reproducing iconic images from these cultural productions. ‘Thus, feature films, revolutionary operas, and their filmed

versions not only produce theatrical/cinematic illusions within theater space but also are at the center of the theatrical nature of everyday life.

14 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

The intersection between the actual study of theater genres and the theater of everyday life challenges us to construe theatricality as a resilient and encompassing notion in a country like North Korea. A seminal idea with which to tap into the otherwise little-known North Korean society and culture, the term theatricality, as theater historians Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait have noted, “is a concept so widely and loosely used that it is comprehensive of all meanings yet empty of all sense.” However, as Davis and Postlewait argue, the history of how the concept has been used helps theater scholars to identify some of the modes in which theatrical representation and everyday reality define each other: “Just as theatricality has been used to describe the gap between reality and representation—a concept for which there is a perfectly good and very specific term, mimesis—it has also been used to describe the ‘heightened’ states when everyday reality is exceeded by its representation.”*° Both of these functions of theatricality are useful for this study of how represented reality in propaganda, like the aforementioned 2003 parade scene, supersedes everyday life in North Korea. In the concept of mimesis, there is an embedded assumption that reality and representation are fundamentally different, so that representation has to make a conscious effort to imitate reality in an assimilative mode. But when producers of theater and film regard everyday reality as inferior to represented reality, and invent utopian versions of reality and present them for audiences to emulate, theatricality becomes the key notion, the staged version of reality when the representation of everyday life exceeds everyday life itself. This is the reversal of mimesis: that is, everyday reality is in a position to imitate the represented reality. North Korea is a theatrical state par excellence precisely because it forces a utopian illusion to mandate conditions of real life. Perpetually obsessed with appropriating the utopian narrative for staging its ideal self-image and directing its citizens as if they were actors playing stereotypical roles found in revolutionary operas, I claim, with neither hesitation nor exaggeration, that the North Korean state, with its well-developed propaganda apparatus, fabricates the foundation of every sociocultural reality.

Ethics of Ethnography

North Korea is a case where theatricality is taken to the extreme, to the deeree that sacrificing individuals for the sake of producing hyperreal national images becomes acceptable. Just as “torture was not accidental quality of this

Introduction + 15

Third Reich, but its essence,”*° in many cases, forfeiting basic human rights of its own people has been the very premise of the North Korean self-representation in propaganda performances. The state gladly removes undesirable objects for the cultivation of its immaculate national landscape. ‘Therefore, anyone delving into discussions of—or participating in—the theatricality of North Korean society cannot fully dodge ethical responsibility. Moreover, George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech in 2001

made North Korea an even more contested hotbed of arguments and debates waged by academics and policymakers alike. Many have projected their given agenda on North Korea without taking a very close look at the country, either to uphold the moral lessons of how and why Communism does not work or to critique the appallingly dogmatic attitude of the United States and its wartime allies. As a scholar whose primary goal is to bring new knowledge about North Korea to the world, I find it increasingly difficult to claim intellectual objectivity. Under the current polarized circumstances, I am often pressured by both human rights activists and the academic Left to take a clear political stance. If this book focused primarily on the state-sponsored violence in North Korea, it might win the favor of human rights activists around the world. By the same token, if this book only argued for the legitimacy of the North Korean state, it could easily serve as an instrument for the Marxist Left to talk back to neoconservatives. “Either yow’re for us, or you're against us” has been stated by both Communists who diminished socialist ideals to the worst kind of totalitarian rule and Western crusaders who distorted freedom to persecute the Other. Such an exclusionist attitude not only betrays the core of what scholarship is supposed to achieve but also negates the complexity of human existence. North Korea is a complex and contradictory country, like anywhere else in the world: on the one hand, the

government has demonstrated remarkable achievements in modernizing the postcolonial state; on the other hand, it has committed unthinkable atrocities and violence. The purpose of my research is to bring out these complexities so that we become more sophisticated in our approach, moving beyond extreme positions of idolization or accusation, which have so dominated discourse on North Korea. As Max Horkheimer proclaimed, “There should be a study on terror but not to denounce its frightfulness, for that has been done enough with both good and bad conscience. Rather, its usefulness in certain social situations should be explained.”*’ The primary objective of this book does not rest on moral accusations of a regime that reduces its people to mere disposable props for a self-aggrandizing show. However, I have tried my best to be cognizant of the many

16 +* ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

ways the theatrical displays examined tie into a larger matrix of human rights abuses in North Korea. Even though theoretical explications of how the state uses performing arts and theatricality are the basis of this book, these theoretical issues often belie the atrocious human conditions of that country, which is what really concerns ordinary North Koreans. I regard these two seemingly opposite poles of my research—the objective analysis of how theatricality operates in North Korea and the ethical responsibility of a scholar studying human suffering—to be mutually inclusive problems. Throughout this book, I hope to illuminate that a close reading of how performance functions as formidable means of control will deepen our understanding of the actual conditions of North Korean people’s lives. Very often in North Korea, basic daily activities—such as eating, dressing, and speaking—become the objects of state control, which in turn becomes a legitimate field of inquiry for performance scholars interested in the modes by which the state sets out to regulate how people present them-

selves. These acts of mundane life are rehearsed on a daily basis to be heightened as revolutionary achievements, through learning from the heroes in theater and film productions, an essential part of education in schools and places of work. Moreover, the everyday ritual that equates rehearsal with the process of becoming an ideal North Korean citizen not only aims at presenting a final performance but also is an end in itself, with instrumental advantages of disciplining people to embody collective life. Richard Schechner has noted the significance of the rehearsal process as an integral part of the culminating

performance, in that it plays a key role in shaping the collective. For Schechner, preparation becomes an important part of the ritual, inviting community members to participate as performers.** However, Schechner’s

understanding of community-based ritual is voluntary and therefore volatile at times, whereas community-based ritual in North Korea is situated in a radically different environment in which the formation of community is not fluid and voluntary, but a systematic procedure controlled by the harsh principles of selection and elimination. For North Korean people, transforming daily lives into rehearsals dictates the precise inscription of the correct modes of self-presentation onto their bodies. This is why the process of preparing a performance is func-

tionally much more significant than the result. In this respect, John MacAloon’s idea of “ritual as duty,” as opposed to “spectacle as a choice,”*” is useful for understanding the function of community ritual in North Korea. As a result, Schechner’s conceptualization must be modified: the prepa-

Introduction + 17

ration process becomes the phase that exceeds the culminating performance. Aiming at social control by forcing people to participate in state ritual is North Korea’s most efficient governing strategy. Its implementation requires constant institutional surveillance, which has been achieved by the North Korean regime as far as it procures people’s complicity. However, the modes in which North Koreans participate in state-initiated rehearsals and performances are much more discursive than can be la-

beled as forced enjoyment, reluctance, fear, or suffering. In interviews I conducted with North Korean defectors, reminiscing about their community rituals at times conjured up fond memories of bonding with classmates or wild expectations of seeing the greatest national heroes, namely Kim IIsung and Kim Jong-il, in person in the grandiose capital city of Pyongyang.

Therefore, my analysis of North Korean propaganda based on ethnographic research will consider multilayered implications of rehearsal and performance rituals from various perspectives: performance producers, participants, and deserters of the regime. Each chapter is a step-by-step explanation of how such viewpoints interact on various levels of performance medium, space, ideology, and strategy.

Chapter 1, “Hybridization of Performance Genres,” focuses on the process of inventing the ideal form of propaganda in North Korea. Kim Jong-il’s cinemania is well known to many people in the outside world, but

the impact it has had in organizing and regulating North Korean society has not been fully explored. Thus, this chapter looks at how and why North Korean propaganda prioritized film over other forms of art, most notably theater, in order to investigate the rationale for the government propaganda department’s choice of film as its primary medium, which had a lasting impact on live stage productions. Although the demise of live theater seems to have changed the landscape of performing arts, amateur acting has flourished in everyday life with the political educational program for ordinary citizens, who are supposed to learn from the films and filmed theater productions shown in schools and workplaces. Chapter 2, “Time and Space in North Korean Performance,” addresses how North Korean propaganda performances create a seamless visual continuum between the physical space of the nation and the illusionary utopian space of stage and screen. The social and artistic significance of the projected theatrical and filmic image of North Korea exceeds that of the actual space, as the utopia created by theater and film techniques has dictated the formation of the actual North Korean landscape. ‘The semiotic dichotomy between urban and rural, as well as between the dark prerevolutionary past

18 « ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

and projected utopian future, illustrates the contrapuntal national landscape of the newly established socialist fatherland. Chapter 3, “Revival of the State Patriarchs,” examines the structure and ideology behind patriarchal family life as performed in propaganda. Confucian patriarchal family ideology and structure, well known to every North Korean, are the primary rhetorical figures appropriated by the government for propaganda. By using the familiar traditional form to propagate revolutionary ideology, the North Korean state could easily make its people relate to propaganda performances, which were relatively new cultural commodities. In this process, Kim I]-sung was idolized as the creator of national culture whose legitimacy to rule was rightfully transferred to his biological son Kim Jong-il, a ritual that enacted the prioritization of the imagined family over traditional family. Chapter 4, “Model Citizens of the Family-Nation,” looks at how North Korean propaganda transformed the traditional structure of the patriarchal family, as the ultimate state father relegated the traditional family patriarchs to secondary males by projecting them as his docile children. This necessitated creating a visible boundary between the legitimate members of the imagined family and the enemies of the family-nation, which in turn serves as a useful educational theme in daily performance. Theater and film train

North Koreans to identify the enemy as a way of reinforcing a sense of community. [The dual identities of citizen and performer merge for North Korean people in the liminal zone where theatrical illusion blends into everyday life. Chapter 5, “Acting Like Women in North Korea,” examines the process

in which North Korean women gained prominence and visibility in propaganda performances as righteous agents carrying out revolutionary tasks. The shifting power and gender dynamics and family rhetoric are examined through visual signs manifested by costumes, props, and bodily gestures in performing arts and visual culture vis-a-vis social policy regarding women. These signs expose the discrepancy between the utopian images of liberated and revolutionized women and the North Korean state’s perfunctory promotion of gender equality, which remains rhetorical at best. Chapter 6, “Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dys-

topia,” addresses the paradoxical performances that have come out of North Korea since the 1994 death of Kim I]-sung. Because of economic hardship, conflict with major world powers, and its own desire to join the world community, gaps and fissures started to appear in the state’s official self-presentation, originating from—and also leading to—a gradual trans-

Introduction + 19

formation of North Korean society. Two related, conspicuous forms of national performance in recent years are brought to conversation: the conditions of human rights and tourism, with a special focus on North Korea’s Arirang Festival, a mass gymnastic performance designed to attract foreign tourists. I look at how the global flow of finance and media has reacted to North Korea’s desire, spurred by economic crisis, to stage an ideal national image for tourism and the regime’s brutal, but futile, efforts to hide epidemic hunger by hunting down escapees. The conjunction of tourism and hunger, as oxymoronic as it may sound, reveals the manipulative principles of North Korean propaganda and the state’s desire to display or conceal its people on an international stage over the past fifty years. The book finally examines the 2006 musical Yoduk Story (Yodeok seutori), the only known North Korean dissident performance that addresses North Korea as the antithesis of utopia. By countering the idealized thesis of official North Korean propaganda for the first time, the musical made its mark in performing arts history; however, this counterpropaganda disturbingly replicates the same strategies found in official North Korean propaganda and thereby absurdly underlines the contagious power of the official culture of North Korea. The fundamental paradoxes of the North Korean reality—the Confucian socialist state, women’s nominal liberation, and staging utopia at the expense of creating dystopia—account for the inexplicable traits of North Korean society and culture, which has established the first and the only

known hereditary socialist state in history. Only the future can tell us whether such paradoxes will sustain the nation. Prologue: Kim Jong-il’s “Guests” and North Korea's Cultural Crisis

On October 19, 1983, in Kim Jong-il’s office at the Central Party Building in Pyongyang, a private conversation took place between Kim and two South Korean filmmakers: director Sin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eun-hui, who had spent five years in North Korea after they had been abducted and brought there under Kim Jong-il’s personal direction in 1978." That day, Sin and Choe secretly recorded what they describe as “Kim Jongil’s tirade-like monologue rather than a dialogue between Kim and us,” which lasted for more than two hours.*! According to the transcript of this recording, Kim Jong-il was struggling with the questions of how to elevate North Korean film to an advanced level without jeopardizing the tight control of its people:

20 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

We send our people to East Germany to study editing, to Czechoslovakia to study camera technology, and to the Soviet Union to learn directing. Other than that, we cannot send our people to go anywhere since they are enemy states. No France, no West Germany, no Great Britain. We especially have to have exchange with Japan, but we cannot even allow [North Korean people] to watch Japanese films. We end up analyzing foreign films to imitate them, but there is limit to what we can do, and our efforts have brought no progress. I have been struggling with this problem for five years [since 1978]. All we ended up doing was to send a couple of people to the Soviet Union after the liberation and to establish a film institute, but they are not that impressive after all. I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking techniques. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.”

Although very little is known about North Korean cinema in the outside world, many have heard of the “beloved leader” Kim Jong-il’s intimate relationship with film. As this speech testifies, he played a wide range of roles in North Korean cinema—from producer, editor, and scriptwriter to critic, historian, and visionary. According to the director Sin, Kim Jong-il is not only a dedicated film

producer, but he is also a highly talented critic of drama and music, allegedly capable of pinpointing a single out-of-tune instrument from a full orchestra. Further accounts by Sin point out that Kim’s boundless knowledge in arts owes to a large amount of materials collected from around the world, materials he has been systematically compiling over a long period of time. Sin had a chance to see Kim Jong-il’s enormous private collection of films, which he thought was possibly the largest of its kind in the world: On March 14, 1983, Eun-hui [Sin’s wife] and I were invited to a tour of the Film Archive. I hurriedly got prepared because this was a place I always wanted to visit. The Film Archive stood on the hills in the middle of Pyongyang. Tightly locked heavy metal doors guarded the archive, and no people were to be seen. ‘This was a controlled access area... . We were invited inside for a briefing and were told that 15,000 copies of films were stored here. Nearly 250 employees, including voice actors, translators, subtitle specialists, projectionists, and recording specialists,

were working for this facility. he films at the archive came from all around the world—from both Communist and capitalists, developed

Introduction + 21

and underdeveloped countries alike. ‘The size of the three-story building measured up to that of any main school buildings in South Korea. As | was listening to the briefing of an archive employee, I thought that this could possibly be the largest [private] collection in the entire world. After the briefing, the manager took us around for a tour. The width of the building was about 100 meters, and all three stories stretching 100 meters were filled with films. ‘Che room with the best equipment was the

one holding North Korean films. In that room every single North Korean film ever made was stored in chronological order. ‘The room boasted a perfect temperature and humidity control system.**

Sin goes on to say that after this impressive introduction, he was given permission to visit the Film Archive and watch all kinds of movies as much as he wished. Access to this building was limited to those who were recommended by Kim Jong-il himself, and for this reason there was an archive employee whose only responsibility was to take care of communications with Kim Jong-il’s office, which testifies to the fact that the archive was indeed a private one. Choe and Sin also noticed that all of Kim Jong-il’s residences across North Korea have projection rooms, where Kim is known to watch films almost every night.” Kim Jong-il was a highly motivated autodidact of world films, which, according to Sin, made Kim Jong-il’s cinematic knowledge and talent surpass those of other North Korean filmmakers. Most filmmakers were barred from using this library owing to North Korea’s stringent ideological control, and consequently it was difficult for

any filmmaker’s understanding of world cinema to measure up to Kim Jong-il’s knowledge. Kim Jong-il’s predilection for film became a well-known story through the accounts of the few people who had a rare chance to work closely with

him. Director Sin was one of those inadvertently chosen ones who had a rare glimpse of Kim Jong-il’s involvement in North Korean films while assisting him to realize his grand cinematic vision. In the mainstream media, this bizarre story of the abduction of the South Korean couple has often served as a popular entry point for exploring the psychotic nature of the “Dear Leader.” Nonetheless, the fact that the North Korean leader chose South Korean filmmakers, citizens of the sworn enemy state, to bail the local film industry he had fostered out of the cultural dead end it found itself in provides us with the opportunity to delve deeper into more complex issues surrounding North Korean society and culture, such as the regime’s attempts to strike a balance between outside culture and indigenous culture

22 © ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

and the ways in which the North Korean leadership envisioned culture as an effective tool for shaping the minds of its people. Although Sin and Choe’s book offers an in-depth analysis of the films produced by the kidnapped South Korean couple, we will look at the presence of this film couple as a way of exploring a complex matrix into which North Korean society’s contradictions and ironies are woven. [he filmmakers’ book provides an opportunity to think about North Korea’s culture as a highly politicized form of power. The kidnapping was a drastic measure that the frustrated visionary came up with after he assumed full power as heir designate. Kim Jong-il’s conversation with Sin and Choe took place in 1983, but Kim had been struggling with the inherent North Korean contradictions since he entered politics in

the late 1970s, and he saw the power of film and art in general as the primary source of, or his way to, governance. The film industry is a collaborative field operated by multiple constituencies because it is a medium produced, circulated, and consumed ona massive scale, which makes it impossible to imagine that one person’s initiative and taste can shape the contours of film production for an entire nation. But as the aforementioned episodes illustrate, Kim Jong-il’s opinion has a formative influence on every aspect of cultural production in North Korea, which makes it very difficult to imagine North Korean film production without Kim’s personal intervention. What is often overlooked in the world’s fascination about Kim Jong-il’s cinemania, however, is that the function of film as an essentially political tool was already established long before his coming to power, and it is precisely by means of mobilizing film’s political potential that he ascended to become the successor of his father, strengthening his position as he further intensified the importance of film. Beginning at the establishment of North Korea in 1948, Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, openly recognized film’s potential to serve his political direction more effectively than any other means of communication. Although at the time of the founding of North Korea, “Kim I]-sung’s comrades from the anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle in Manchuria was comprised of the least educated of the Communist ‘factions’ and the least involved in cultural affairs,”*’ Kim Il-sung nevertheless followed the examples of other socialist states and recognized the edifying potential of film for his newly founded republic. Kim I]-sung learned a valuable lesson from Lenin and Mao, who held in high regard film’s potential to serve as effective propaganda. Lenin himself presaged film’s ability to penetrate the illiterate masses and concluded: “For

Introduction + 23

us the most important of all arts is cinema.”** For the same reasons, the film industry in China was fully utilized by Nationalists and Communists alike in order to educate and mobilize the masses. Historian Charles Armstrong enumerated the reasons why the Soviet leaders adhered to film as a major tool to serve politics, which functions as a useful reference to examine the North Korean case:

The Bolsheviks were attracted to the propaganda potential of film for several reasons. In a vast, diverse, predominantly agricultural and largely illiterate society such as the Soviet Union, cinema could reach far more

people than, for example, literature. Furthermore, the novelty of film and the immediate power of its imagery made film, or so the Soviet leadership believed, particularly effective. Film-viewing itself was a public, collective act and therefore even the mode of viewing could be a means of instilling collective consciousness. Finally, the great expenses of making films allowed the state to control cinematic production more easily

than other arts."

The aforementioned reasons why the Soviets privileged film for propaganda over other media—ease of controlling the filmmaking process, film’s

ability to reach out to a wider population, the novelty of the cinematic medium to attract attention from a wide range of population, and film consumption as a collective process furthering a collective consciousness—apply to the North Korean situation well. The film production process requires massive participation and consumption. The collective nature of producing film simulates well the way North Koreans lead their lives in various collective organizations.°” The filmmaking process of shooting, editing, and watching others’ lives mirrors how North Koreans constantly monitor one another in their daily lives. Put

otherwise, to watch, to be watched, to make a presentable showcase through editing all represent major principles of the North Korean way of life. This point reinforces I U-yeong’s observation of why “underground

literature is difficult to detect, but underground cinema is difficult to make,”?! since the production process is not only collective but also highly controlled to the degree that it does not allow for any improvisations or accidents to take place. From the planning stage to the final cut, filmmakers repeat the production process to achieve the image they desire, which res-

onates with the way North Koreans filter their language and behavior to abide by the rules. he rehearsal process of these productions could be

24 ¢ ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

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= = i m) Wir 4 , = 1) ; co i 4 3 me | BT coe MeaBR ay Aor My atg: A Ue = iy j ; However, in just a year, this colorful array of worldly coverage soon narrowed down to the cultural activities of socialist states, such as the success of the Soviet and the PRC troupes in Indonesia, Egypt, and Iran.°° The March 1957 issue of Joseon Yesul, the seventh volume, was the last one to run a world theater column. Information about the international coverage of films that came from both Communist and capitalist regimes lasted much longer than other cultural topics. In the early 1960s, for example, Ri So-hun wrote an article in Joseon Yeonghwa (North Korean Film) introducing a brief history of Italian

films,°’ and Kim Jeong-ho wrote a series of articles that provided an overview of the 1920s French avant-garde films and filmmakers, such as Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Germaine Dulac’s Arabesque.** The magazine covered a fairly decent number of international film festivals, such as the Venice International Film Festival, the AsianAfrican Film Festival,°’ and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. By the end of 1966, however, the journal’s rich coverage of world films gradually narrowed down in scope to cover Marxist-Leninist techniques and ideology in filmmaking.*!

Introduction + 27

As if resisting the Soviet Union’s de-Stalinization campaign and the attack on personality cults the campaign represented, the North Korean media started in 1957 to promote Kim I]-sung’s unchallenged position. Beginning in the 1960s, it became obvious that the cult of Kim Il-sung began to intensify in all realms of the arts. The inner covers of the magazine, which used to feature various still shots of films and actors, started to publish Kim Il-sung’s photos and instructions continuously. ‘he October 1960 issue of Foseon Yeonghwa even published a photo of Kim I]-sung with his retinue on the cover, an image that seemed to have absolutely no relation to the arts world whatsoever . . . or did it? Foseon Yeonghwa featuring the face of the cultural czar symbolically gestures toward the displacement of international art and culture for an indigenous political model, a shift that North Korea would live with for many years to come. The shift in cultural production from international to local,

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28 + ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

multicultural to dogmatic, was a well-choreographed move by the North Korean leadership. As obvious as Kim Jong-il’s fascination with film was, it is only fair to state that Kim Jong-il’s open manifestation of cinemania is not

only his personal proclivity but also a natural result of searching for the most efficient way to gain political capital within the leadership and manage the North Korean people’s worldview. According to director Sin, the reason Kim Jong-il was chosen as heir apparent to his father Kim [-sung was twofold: having witnessed the de-Stal-

inization campaign in the Soviet Union and the degradation of Mao Zedong in the PRC, Kim Il-sung was concerned with the possibilities of suffering the same posthumous insult. ‘Taking these factors into account, director Sin argues that Kim Jong-il earned his privilege to be the heir designate by effectively building the cult of his father by means of the perform-

ing and visual arts.°’ Sin’s view is both persuasive and illuminating for understanding Kim Jong-il’s rise to power as ultimately related to his successful cultural productions glorifying Kim Il-sung. Many scholars assume that Kim Jong-il was officially designated as the heir to Kim II-sung in the late 1970s, which, indeed, follows Kim Jong-il’s intensive yet highly successful deification of his father as the legitimate ruler of Korea and the canonization of his household through revolutionary operas and films in the early 1970s. Film, in this sense, is not only an object of Kim Jong-il’s personal interest but also a highly effective apparatus to increase incrementally Kim’s political capital. But Kim Jong-il’s cinematic journey does not stop here. He took one additional step in appropriating film as an instrument for domestic politics: he attempted to bring in innovative techniques to the filmmaking industry and made visible efforts to diversify North Korean film. According to Sin, this seemed to have been motivated by Kim Jong-il’s desire to increase the abil-

ity of North Korean films to gain visibility and notoriety in the international arena through festivals circuits and even commercial releases. Kim Jong-il set as his ultimate cinematic goal to win the hearts and minds of the international audience. If Kim Il-sung endowed film with a mighty social status as an adequate tool to carry out propaganda, Kim Jong-il strove to achieve higher filmic standards in order to compete with world cinema.

Yet Kim Jong-il’s task of enhancing the artistic quality of film while keeping in mind the notion of film as the most effective propaganda tool was paradoxical in nature, as it required him constantly to mediate arts and politics without compromising either one. He had two conflicting realizations about North Korean film: he believed it was the best political instru-

Introduction + 29

ment he possessed as a ruler, but he also believed that North Korean film could benefit from diversification that would enhance its artistic value. How could he elevate North Korean film to compete with world cinema without opening up the borders of the country? How could he improve actors’ performances and create competition without taking away the central government’s subsidy, which was the only way to finance any film production?

These questions bring us back to the private conversation introduced earlier. Kim Jong-il’s struggle to seamlessly mediate propaganda and arts in film is known to us thanks to the risk Sin and Choe took in recording their conversation with him on October 19, 1983, in his office. Kim in this conversation honestly expressed his frustrations over North Korean films as

underdeveloped as children in kindergarten, whereas the South Korean film industry was approaching its full maturity like college students.°? Such an acknowledgment creates a stark contrast with his official speeches and writings, in which he extols the virtues of North Korean cinema and socialist cinema as a whole vis-a-vis their corrupt capitalist counterparts.“ Kim was well aware of the inertia of his film staff, which he believed was due to a lack of competition and their excessive reliance on the central government support: “Since the government is taking care of the pay and basic needs of writers, they are not motivated to produce more scenarios. When requested

to do so, they want to be sent to sanatoriums or resorts to work on it.”® When Sin told Kim Jong-il there was a need to change the typical propaganda style and produce heroic movies in the American Western style in order to make them more interesting and effectively didactic, Kim Jong-il was

fully in accord. This encounter brought about a dramatic change in North Korean filmmaking in the 1980s, when the element of entertainment together with propagandistic value became one of the fulcrums of what sustains North Korean film. Director Sin’s presence in the North Korean film industry from 1983 to 1986, during which time he directed six feature films in collaboration with his wife and supervised thirteen, helps account for such a turn in North Korean film. But it was Kim Jong-il’s determination that opened the door for the change to take place. Kim openly acknowledged to Sin and Choe during their private conversation: “When director Sin asked me [the other day] why we do not host an international film festival, I was ashamed to admit it then, but I admit it now. We really do not have any films to present. What kind of North Korean film could we show to the entire world? We do not have any films that will make the world laugh and cry.”°’ Kim took Star of Joseon (1980-87), the sacrosanct epic film series that deifies his

30 « ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

family history traced back to his grandfather’s household, as an example of how propaganda and art have become mutually exclusive in North Korean

filmmaking: “Star of Joseon is history. It is suitable for those who have difficult time reading history, but it is not art. It is history.” Kim knew that there was a way to advance the film industry by learning from the world’s experience. The painful realization tempted Kim to absorb the advanced technology of Western filmmaking, but this desire presented

problems that had to be curbed by North Korea’s political line. The discrepancy that rose from limited political freedom and the desire to catch up with the rest of the world in filmic standards was the dilemma metonymically standing for the entire social problem Kim was facing in the 1980s when North Korea’s neighbor and ally China was living North Korea’s hy-

pothetical situation as reality. In his private conversation with the South Korean film couple, Kim bluntly admitted:

When I met with Hu Yaobang of the PRC, he honestly told me that China partially opened up its doors to learn advanced technology, but young people started imitating only Western appearance, growing beards and long hair. It’s the same with us. If we start airing foreign films on IV and everywhere, then only nihilistic thoughts will emerge out of them. Our country is now divided and we must foster national dignity and pride. We cannot simply worship foreign things, so we must raise the level of our technology and then open our country to foreign things, but this is paradoxical in itself. So I want to give [the film industry] partial autonomy within the given limits.”

This primary contradiction Kim faced—to renovate the ailing North Korean film industry without the danger of opening North Korea to the outside world—thus led to a twisted solution in the abduction of a South Korean couple. And just as Kim had hoped, the couple did so well with their string of film productions that they even managed to claim some degree of fame on the international festival circuit, mostly featuring films from the socialist bloc, by winning the special jury prize for directing Special Envoy Who Never Returned (Doraoji anneun milsa) at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1984 and the best actress award for Choe’s performance in Salt (Sogeum) at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1985. Sin and Choe’s given task in North Korea was not limited to renovating the North Korean film industry and charting out a place for it on the map of world cinema. The fact that they were the chosen guests of Kim Jong-il

Introduction + 31

surreptitiously pointed to alternate possibilities for understanding North Korean cultural policies: If all Kim Jong-il wanted was to innovate North Korean cinema and achieve international claim, he could have made excep-

tions by sending a few North Korean directors to the Western world to bring back advanced filmmaking technology or by inviting directors from Japan or other advanced countries to North Korea for a limited time. Instead, Kim Jong-il decided to choose South Koreans for reasons dictated not entirely by the aesthetics of filmmaking but by the ethnicities of the filmmakers. ‘The fact that Sin and Choe were Koreans must have been a determining factor in Kim’s decision precisely for the reason that Kim envisioned the couple functioning as a cultural buffer filtering and bringing in Western cinema through the disguised forms of Korean ethnicity. Ethnic cohesion—especially because Sin was originally from North Korea—was a sublimated process of bringing in foreign influences under the well-known political banner of ari minjok-kkiri, or “Our people [deal] with

each other [without foreign interference].” This sentiment implied Kim’s desire to improve (North) Korean film with the help of (South) Koreans without any foreign cultural intervention; this aptly served the ideological foundation of juche.’°

By having South Koreans make North Korean films embodying North Korean ideology, Kim Jong-il hoped to project South Koreans in general as North Korea’s revolutionary project. As the North Korean leadership saw it, South Korean civilians were subjects placed under the wrong leadership and therefore should be liberated from the oppression of corrupt South Korean capitalists and foreign imperialists. In this light, Sin and Choe were officially projected as prodigal children who were temporarily led astray under a wrong set of political and cultural influences, but were finally rescued and brought back to where they originally belonged. They were supposed to showcase the North Korean belief that the only good South Korean was the one liberated by North Koreans. But was this propaganda project really a transparent process where the directions of the Dear Leader were symmetrically transmitted to his guests as hostages? Were there no subversive moments in Sin’s and Choe’s careers

in North Korea when they secretively bit the hands that brought them there and provided for them? The irony of their presence is doubled when we consider that the almighty cultural leader had to depend on his prisoners for promoting North Korean cinematic standards, which were to serve as the models for everyday life in North Korea. ‘The inversion of power relations—in which Sin and Choe were the guiding light for Kim, the prison-

32 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

ers providing the jailer with visions of the rescue of North Korea—symptomatically signals the intricate dynamics of what North Korea officially put on display at the expense of suppressing other heretical factors into silence and invisibility. Although covered in the veil of revolutionary ideology, there are fissures and gaps in the movies Sin and Choe produced, which allows for subversive

readings challenging conventional ways of understanding their work as faithfully serving Kim’s regime.’! It is undeniable that the changes Sin and

Choe brought to the North Korean film industry were often limited, but their story of North Korea opens up the possibilities of discussing most crucial moments in the development of North Korean theater, film, and performance history and offers tales of misplacement in time and space, the place of the state patriarch in North Korean society, gender relations, and the everyday performance they were to display as model citizens of Kim Jong-il.

CHAPTER I

Hybridization of Performance Genres

Institutional Reforms

The North Korean leader’s fascination with and special treatment of film raises questions about how the genre evolved from or had a formative influence on its parallel genre—theater. Michelle Mills Smith has shown that there are two ways of looking at the relationship between film and theater: “either as a ‘to the death’ struggle between competing performance genres, or as a sort of ‘parallel universe’ in which the two have little to do with each other.”’ While these two models might prove useful for other case studies, neither provides a self-sufficient method for the analysis of North Korea. ‘There was an open preference for film from the initial stage of the North Korean state, so as to make live theater appear peripheral. North Korea’s own report claims that its film industry began in February 1946, when a small film laboratory was established in Pyongyang. ‘This was just one month after the Propaganda Bureau of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee established a film unit.? Armstrong’s study of early North Korean cinema confirms the story: “The Soviets and the North Koreans had to create a film industry from the bottom up. According to playwright O Yeong-jin, active in the filmmaking circles in Pyongyang at

the time, the Red Army signed a film production agreement with the People’s Political Committee of South Pyeongan Province in 1946, and brought in film equipment and trained technicians from the Soviet Union.” The following year saw the opening of the Joseon Art Film Studio 55

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(Joseon yesul yeonghwa chwalyongso), where feature films were supposed to be made. As the North Korean official claim goes, in February 1947, Kim IIsung ordered a sock factory formerly owned by the Japanese to be converted into a film studio.t The North Korean media claim that Kim II-sung himself was actively involved in guaranteeing that the studio had the necessary in-

frastructure. Kim directed his staff “to order the import of equipment, the recruitment of filmmakers from all over the country, and provided ample encouragement so that North Korea would have a film studio by no means inferior to those in other nations.”> However, this cradle of North Korean film

production was ruined during the Korean War when heavy bombardment effectively destroyed Pyongyang. A North Korean source claims that a Soviet cameraman with the last name Nevrisky helped plan the reconstruction of the studio.® The veracity of this report is proven by echoes in the memoirs of eyewitnesses. As Sin and Choe noted late in the 1980s, this North Korean film studio was a smaller replica of Mosfilm Studio in the Soviet Union.’

The Soviet influence on North Korean cinema was formative, but this

was openly acknowledged by the North Korean state only in the late 1950s.° For example, in November 1957, Foseon Yesul featured an article, “The Soviet Influence on Our Cinema” by Jeong Jun-chae, in which the

author compared the film industry of 1950s North Korea to that of the 191g postrevolutionary Soviet Union. This detailed history of the Soviet-North Korean collaboration in film production testified to the immediate presence of Soviet directors and cinematographers on production sites.”

Although the Soviet presence in charting out early North Korean cinematic practice is undeniable, it is difficult to claim that North Korea uncritically absorbed this cultural assistance. ‘The first North Korean feature film, My Hometown (Nae gohyang, 1949), exudes a strong nationalistic ethos, distinctively different from Soviet films of the time such as The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, 1949), which mostly centered on the idolization of Stalin without paying equal homage to the homeland. Loosely based on Kim IIsung’s biography, the film features an ordinary family’s vicissitudes against the larger background of national struggle against Japanese colonialists and the landed class. The narrative follows the epic journey of a male protagonist, Gwan-pil, who leaves his family in the devastated countryside to fight

for the Japanese colonialists in Manchuria. The film illustrates the unflinching struggle of male peasants entirely dedicated to the reclamation of national dignity. After the heroic victory, Gwan-pil returns to his hometown and participates in the liberation of landless peasants from the ex-

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ploitative landed class, which ultimately brings the peasantry’s long oppression under occupation and exploitation to an end. Bucolic family life is restored, culminating in Gwan-pil’s marriage to a village girl as an allegorical rehabilitation of national sovereignty, which is predicated on the revival of masculinity. Although the film seems primarily to focus on the revolutionary struggle and the salvation of the nation through the personal views of Gwan-pil, the political theme is richly interwoven with a lyrical portrayal of the Korean countryside, creating an intricate tapestry designed to canonize the simple way of life of peasants, who were projected as the embodiment of the Korean national essence. As Armstrong argues, the national ethos expressed in the movie was so powerful as to eclipse the socialist tenet: “One might expect a film made in North Korea during the Soviet occupation, at a time when Soviet cinema was the object of so much lavish praise, to be a faithful imitation of a Soviet film, focused on class struggle and saturated with fulsome gratitude for the Red Army’s liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule. But the USSR is not even mentioned in Nae gohyang, and class struggle is far less important than the national struggle against Japanese oppression. Nae gohyang is a propaganda film, to be sure, but its propaganda message is one of Kim Il-sung leading the Korean nation, not the Soviet Army liberating North Korea.”!° Similar to Armstrong’s analysis of the national superseding the pan-socialist, director Sin, who saw this film in Seoul in 1950 just before the outbreak of the Korean War, acknowledged that he was quite impressed and thought at the time that the Soviets were instrumental in making the film. However, when he came to North Korea later, he was surprised to find out that it was virtually a North Korean production, made with Soviet resources.'’ The driving force of this film, the autochthonous sentiment for the homeland based on unfaltering patriarchy, provided the archetype narrative line for future films to come. With the success of its first feature, the North Korean state’s preference for film was consolidated, and it had a foundational influence in remolding the educational curricula in the arts. The way North Korea has reorganized the performing arts institutions over time reflects the leadership’s high expectations for film to carry out revolutionary education of the public. With the lofty aim of producing the first generation of indigenous North Korean

artists, the Pyongyang Institute of Music and Dance was established in 1950. In the same year, the Pyongyang Institute of Art was also established. On November 1, 1953, following Kim II-sung’s instructions “to uphold the artistic principles of the Party and to nurture future generations of revolu-

tionary artists,” the first performing arts school was founded in North

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Korea. This school was renamed the Pyongyang Institute of Performing Arts. It provided not only technical education but also a professional and well-balanced curriculum in higher education for theater artists. On August

I1, 1956, the institute was reformed into the National Theater School, a single college providing an education for future directors, actors, set designers, and lighting designers. However, in September 1959, the National ‘Theater School was dissolved and replaced by the Pyongyang Institute of Theater and Cinema (PITC). This event signaled a turn in performing arts education in North Korea, toward film as the dominant genre for propaganda. In the early 1960s, Kim Jong-il began to make his presence felt in the art world by providing leadership before he made an official debut as the head of the propaganda bureau in the late rg60s. One such effort was to supervise the PITC himself. He pointed out that theater cannot cope with the rapidly changing reality and is trapped in old-fashioned pedagogy; he criticized the PITC for ignoring education in the emerging genre of cinema. In implementing his wishes, the

PITC started to pay much more attention to film education by the mid1960s. A 1965 article, “Hopeful New Generation: The Sixth Graduation Ceremony of the PITC,” introduced the titles of the student films made at the PITC, such as Wife, Landlord, and Servant; Pride; The Departing People; and The Waiting, but not a single theater production was introduced."

The preference for film over other performing arts genres manifested itself in an extreme form during the following decade. On July 8, 1971, Kim

Jong-il abolished the theater department and renamed the school the Pyongyang Institute of Cinema (PIC). It provided a four-year education concentrating only on film. ‘This was the period when the revolutionary operas under the guidance of Kim Jong-il were produced and aggressively promoted. Kim Jong-il’s personal involvement cannot be underestimated, but at the same time, the notion that he was at the heart of the creative process was systematically propagated by the North Korean media. For instance, Laudatory Actor Rim Chun-yeong (just like members of other professions in North Korea, artists and performers are ranked according to a strict social hierarchy, in which a “laudatory actor” is the second highest level ), who played the female lead in one of the revolutionary operas, Ob, Tell the Forest, remembers when Kim Jong-il was intensively involved in the making of revolutionary operas: In those days [early 1970s] we had to start rehearsing way after 10:00 p.m. since we used the same theater space in which Sea of Blood was

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being performed. It took about three hours for the workers to take down the stage set of Sea of Blood and put up a new set for Ob, Tell the Forest. ...I played the role of the female protagonist, Bok-sun. When we were rehearsing act 5, scene 2, where my character was supposed to sleep for seventeen minutes, I felt so tired that I really fell asleep. When I woke up and realized my mistake, to my surprise, I saw the smiling face of our

Dear Leader in the auditorium. When I saw his caring face, my stiff body relaxed like melting ice under the sunlight, and I promised myself not to make the same mistake again.!°

The anecdote about Kim Jong-il’s presence at the rehearsal eludes any reliable proofs. However, what deserves our attention foremost is the fact that

the North Korean journals created the image of an artistic director who stood at the heart of the creative process. On a similar note, People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok, who played the leading female role in the revolutionary opera Flower Girl, made an entry in her diary on April 19, 1973, which was published in Joseon Yesul in 1989: “I heard that a week ago, on April 13, our Dear Leader expressed his opinion on the characterization of the leading role in Flower Girl. ‘A female singer in the Sea of Blood Opera Troupe sang very well in the production of Sea of Blood. I think that she can play well Kkot-bun’s role in Flower Girl.’”'* Choe Haeok’s May 8, 1973, diary entry further shows her excitement after the successful premiere of the production: “The Dear Leader showed up at mid-

night after our performance. I was so worried that I could have disappointed him with my immature acting and singing, so I was simply touching my costumes [in anxiety]. But to my surprise, the Dear Leader once again showed his love and trust: “The actress playing Kkot-bun’s role plays the role quite well in a modest fashion. ‘That role should not be exaggerated and should be played simply and modestly. The actress has quite a good stage presence. She is taller than others, but since she is in harmony with the actress who plays her sister’s role, it does not create any concerns.”'> The detailed coverage by the North Korean media of Kim Jongil’s involvement in such productions promoted the notion that he was the originator of the revolutionary operas and the idea that thanks to the leadership’s unflinching support, the operas prospered as the brainchild of the Dear Leader and the new model of national theater. However, the revolutionary operas’ prosperity brought about the downfall of pure spoken drama. Not until July 25, 1987, did Kim Jong-il change

his mind and restore theater education to the PIC’s curriculum, after

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watching a revolutionary play, Three Members, One Party, which was an adaptation of a classical Korean play.'° Nonetheless, the more than decadelong hiatus in theater education caused irreversible damage to pure spoken dramas.

In 1983, twelve years after official theater education halted and four years before it was officially restored, director Sin had a chance to see two North Korean stage plays: My Hometown, the stage adaptation of the 1949 film; and Mortification at the Hague Peace Conference, a piece allegedly written by Kim I[l-sung himself, which centers on the secret emissary of the Joseon dynasty who was dispatched to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference to protest the Japanese ambition to annex Korea. Sin recalls that he was dis-

appointed with both productions, as he believed that both plays significantly lacked dramatic tension. Sin regarded the decline in stage performance as a result of three primary factors: first, only limited topics were allowed on stage, while all translated foreign plays were forbidden; second, Kim Jong-il neglected pure spoken drama and focused on revolutionary operas; and third, talented stage actors retired without raising the next generation of actors, reflecting the discontinuity in theater education.!’ Although the realistic acting style of the pure spoken drama was fully absorbed by film, reducing the stage performance and education of spoken drama to the minimum had a detrimental impact on acting as a whole; with fewer venues for actors to explore, they now had limited chances to engage in various genres and less versatility. During what Kim Jong-il thought was

a private conversation with Sin and Choe, he openly acknowledged the shortcomings of North Korean actors vis-a-vis their South Korean counterparts: “South Korean actors are versatile, they appear in T'V dramas, live stage shows, and in film, and they do it all well. Our screen actors are ridicu-

lous when they are put on stage or on T’V. They are so unnatural, to the point that it is much better to listen to the recorded performance. However, when stage actors are put on screen, they also appear ridiculous. It is all our responsibility; for fifteen years we have been in charge of culture and arts and we have not even resolved that problem yet. Stage actors ought to act equally well in front of the camera. There are only few actors who do both well.”!®

In order to foster versatile actors as Kim Jong-il wished to do, it was absolutely necessary to have different venues and formats for acting—live stage, film, and TV. Although North Korea did have all those venues, balanced training for different acting formats was significantly impaired by the one-sided curriculum. ‘To revive actor training for spoken drama was not

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yet a part of Kim Jong-il’s intention in 1983, when the conversation with Sin and Choe took place, and in the meantime, the North Korean leadership was investing all its energy in film to the degree that no resources were spared to raise its cinematic profile. The culmination of Kim Jong-il’s effort to vitalize North Korean cinema with the help of the South Korean couple came with the opening of Sin Film Studio in Pyongyang in 1983.'’ The unprecedented naming of the film studio after an individual other than the Kim leaders and some other prominent revolutionaries manifested Kim Jong-il’s desire to pledge unlimited support for Sin Sang-ok, whom he believed to be capable of creating a place on the map of international cinema. Kim Jong-il added US$2 million annually to Sin’s personal budget, tremendous support for any individual by North Korean standards, to be used for his filmmaking activities.*" Sin and Choe immediately started making films drastically different from previous North Korean films, with a faster tempo, rhythmic editing, and a realistic acting style. The promotion of realism in films directed by Sin reached its zenith with his second film made in North Korea. Based on the 1920 novel by Choe Seo-hae, Runaway (Talchulgi, 1984) features a male protagonist who joins the underground anti-Japanese revolutionary group. The film features a scene where he blows up a train with dynamite. In order

to enhance the realistic effect, Sin asked the North Korean authorities for permission to blow up a real functional train, since there were no special effects available. The authorities came back to Sin immediately with a positive answer. As he wrote in his memoir, “Everything was allowed to [him] in the name of filmmaking in North Korea.”?! Sin and Choe’s experimentation with different cinematic styles with the unlimited patronage of the leadership not only brought realism into North Korean films but also expanded the scope of possible cinematic subject matter. In 1985, Sin made a film involving a fantastic creature called Bulgasari, which became the title. Modeled after the Godzilla film series and intended to be an international blockbuster,’” the film centers on a small iron doll figure, which, upon coming in contact with human blood, grows into a gigantic monster that destroys everything. The film is set in an unspecified

past when landless peasants suffer from cruel exploitation by the ruling class. The film concludes with Bulgasari eventually joining the peasant side and bringing social justice by punishing the exploitative class. The unusual subject matter makes Bu/gasari stand out from the rest of North Korean cinema and even from Sin’s North Korean oeuvre, as there are no other films featuring similar imaginary subject matter. Moreover, the

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film is unique in its hybridization of different performance genres. Clearly with an eye set on entertainment, it incorporates folk dances and martial arts to advance the dramatic action, which in turn is not-so-subtly framed by revolutionary ideology hailing the collective will of the people. Nevertheless, as obvious as the socialist orientation is, equally conspicuous is the fact that North Korean film from then on became aware of its potential to entertain as much as to educate. Love, Love, My Love (Sarang, sarang, nae sarang, 1984), Sin’s greatest hit among the movies he made in North Korea, is a musical adaptation of a traditional tale well known in both parts of Korea. Set in the Joseon dynasty, the story centers on the female protagonist, Chunhyang, who is born of a courtesan mother and a literati father. She falls in love with the son of a governor, but because of their different status in a strict social caste system, their love meets challenges from all sides. Eventually, Chunhyang’s perseverance and loyalty defeat all odds and the lovers are happily united in marriage. More detailed thematic analysis of Love, Love, My Love will follow in chapter 5. Here I want to emphasize that Sin turned this classical tale into a cinematic innovation through various experiments, such as mixing the old lyrics with contemporary music to be performed with choreographic gestures demonstrating traces of both old Korean dance patterns and contemporary dance. However, the cinematic experimentation culminates at a moment when the film introduces different spaces of performance showcasing three disparate spatial types, which bring in various genres of film, theater,

and two-dimensional visual arts. Sin presents the moment when Chunhyang and her lover, Mongryong, celebrate their union by singing a love duet in a fluid transition. First, the lovers are located in the three-dimensional space of a film studio, with realistic props and furniture unambiguously signaling the interior of Chunhyang’s bedchamber. As the song and dance progresses, Chunhyang and Mongryong move on to the adjoining space, devoid of any realistic props and filled with large and tall panels on which abstract calligraphic patterns are written. The panels are randomly lined up to create the three-dimensionality of space, the theatrical illusion of a live stage. Then finally, the two move on to the two-dimensional space of an ink painting, where the flat surface of a large white paper on which a tree is painted in black functions as the only backdrop. The colorful silk costumes of the two lovers freely roaming around the surface evoke a butterfly chasing a flower. Such a variety of blending of different performance spaces in this scene strikingly resembles the quintessential North Korean way of promoting the

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hybridity of all forms of art, with film at the helm coordinating diverse performance genres. Whether intentionally or not, the most experimental moment of filmmaking in North Korean cinematic history reverts to the principles of hybridization, ironically echoing the artistic vision of Kim Jong-il, who sought to appropriate various motifs and styles of each performance medium to create a culminating total art in which cinema was the backbone. The theoretical issues of hybridity provided the rationale for North Korean performing arts to develop as they did over the past fifty years, with particular attention paid to the paradoxical proximity of innovation and tradition, amateur and professional principles of performing given roles. Staged Film, Filmed Stage

All things considered, film occupied a preferred position in North Korean performing and visual arts under the exclusive patronage of the leadership. As observed in the previous section, this fact was reflected in institutional structures such as educational curricula and distribution of resources, which established and guaranteed the unchallenged status of cinema. Then, did the theater and live performance lose their relevance under the tangible

dominance of film as the prototype genre for the political education of North Koreans? Political education, heavily reliant on visual propaganda, mandated that audiences reenact the cinematic ideals in their daily lives through systematic educational and community activities. As every North Korean was supposed to discuss and embody the heroic virtues of film characters, ordinary viewers were encouraged to perform their roles as model citizens in communal activities such as parades, mass games, and educational sessions at work and school. Consequently, amateur acting flourished. The elements of live performance can be found in the everyday lives of the people, who strove to emulate the characters on screen

and thereby practice the state-imposed doctrines. Thus the ubiquitous medium of education and entertainment became a conduit to an appropriate worldview. The mighty status of cinema as a tool for education brought about an intriguing reversal in the roles of spectators and performers: while the usually anonymous spectators watching film (North Korean people) had to become performers of politically correct acts under constant social surveillance, the role of the spectator with all-seeing privileges was reserved only for the leader. However, it would be misleading to claim that the prominence of film eclipsed live theater performance in the performing arts scene. ‘That film

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received preferential treatment is undeniable, but equally undeniable is the fact that the principles of live stage performance found alternative venues in the hybrid genre of revolutionary opera and the political importance of amateur acting in everyday life. The latter will be explored in the next section together with professional actor training; in this section, I examine North Korea’s essential debates on how theater and film evolved as genres and whether the boundary between the two is as firm as many claim. The positions of theater and film as disparate genres began to change with the advent of revolutionary operas. This was not only because revolutionary operas consciously integrated various art forms such as spoken drama, Western orchestral music, dancing, and singing, but also because the advent of these operas in the 1970s was at a crossroads in time when spoken dramas were declining and new types of feature films with much more vigorous revolutionary content were on the rise. The introduction of revolutionary operas may appear as the advent of an unprecedented performance format, but a closer look reveals that it was a meticulously planned state effort to reconcile the declining stage tradition with the ever-increasing popularity of film. The revolutionary operas faithfully followed the stage production format in their use of proscenium space, but they were mostly circulated across North Korea not as live productions but through

filmed documentation—so much so that revolutionary operas brought about the tradition of filming stage performances, fusing live theater performances with filming techniques. In contrast to frequent statements about separating film and theater, intentionally or not, the North Korean filmmakers ended up integrating the two, and thereby created a stronger medium for propagating ideology. The characteristics reflecting the interference of film in theater and the hybrid medium of filmed theater performances deserve attention in their

own right, since the ability to propagate cultural products dramatically changes depending on the choice of genre. The filmic intervention, documenting the live performance, engenders creative rupture and reconfigures the contours of performance as a whole. In other words, the medium of representation (stage or screen) becomes as significant as the object of representation (political agenda). Susan Sontag referred to the use of film as “a medium as well as an art, in a sense that it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription.”*’ But as Annabel Melzer has contended, Sontag failed to sufficiently address the question of what it means to “document” a performance. By focusing on the act of recording a live performance, Melzer turns our attention to the “intention” of filming:

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“Can the performed piece withstand the move from medium to medium, without undergoing irreparable damage? ‘The question in itself implies that in the move there is no chance of a ‘pure’ document and that some ‘damage’ is inevitable. Questions and answers are echoed in terms of how many cameras, how much editing.”** Extending a step further Melzer’s argument that

questioning the intention of documentation is a good starting point for tackling the problems posed by a hybrid genre, I approach the “inevitable” damage as creative fissures and gaps consciously appropriated by the filmmakers who documented live performances. Editing a live performance is a drastic type of manipulation, often used to implement a certain ideology. Each technical aspect of filming—lighting, the camera’s point of view, miseen-scéne, position of the camera, editing that reconstructs time and space through montage—is an ideological statement, a “film phrase” reflecting the motivation of the filmmaker.” Filmed performance provides a glimpse of what could have been lost forever, but at the same time it poses the question of what has been left out in the process of documentation. Live performance could be the prized value of stage productions creating an authentic aura within mechanically reproducible films, but this was less so in the case of North Korea. For propaganda strategists, live stage performances primarily meant logistic challenges caused by disappearing acts impossible to reproduce. To borrow performance scholar Philip Auslander’s argument, the filmization of live performances is “determined by cultural and historical contingencies” rather than stemming from the competitive opposition between live and mediatized performances.”° Auslander’s book Liveness, a study of live performances in the mediatized

world, provides a helpful insight into the North Korean practice of filming live performances. As Auslander has argued: “Initially, mediatized events were modeled on live ones. ‘The subsequent cultural dominance of mediatization has had the ironic result that live events now frequently are modeled on the very mediatized representations that once took the self-same live events as their models.”’’ Although his primary focus is Western popular music, his research quite aptly explains the North Korean situation. The first part of Auslander’s observation—that the early mediatized events imitated live performances—at first glance may not appear to apply to early North Korean films; on a closer look, it explicates why these early films did not retain many elements of live performance. The primary reason is that while live performance and techniques of mediatization existed coevally in Auslander’s case study so as to mutually shape the modes of production, the first North Korean film was produced as late as 1949, quite

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some time after the initial stage of mediatization or filmmaking, which is heavily based on theatrical staging principles, as we see in George Méliés’s Trip to the Moon (1903). By 1949, the world cinema had gone through many cycles of development, with the introduction of color and sound films and the emerging tendency to capture realism on screen. More concretely, the fact that North Korean films, even from the early

stage, did not retain many theatrical elements is contingent upon the fact that Soviet cinema—the foundational model for North Korean films in 1949—was rigorously cultivating the new genre of socialist realism.*° Although North Korean cinema persistently dramatized the nationalistic ethos on a thematic level, as in My Hometown, on a technical level it was deeply indebted to Soviet filmmaking traditions. Starting in the 1970s, most North Korean theater productions were filmed primarily for wider circulation, which reinforced a rigorous editing process to achieve desirable images. The manipulation of the camera dictates the direction of the viewer's gaze at certain aspects of a viewed object. As film critic Andre Bazin has argued, “The screen has certainly modified our feeling about verisimilitude in interpretation”:’’ the position of the camera and editing were intended to have a clear ideological orientation. Eric Bentley, a renowned critic and playwright, has introduced a polemical perspective: “Just as the abstract painter argues that photography removed the need for representational painting by doing the job much better, so it is argued that cinematography removes the need for realist theater.”*° Kim Jong-il’s open abandonment of live spoken drama seems to agree that film can depict the revolutionary effort much more realistically than theater, but the hybridization of performance genres that began in the 1970s contradicts such an assumption. North Korean films demonstrating visible theatrical elements and theater performances were mediatized according to filmmaking principles; in other words, staged films and filmed stages reveal that both genres were very much in touch with nonrealistic theater elements, sharing similar themes and acting styles. This creates a perceptible contrast to the earlier films, which self-consciously marked themselves as distinct from all other genres. The theoretical and empirical debate on how screen and stage evolved out of mutual influence was very much at the center of North Korean producers’ attention. The February 1959 issue of Joseon Yesul contained an article regarding the difference between theater and film by accentuating the advanced nature of the latter.?' Using snowflakes as an example, the author states that in cinema one can shoot a scene under real snow, whereas it is

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impossible to scatter real snowflakes on stage, where no spectator expects to see them. ‘The use of props on stage is based on the assumption that they are seen by the audiences as conventional lies intended to represent something

real; props in cinema are real in themselves and therefore more credible. Using the montage effect as an example, the anonymous author continues to enumerate the differences between genres, and states that cinema was devised to convey a controlled vision proposed by the creators, whereas theater is left to the audience’s voluntary viewing process: “Montage in theater is accomplished by individual spectators, whereas montage in film is planned by the director before reaching spectators.”*” One of the first meticulous articulations of the difference between theater and film in North Korea, the article elaborates by discussing their genealogy: “Silent films often mixed stage techniques with film techniques and in that respect were a transitional step in the move toward full-blown cinema”;°’ “dialogues in film are brief because film naturally can rely on rich visual imagery.”** This author evaluates theater as a preliminary passage that leads to the mature genre of cinema, thus justifying the artistic privilege the latter enjoys. The argument that film is in a superior position continues to appear throughout North Korean criticism, echoing the leadership’s vision. In 1960, film critic Han Hyeong-won, in an article titled “Special Features of Film Scenario and Questions for Discussion,” quite persuasively demonstrated the superiority of film to other genres: “Film is the most important art of all. It is the mission of our party to arm the people with communist ideology through cinema.”*> Han proves his point by elaborating on such advantages as editing, easy manipulation of time and space, and inherent cinematic rhythm that is distinguished from other genres. Han points out that “editing is a series of words, cuts, colors, and collision of mise-enscéne, which allow for effective artistic expressions,”*° and thereby indicates

that the film scenario, unlike the drama script, does not bind writers with many restrictions. Han further notes that assisting this editorial advantage in film is a free-flowing time and space structure. This not only enables the scenario writer to switch time and space at will “but also enables the writer to choose the most essential part of events, and hence, to understand editing techniques translates to opening up infinite possibilities of changing the flow of events.”*’

Accordingly, the manipulation of time and space can force viewers to fo-

cus on certain aspects of the viewed object: “The specific nature of film editing is based on the subtraction of the elements of visual presentation.

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Fditing techniques may force viewers to look at one specific object, whereas

spectators of theater production may choose to stop looking at an object that might not grab their attention.”** Han’s argument that film as a genre could be more dictatorial than stage presentation emerges from the distinctive nature of the medium itself. The author seems to believe that “although distance in spatial settings could be an indication of time passing in both theater and film, film as a genre seems to capture more appropriately the passage of time than stage productions.”*’ Such a view is questionable in nature, showing the author’s inherent bias toward theater as a genre of limitation. Nonetheless, views like these were taken seriously by the filmmakers

and the political authority to account for the North Korean propaganda bureau’s preference for film. Another important remark concerns language in film. Han quotes Konstantin Stanislavsky’s assertion that “not everything has to be said in order

to be expressed”? in emphasizing the need for films to use laconic language, since wordiness can take away the persuasive nature of film: “[Verbosity in film] emerges from the lack of understanding the specific nature of filmic language. An effective balance between silence and words could increase the dramatic nature of the presentation.”*! This point resonates with

that of Han Seol-ya, the leading literary figure in the early years of the North Korean state. Han asserted that the verbosity of stage productions reflects the undesirable legacies of the byeonsa, the narrator who provided a narration accompanying the silent film, which polluted the beauty of the Korean language: “Dialect, when used to simply invite laughter from the audience members, becomes a cheap device. Many actors indeed imitate the exaggerated tone of a narrator from the silent film era.”*” In Han’s view, the residue of silent film that crept into spoken drama was unambiguously a detrimental factor for contemporary filmmaking. However, Han Seol-ya’s point presents a set of problems, since it implies that speech is the only component in stage production through which plot unfolds itself. He argues that characters on stage express their thoughts and emotions mainly through speech, but film scriptwriters are not so bound by this limitation in expressing characters’ thoughts.’ Both authors agree that

stage production generally is much more dependent on verbal means of communication than film, whereas cinematic representation tends to manipulate image-based silence much more effectively than theater. Based on such conclusions, Han Hyeong-won asserts that films have inherently different visual and sound rhythms differentiated from all other genres.

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Counter to the idea that theater needs to unlearn realism on stage, Bentley has suggested that if the screen is able to be more realistic than the

stage, it is also able to be more fantastic. Although the aforementioned opinions of filmmakers and critics agree that film has many aspects that differentiate it from theater, a thorough investigation of theatrical and cinematic practice points to the affinities between North Korean film and the-

ater, at least since the 1970s, when the revolutionary operas started to emerge: early North Korean films may not come across as theatrical, but since the filming of live stage productions began, there have been many in-

stances in which North Korean theater has freely borrowed film techniques, such as erratic changes of time and space achieved through editing, thus resulting in the visible affinities between the two genres. Even though Auslander’s observation that live events rendered mediatized events a performance format does not apply to early North Korean films, his later conclusion that with time, live events were modeled increasingly after mediatized performances has held true in the North Korean case. The comparison between the stage version of Flower Girl and its filmic

counterpart illustrates this point well. The stage production quite frequently uses blackout in order to quickly change the time and space setting of the action, which creates various effects akin to film editing. It also uses film projected on a blank backdrop to create realistic scenes of a house set on fire or roaring waves of the sea. But most significantly, the camera movement, using close-ups and rapid zoom-out sequences, allows for the scene to change without the viewers’ knowledge. When the female protagonist, Kkot-bun, travels to visit the prison where her brother is held, the guards

refuse to let her in to meet him. Devastated, Kkot-bun clings to the iron gates while the camera zooms in to show her tormented face. When the camera zooms out after a few minutes, the prison is nowhere to be found and instead, there is a film projection depicting roaring waves, which signals elapsing of time and space—a sequence only film editing can achieve. In addition to the filmization of stage productions, theater and film were

tied by another level of acting, grounded on a heightened melodramatic style. Furthermore, both genres fully shared the legacies of socialist realism,*° which promoted the teleological vision of the future. As delineated in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, socialist realism promised to

depict reality in progress. As literary scholar Katerina Clark eloquently points out, the mythological structure of socialist realism fortified the vision that the present leads to the utopian future, which was distanced from

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historical reality.*’ Although the North Korean producers wanted to create works in line with the realist tradition, their films nevertheless faithfully reflected the illusionist spirit of socialist realism. In its relentless promotion of illusion as reality, North Korea’s openly political manifesto aiming to embody revolutionary reality is interrupted by not-so-subtle utopian visions propelled in form and content by socialist realism. As one North Korean documentary filmmaker frankly admitted in 1965, shooting reality as it existed without visible dramatic intervention is not the best way to render revolutionary spirit: “I have had the experience of making the historical documentary Glorious Anti-Japanese Armed Resistance. | have learned some things I can apply to my next film: although the film deals with historical events, researching archives and collecting materials is not enough. Filmmakers should reflect his [the Leader’s] lofty mind and the passion of the time period they are capturing on screen.”** Kim Jong-il expressed the same sentiment in his book The Character and the Actor: “The real objective of cinematic art is not to make people merely aware of the world, but to develop them as communist revolutionaries and accelerate the revolution and socialist construction.” Distanced from the goal

of verisimilitude, North Korean performance has allowed pretentious ideals to occupy the creative center in both theater and film throughout the history of their development. Such a vision of utopian reality paradoxically brought about the embrace of an acting style that came from a melodramatic tradition under Japanese colonial rule. With the benefit of hindsight, the irony becomes clear: North Korea opposed everything Japanese according to its loudly proclaimed ideology, but at the same time, it seems that North Korean performers inherited the acting style of Japanese shimpa, a transitional genre that evolved in

the early half of the twentieth century as a bridge between traditional Kabuki and modern shingeki, a spoken drama influenced by Western-style spoken drama. According to Ayako Kano, shimpa “translated as ‘new school drama,’ and the standard encyclopedia definition explains that it was a kind of hybrid genre, a step between kabuki and truly modern theater.”° Early

twentieth-century Korean theater absorbed the elements of this genre, which had a formative influence on the overall development of modern Korean theater. The official North Korean theater detested everything Japanese on a thematic level, but ironically, so far as acting style was concerned, it retained some quintessential iconographies of shimpa as it extolled the histrionic passions expressed in immediately recognizable tableau gestures

of stage characters. Only through exaggerated passions could North

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Korean films clearly project the utopian visions of the future as the blueprint of how the nation was destined to evolve. This exaggerated acting style has been criticized by both North and South Koreans who detested North Korean theater’s superficial appropriation of foreign genres. Han Seol-ya, in an article titled “Proud Current State and the Future of Mass Art,” criticized some plays featured during the National Arts Festival in 1958.°' He noted that “sinpa [shimpa] style acting and staging were undesirable,”*” and that “the appropriation of various foreign genres, such as operetta, musical sketch, variety, and ballads without exploring the thematic depth of performance should be avoided.””* The half-baked appropriation of various foreign genres was not the only symptom of ailing theater productions. South Korean dissident writer Hwang Seok-yeong, who is known for his pro—North Korean political stance, noticed a similar trend in much later films of the 1970s and 1980s: “North Korean films, dance, and opera . . . all carry a fatal flaw, which originates from 1900. The intellectuals of the feudal agricultural society, most of whom were educated in Tokyo, blindly absorbed and introduced West-

ern civilization and culture. These intellectuals brought to Korea a Japanized version of Western culture.””* This flaw ironically tied the disparaged genre of theater much closer to film. The melodramatic acting style of the film Flower Girl is hardly distineuishable from that in a theater version, although the former takes much more liberal leap of faith in the camera’s ability to capture life more realis-

tically than live performance. Bentley makes the point that the screen is equally realistic and fantastic, like its predecessor: “The camera can show us all sorts of things—from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies— which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another

with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.”°> What Bentley suggests as the strong point of film—its ability to involve rapid camera movement—became instrumental in the way stage productions were filmed. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of stage characters might have motivated the staging of films as communal rituals in which live bodies of spectators formed a congenial notion of community. Although the living actors’ bodies were

transposed onto a two-dimensional screen, spectators emerged as living heroes of the filmed theaters, expected to live out the ideal collective drama.

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Actor Training and Everyday Performance

The process of blurring the boundary between performed illusion and social reality by transforming spectators into performers was carried out on two fronts. While professional performers on stage and screen were perpetually striving to learn the virtues of real revolutionary citizens in real life, ordinary viewers were aiming to become like the film characters who were presented as models to emulate. ‘These simultaneous processes were taking place in accordance with the vision of the leaders, especially Kim Jong-il.

Kim’s ideas on performance were crystallized in numerous publications, one of which was a 1987 book, The Character and the Actor: “In order to have

a broad and deep understanding of a character, the actor should first study the script and, in accordance with it, experience life on which he is to base his portrayal. The actor should get to know the character while studying the script, and on that basis, delve into his life.”°° In order to achieve the union of himself and the character, the actor should deeply explore the character’s world and correctly analyze his personality, and on that basis, gain invaluable experience of his life.”°’ Kim’s rather naive insistence that the actors master the lives of the characters they play, in principle, was based on the Stanislavskian method of acting inherited from the Soviet Union. However, more important in the process of becoming a character was a total political conversion. Before imagining the lives of characters, actors were expected to be politically correct model citizens themselves. North Korean society openly prized actors’ political correctness more than their performing talents, which reveals a significant aspect of performative practices’ glossing over what seem to be the two disparate realms of illusion and reality—the character’s identity should spill over into the actors’ daily lives so they would be perceived solely by the roles played on stage and screen. Kim’s direction that “actors mediate screen and spectators by functioning as conduits attracting spectators into the world of cinema”** requires the actors to establish a correct ideological entry point for viewers. Actors are political teachers who perform ideology, whose social significance is located in the liminal realm of performed illusion and political utopia. This is precisely why achievements in acting are presented as a collective pride of the North Korean state rather than as individual talents. In fact, any mention of individual talent is extremely difficult to find in North Korean society, and in rare cases when specific performers are praised, the state leaders are behind the endorsement. ‘The flip side of this practice is

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that a performer’s individual identity in real life is a continuation of a film character’s identity, which is made evident in the film itself and therefore not to be elaborated outside it. When Sin Sang-ok directed his first feature film, Secret Envoy Who Never

Returned, in North Korea in 1983, he credited all performers and staff members at the end of the film, which was unprecedented in North Korean film history. All the movies that came before contained no acknowledgments because North Korean actors were not supposed to gain individual

fame. Even leading stars such as Hong Yeong-hui were known by their character’s name (Kkot-bun in the film Flower Gir?).°’ In fact, Hong Yeonghui’s role as Kkot-bun was so popular that it even appeared on a frequently used North Korean banknote, perpetuating the identity of a fictional screen character in real life.

Although the individual identities of famous performers are not made public, as they are in many other places around the world, a handful of successful North Korean stars enjoy social and economic prestige. Those who have successfully played major characters to become social icons are given high honors in North Korean society. ‘Io be awarded the title people’s actor (nmin baeu) is the most honorable rank a performer can achieve, equivalent to a government minister. The next rank, /audatory actor (gonghun baeu), is equal to a vice minister.

In principle, actors are perceived and treated as pliable workers, like peasants and farmers, who contribute their labor to the construction of the socialist state. Stalin’s dictum that “writers are the engineers of the soul” is revised and expanded in North Korea so as to create a new equation: “performers are the trainers of political correctness.” Ron Gluckman, an American reporter based in Hong Kong, had a chance to visit Joseon Film Studio in Pyongyang. During the tour he received a booklet titled “Guide to the Korean Film Studio,” which indicated that “film stars go into real life and help farmers in their work at the rice-transplanting season.” True to the account in this guidebook, performing for stage and screen is interwoven with efforts to learn from real-life experience. North Korean media transmit many stories where actors are identified with ordinary viewers. Laudatory Actor Rim Chun-yeong, for instance, published a memoir in 1988 reminiscing about when she acted in revolutionary opera productions: “In 1963, upon graduating from Pyongyang High School of Transportation, I was working as an inspection worker at the Pyongyang Railroad De-

partment. Thanks to our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s loving care and his high regard for my political solidarity, I realized my dream of becoming an

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artist and ended up participating in the productions of O+/, Tell the Forest and Song of Geumgang Mountain.”°" Rim’s narrative unfolds two ways of becom-

ing an actor in North Korea: not only professionally trained actors but also real workers were recruited for productions. But a more telling aspect of her story is that her correct political stance was the main reason for her selection as a performer, reiterating the notion that a successful actor and an ideal political citizen are inseparable identities in North Korea.

People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok tells a similar story in an article titled “Memories of Faith and Love,” which is an excerpt from her diary entry on April 19, 1973: ‘Today I was chosen to play the leading role of Kkot-bun in the revolutionary opera Flower Girl. I have only spent a few months on an opera stage, and to be selected as the heroine of this masterpiece is simply unbelievable. ... The more I think about it, the more it feels like a dream.

I was only a high school student in the far northern province of our homeland, lucky and blessed to be chosen to study at the Pyongyang Institute of Music and Dance. How can | ever express my gratitude for getting a chance to play this important role! ... Without the Dear Leader’s faith and love, I, the poor farmer’s daughter, would never have had a chance to play the leading role in this masterpiece.

Her story resonating with Rim’s account in the previous quotation, Choe emphasizes that the Dear Leader’s clemency, as well as her correct political background as a poor farmer’s daughter, opened chances for her to play the heroic roles. In some cases, the actor’s political involvement has gone beyond embodying revolutionary heroes on stage and screen. Without exception, all decorated actors have to have politically correct backgrounds; in rare cases, some have joined the Korean Workers’ Party, the highest political honor bestowed on any North Korean citizen. According to People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok, her entry into the Korean Workers’ Party was a monumental event of her life, as she recalls in her diary published later in Foseon Yesul: “Today,

thanks to the Dear Leader’s magnificent political trust, | became a member of our honorable party, the Korean Workers’ Party. Member of the Korean Workers’ Party! A noble title that I longed to embrace with my heart. ... In front of me is the party membership card that the Dear Leader kindly issued and presented to me. As I keep touching and looking at the membership card, I can hear his kind voice giving various instructions.”®? North

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Korean actors are highly political in a sense that they perform the models for ordinary people to emulate, but becoming an actual politician is rare and comes with clear limitations. Although some decorated actors have joined the Communist Party, there is no evidence that they have participated in political affairs in any leadership capacity so as to assert their view in politics. Historically, actors’ political participation has been a fact in various societies. For instance, Paul Friedland summarizes such dynamics well in Political Actors, which investigates the symbiotic fusion of theater and politics during the 1789 French Revolution: “Actors storming the political stage, politicians in the National Assembly behaving like actors, and both of them suddenly discovering the profound importance of political theater—all of these phenomena testify to the convergence of politics and theater in revolutionary France. Within a remarkably short span of time, France had been transformed from a nation in which actors were virtually ostracized from every aspect of social and civic life into a nation in which actors and politicians—and theater and politics in general—mixed so familiarly that they had become virtually indistinguishable.”” Not too different from the situation in revolutionary France, in North Korea the elevation of actors’ social status to that of political leadership took place in a remarkably short time. However, the change remained a

figurative one rather than an actual one. Unlike the French actor JeanMarie Collot d’Herbois, who became “one of the most important political figures in all of France,”® North Korean actors never ventured into real politics but remained within the liminal zone between illusion and reality, serving through their acting skills alone. Although there was an aggressive mutual influence of theatrical and cinematic images and political life, the actors themselves only rendered the images of immaculate revolutionary heroes and toured the country to interact with and educate ordinary citizens. Actors inspired audiences to become like them by simulating the political heroes, yet they themselves were placed at a distance, in the spectators’ position, to simply observe politics but not to take part in it. The creative team’s efforts to bring themselves closer to the daily reality of workers and peasants included other participants in the performative process, such as directors and writers. For instance, writers needed to find the roots of their creative subjectivity in everyday life: “In writing short oneact plays, it is important to find positive facts in our lives and aggressively make an archetypical model out of them... we should find the hero of our times and the red fighters of our party. In order to achieve this goal, we

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should not only work on already well-known heroes but also look into the ones who have not been discovered yet, and forge archetypes out of them.” By the same token, writers who did not situate their subject matter in reality were criticized for neglecting their role as vanguards of revolutionary

struggle, as demonstrated in the theater critics Park Hye-ok and Kim Gwang-hyeon’s assessment of the 1962 drama festival: “he playwrights have not totally mastered the reality of revolutionary struggle. They should make more efforts to go among the people and experience real life.”®’

These assertions arguing for the total conflation of illusion and reality appeared not only on journal pages but also in other venues, such as communal activities, whereby the performers on screen and viewers in real life were brought together. “Once a month, or twice a month if there are holidays, we show documentary films we made to the people of the countryside in assisting them with organizing and improving their cultural activities,” wrote one documentary filmmaker in 1966. A 1967 article exemplifies another instance where the actors and spectators created an occasion to encounter each other face to face: “Recently, the production team of Choe Hak-sin Family visited Kim I-sung University and played the film for the students, faculty, and staff. The attendees enthusiastically applauded the achievements of the production team, which artistically captured the lofty revolutionary ideals... . The participants in the discussion pointed out that this film attained a high level of artistic and ideological achievement by disclosing the American imperialists’ aggression, barbarity, and cunning.”°” These types of discussions were intended to prevent the film production teams’ potential detachment from immediate audience responses. For filmmakers to stay in close touch with the audience was a way to transcend film’s

defect of being an infinitely reproducible medium for the consumption of numerous anonymous viewers with whom the filmmakers rarely interacted—a genre that inherently is distanced from the audience. Films of Hollywood musicals share a similar fate in that they originated in live stage productions and have been transcribed into another format. Film scholar Jane Feuer points out the efforts to create the illusive presence of community within the musical itself in order to veil the alienation between the professional performers and the anonymous spectators of the film: “The Hollywood musical as a genre perceives the gap between producer and consumer, the breakdown of community designated by the very distinction between performer and the audience, as a form of cinematic original sin. ‘he musical seeks to bridge the gap by putting up ‘community’ as an ideal concept.”””

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North Korean communal activities aimed at tying film production and consumption into one circular event are too numerous to list in their entirety. The following letter, from farmers urging filmmakers to visit their collective farm and make movies based on their lives in the socialist countryside, is just one example. It was written in 1965 by Ri Sin-ja, then the director of the Pyongyang Seungho District Riheon Collective Farm: “Members of our collective farm are encouraging ourselves to uphold the spirit of our Great Leader’s “Thesis on the Problems of Our Socialist Countryside’ and doing our best to repay the Party’s endless grace bestowed upon us... . Come to our village where people struggle to realize our Great Leader’s ideals and energetically advance our nation’s living standards. Please visit us and make more movies about the socialist countryside. We believe that comrades who made admirable films such as Red Agitator and The Son of Earth will produce more outstanding movies depicting the socialist countryside in the new year.”’! A farmworker’s plebeian opinion, such as this one, was treated as equal in importance to a professional critic’s review, since film

was supposed to be the document of reality, about which real workers and farmers were the utmost authority. For the same reason, a member of the Ryangtan Cooperative Farm in Yeongheung-gun criticized the depiction of a farmworker for lacking any realistic aspects: “Whether the farmworkers are progressive or reactionary, they should be depicted in a way that one can

smell soil from them. Just because actors wear peasants’ clothes, grow beards, and use local dialects does not mean that they have embodied a character possessing features typical of farmworkers’ character.””” Through these various venues where conversation between professional actors and ordinary citizens was encouraged, viewers learned to discipline

themselves according to visual performances. In turn, the consumers of these performances set out to internalize the bodily behaviors demonstrated by actors. According to a retired soldier’s letter sent to the editor of Joseon Yesul, “Retired veteran soldiers who work in our factory watched the play Our New Generation. It was so touching that we kept watching it again and again. The new generation of veteran soldiers who grew up in the loving care of our Mother Party swore to lead heroic lives like those of stage characters. Please write more plays like this one.””’

The nonprofessional film and theater viewers’ assimilation to heroic characters on stage and screen was facilitated by organizational support at a grassroots level. From the very early stages of North Korean history, local organizations were created to support political education through the arts. Collecting viewers’ feedback for future productions was one way to imple-

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ment this policy. Park ‘lae-yeong, the head of the Writers’ Union of Dramatists in 1957, claimed that it was necessary “to establish a system that could listen to the viewers’ opinion; to discover and cast talented new actors and directors instead of rotating roles according to rigid work schedules; to have the leadership demonstrate moral virtues themselves; to depict everyday life in a much more artistic, delicate, and calm way.”’* Likewise, the Art

Circle of the Pyongyang Cooperative Factory producing miscellaneous household items published a statement that its members should “uphold the teachings of the Great Leader and strive to depict the mechanization of the production line in various performance forms such as comic sketches and variety shows, which are the ways to bring those performances closer to real life and enliven everyday experience.””°

Such views were echoed by professional writers as well. The leading writer of the time, Han Seol-ya, commented: “We need to systematically coordinate the organizational structures of artistic activities of small circles and the circle for the masses. Each organization at a provincial level should encourage small-circle activities and make them interact with other circles in order to find and develop national treasures. .. . Small circles should not insist on staging large-scale productions but develop small-scale pieces in order to function as the vanguard of agitprop among the people.”’° These “circles,” or small-scale local organizations, were to be places where nonprofessional viewers could learn from the characters in film and theater. The lesson was learned well; these small organizations also became essential social structures to foster collective ways of life through various collaborative performance projects, such as group discussions and creating performances.’’

Similar to this story from the PRC, director Sin tells a story involving a

campaign officially titled “Struggle to Implement and Realize Ideals in Films” (yeonghwa silbyo tujaeng), through which the North Korean state in-

volves every social unit, from schools to workplaces, in organizing study eroups to carry out their duty of learning from films: The study group members organize discussions by comparing their lives to the lives of heroes in the film and make resolutions to emulate the

heroic virtues at work and home. Moreover, the Party publishes exemplary lines and theme songs in a small notebook to be distributed free to every North Korean. Each workplace and school will organize acting or singing contests and reward individual or group winners in order to encourage competition among them. Once when I was detained in the

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Social Security Police Station [for attempting to escape North Korea], | was not aware of such struggle sessions, so when one guard, all by himself, started to rehearse lines from a movie in a stultifying melodramatic tone, I thought he was mad.”*

By systematically organizing audience participation in and reenactment of performance, what may seem one-dimensional propaganda theater productions and films become live events; the major lessons promoted by the rep-

etition are inscribed onto the bodies of North Koreans and serve as the ideological foundation of their worldview. The small-scale performances that people practice on a daily basis often culminate in street parades and mass games, a large-scale performance i1n-

volving thousands of participants. Emulating the actors on proscenium stage and film screen, the citizens of North Korea perform collective ideals of revolutionized nationhood in unison. Since this kind of mobilization requires a long preparation period, the events are staged on the streets and squares for special occasions, such as the annual celebration of the leaders’ birthdays, the People’s Liberation Army, the Korean Workers’ Party, or the founding of North Korea. Or according to one defector who lived in a small town near the North Korean—Chinese border, on these national holidays, sports competitions were held instead of street parades in celebration.” Although this kind of small-scale sporting event does not measure up to the massive parades in urban areas, it nonetheless upholds the same state ideals of physical strength and coordination of participants.

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Figure 4. A panoramic view of parade rehearsal scene, from the Grand People’s Study Hall overlooking Kim Il-sung Square. Mid 2000s. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

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Storming the squares and streets has been an enduring tradition of socialist states and had a formative influence on the early stages of North Korean collective performance. The earliest North Korean state documents, captured by the U.S. Army during the Korean War, showcase film documentations of Soviet mass gymnastics, testifying to the early influences North Korea received from the Soviet Union. According to these Soviet materials, thousands of schoolchildren, teenagers, and adults staged physical exercises choreographed to demonstrate the unity of all participants, exercises that their North Korean counterparts remarkably resemble. Al-

though I have not yet encountered a direct source confirming the immediate Soviet connection in building the prototype of the North Korean mass performances, the fact that the North Korean government pos-

sessed these extensive documentaries sheds light on the substantial influence from the Soviet Union. Mass performances—mass gymnastics, street parades, group dance, and demonstrations—embody the collective ways of North Korean life in a literal sense, bringing the members of the family-nation into a physical space and thereby visually ascertaining the corporeal unity of the collective. Furthermore, the bodies on display showcase national strength, with a particular emphasis on the youth and health of the burgeoning nation, which were expressed by the youthful physicality of participants. As Charles Armstrong

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id 3 Ja\ 5 oO _ e/ - Figure 5. A poster of a physical training , o = fi | =I rfSeptember | f 1 / canpaleris Theare caption on thePhysical oP reace and 1980. October People’s ¥‘ “= ahdfe7 |aiwe)?! Te Strength Examination Months.” The caption at

al we Le | the bottom reads: “Let Us All Pass!” (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

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comments, “Immediately following the creation of North Korea, there was a considerable emphasis on hygiene, sports, and physical purity. ‘Uhe individual had a duty to perfect his physical condition in order to strengthen the society and better serve the state . . . the well-trained body was a synecdoche of, and a prerequisite for, a well-functioning body politic.”*® From the very early days of North Korea, its citizens were made to participate as performers staging a national body as a wholesome and congenial entity. This practice forecasts the ensuing state policy, which placed so much emphasis on training, regulating, and demonstrating the healthy bodies of the state’s subjects as a metonymy of a strong nation. The proliferation of images of parades testifies to the North Korean state’s investment in communal rituals meant to discipline citizens into patriotic actors. Chris Springer, who traveled to North Korea, effectively describes the breathtaking scale of these parades on the central square of Pyongyang: “North Korea excels at putting on a show—and this [Kim I[]-sung Square] is its center stage. On national holidays this square witnesses aweinspiring displays of power. ‘Thousands of soldiers goose-step in dress parades, backed by an array of fearsome weaponry. Flamboyant floats tout the regime’s successes. Civilians bring up the rear, carrying placards, chanting slogans, and waving to the leader on the tribune. Through such political theater, the regime creates its own reality.”*! The military as the spearhead of the parade, followed by the civilians, seems to be the sequence of all North Korean parades I have researched. Kim Jong-il was mindful of the effects of such a sequence, as he noted the necessity to showcase the military’s strength on a regular basis so that the people will have faith in the military’s ability to protect them in times of war.” To have its bracing effect, military power must be displayed properly, and yet the display of power is

not effective until its appreciators—not only Kim Jong-il, but more significantly, North Korean civilians—become complicit actors in the display process. This is why the civilians always follow the military in North Korean parades: these civilian actors moving in unison were performing the same ideals they saw in films, filmed stage productions, and some live stage productions, all engineered to create a simulacrum of a utopian family-nation where illusion and reality coexisted in hyperreal performances. Although the suppression of live theater performances seems to have assured the dominance of film as a genre, film in a way simply became a means for amateur everyday life performance to flourish in order to reinforce the solidarity of the nation in everyday life.

CHAPTER 2

Time and Space in North Korean Performance Without Pyongyang, Korea would not exist, and without Korea there would be no earth. —NORTH KOREAN PROPAGANDA SLOGAN

Inventing the Sacred Landscape of the Mythic Past

In the 1993 feature film The Story of On-dal, set in the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, a lachrymose song accompanies the reluctant steps of young men who embark on a heartbreaking exile: “Who wants to leave their dear homeland behind? Only firm resolution can sustain us in this hardship.

Who wants to experience the tragedy of not having a country? No one wants to be subjugated under the yoke of foreign power. Never will I spare my life for defending my country.” These young men are lowly outcasts driven from their homeland by unbearable discrimination inherent within the feudal caste system of Korea. Although the fate of the nation is precarious and the ruin of their hometown obvious in the face of an impeding foreign invasion, they have been deprived of any chances to defend their country, ironically by native Koreans of higher caste. Having no other option, they are forced to set out for a secret training ground to become warriors, hoping that the future will bring them a chance to avenge the common people against both the foreign invaders who compromise their dignity and other oppressive wrongdoers. This lament from The Tale of On-dal is but one segment in a series of performative attempts to reflect on the “feudal past”! that began long be60

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fore the socialist revolution. North Korean films and stage plays dramatizing the feudal past are full of frustrated characters similar to these young men. The cinematic and theatrical representation of the past hinges on the official historiography of North Korea, which views the prerevolutionary era as marked by failure. Invoked as the dark age associated with either chaotic statelessness or oppression Koreans had to suffer, the “feudal past” figures the time when Kim Il-sung had not yet made a destined entrance into national history as the savior of the Korean people. Clearly stated in this historical perspective is the notion that legitimate Korean history began only with Kim Il-sung’s arrival to lead the socialist revolution and liberate the subjugated Korean people from servitude. ‘The past has been re-

configured to merge the origins of the North Korean state with the personal history of Kim Il-sung; his birth year of 1912 became the North Korean anno domini marking the official beginning of the state. Cast in this light, the past that precedes Kim Il-sung’s rule is configured as a meaningless time when feudal rulers suppressed the working class, who

longed for equality and liberation. Consequently, North Korean theater productions and films show no special efforts to glorify the past, nor any nostalgic longing for it. Instead, there is a persistent need to expose and exhibit systemic social flaws and correct them in every performance that dramatizes the pre—Kim I]-sung era. Perhaps because of the insignificance imposed on the feudal past, only a handful of performances are set during that time, such as Story of On-dal, Hong Gildong (1986), Rim Kkeok-jeong (1993), and Story of Chun-hyang (1980), together with the last’s musical adaptation, Love, Love, My Love (1984). Still fewer stage productions are set in the feudal past, and those rare instances were written and produced prior to the rise of Kim Jong-il’s revolutionary operas in the 1970s, with examples such as Princess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongju), the musical in five acts scripted by Jo

Ryeong-chul in 1956.2 North Korean society projects its historiography along the patriarchal succession stemming from a highly gender-discriminative stance. Performances that center on female protagonists of the feudal past, such as Princess Seon-hwa, Story of Chun-hyang, and Love, Love, My Love will be discussed in chapter 4, which focuses on women’s issues.

Three films that are set in the feudal past—Hong Gil-dong, Rim Kkeokjeong, and The Story of On-dal—teature striking commonalities despite the enormous gaps among them in the configuration of time and space. With their almost identical character types and similar plot lines culminating in the ultimate triumph of the low and humiliated, these films form a trilogy with a common thread running their structural and ideological matrix. The

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heroes of the past may be courageous, but they carry fatal flaws of not being able to subvert and revolutionize their given society, and in this sense, they remain as the failed understudies of the only successful heroes in Korean history—Kim I[l-sung and his family members. What this intentional creation of failed heroes of the past brings to our attention, more than anything else, is the presence of the triumphant leader of the present. It was a way to vicariously glorify the present by sketching out the darkness of the past, thus creating a vivid chiaroscuro of North Korean history that culminates with the advent of the savior. Hong Gil-dong, the first of the three films to be released, in 1986, enjoyed enormous success in North Korea and abroad in the eastern bloc, most notably in Bulgaria.’ The film is based on a popular novel by a Joseon dynasty literati scholar and official Heo Gyun (1569-1618), which captures the life of a legendary folk hero, Gil-dong, who steals from the rich to serve

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le othe > § nat « 7 m ain 7" - = ss sae ee | Figure 6. A poster of the film Hong Gil-dong on display outside a theater in Pyongyang. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

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the poor. His background—born out of wedlock to an aristocratic father and his lowly concubine'—was a fatal flaw for a hero of this period, when illegitimate children were openly discriminated against as the lowest mem-

bers of the rigid caste system. Thus, throughout the film the protagonist carries this stigma, which eventually becomes the natural justification for resisting corrupt feudal establishments. The film opens with scenes featuring the harsh discrimination and injustice little Gil-dong has to suffer in his father’s household. Known for his intelligence and a sense of justice, he becomes a favorite child of his father, a status that invites the jealousy of Gil-dong’s stepmother, the legitimate wife and the birth mother of Gil-dong’s kind half brother. Threatened by Gil-dong’s growing presence in the household, the stepmother conspires to

eliminate the boy and his mother, forcing them to leave home. Gil-dong enters a mountainous region to receive martial arts training from an old master who previously saved his life from the stepmother’s deadly plot. He trains diligently to become a martial arts master, and when he comes of age, he falls in love with an aristocratic lady named Yeon-hwa, whom he frees

from the thieves who have captured her. Unknown to the young lovers, however, is the fact that Yeon-hwa is the daughter of Lord Rim, who is a long-standing enemy of Gil-dong’s father, Lord Hong. Consequently, the lovers’ desire to be united meets challenges from both families, especially from Yeon-hwa’s parents, who are opposed to admitting an illegitimate son of their rival family into their own family. Not able to cope with this injus-

tice and social discrimination, Gil-dong forsakes society and becomes a thief, punishing corrupt officials and distributing their wealth to the suffering people. Gil-dong becomes a national hero when he triumphs over Japanese pirates. When he returns to the capital, the king summons him to the court to grant him any wishes he names: KING: You’ve saved our country. What can I do to reward you? ‘Tell me what you want, title, wealth, you name it. GIL-DONG: I’m humbled, Your Majesty. But I couldn’t have saved the country without the people’s help and sacrifice. My only wish is to see social order restored so that the people can focus on their livelihood. KING: (Szziling to Gil-dong.) You have a kind heart. (Turning to Lord Rim.)

But what does this mean? You kept telling me that people live peacefully, but this is not what I hear from Gil-dong. LORD RIM: Forgive me, Your Majesty.

64 + ILLUSIVE UTOPIA BROTHER [Gil-dong’s half brother]: Your Majesty, allow me to ask a favor on my

brother’s behalf. KING: Please proceed. BROTHER: My brother and Lord Rim’s daughter are in love. We seek your

approval of their union. KING: (G/adly.) Is that true? Lord Rim, isn’t this a great way to make peace between the two families? LORD RIM: Not at all, Your Majesty! Gil-dong is an illegitimate child, born out of wedlock, of Lord Hong and his lowly concubine. If you grant this marriage, it will create social disorder. And the strict caste system will collapse. I implore you not to approve of this union. KING: Is that true?

BROTHER: But Your Majesty! You’ve promised to grant any wish! KING: But this is a request that is impossible to fulfill.

After this final act of betrayal by the king, Gil-dong realizes that the only way to cope with the corrupt system is to step outside of it instead of vainly fighting from within. This dialogue sequence is shot in a confined theatrical space of the court with patterns of shot / reverse shot to capture the faces of the speakers. The extreme close-up of Gil-dong’s disappointed face creates a contrast to the medium shot of the king with the camera frame capturing the grandeur of his court attendants. Of particular interest in this contrasting sequence of shots is that it creates a palpable sense of disjuncture between the social system as a whole and Gil-dong as an individual. The courtiers’ ranks are marked by a strict hierarchy of lineups and sumptuous costumes, all designed to uphold the king as the central focus of the gaze; in this forest of pretentious courtiers, even

a legendary hero like Gil-dong is a diminished component of mise-enscéne. The camera angle explicitly suggests this idea as the spectators look down on Gil-dong from the pedestal where the king is located. In a similar fashion, the dialogue in the scene replicates the visual hierarchy. The conversation involving the king, Gil-dong, Lord Rim, and Gildong’s brother is not dialogic in nature, but rather like a series of authoritarian dictates by the king perfunctorily involving various partners, thus reinforcing the contrast of one versus many. Only in this case, the contrast lies between the mighty king and the multitude of subjects who are rendered mute. In the historical archives as well as in the novel, Hong Gil-dong leaves his homeland in search of a utopian country and establishes his own king-

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dom, in what scholars believe is now Okinawa. However, the North Korean film creates a much more open ending, with Gil-dong and his suite, including his mother and Yeon-hwa, embarking on an uncertain journey to the unknown land. In the closing scene, Gil-dong does not leave his homeland as a vindicated hero, but rather as a hermit resigned from worldly affairs. He exits the screen with a sense of defeat, as he cannot change reality no matter how much he resists. This modification of the original ending in real history and Heo Gyun’s novel seems to serve two purposes: Gil-dong, the hero of the oppressed people, could not have been presented as the settler of what is now Japan, the openly sworn enemy of the North Korean state. In addition, there must have been a need to tone down Gil-dong’s heroism to accentuate the real mighty hero for the nation—the founding father, Kim Il-sung. Gildong’s exile is attributed to the systematic failure of the feudal society, which does not present the possibility of revolutionary redemption, thus paving the way for the long-awaited arrival of the real savior. A similar sense of failure can be found in the film Rim Kkeokjeong, based on the epic novel by Hong Myeong-hui, who was a leading literary talent under Japanese colonial rule. Hong went to North Korea after the Korean

partition in 1945 and became a prominent political figure there. Written over a decade to be published in installments in a major newspaper, Joseon Ibo, from 1928 to 1939, Hong Myeong-hui’s epic novel vividly captures the rise and fall of the sixteenth-century bandit figure whose pillaging under the reign of King Myeongjong made an entry into history.’ The North Korean film version resembles the original’s epic scale, with the production of

the first eighty-minute installment commenced in 1986 and the fifth installment—the last in the series—completed in 1993.° This film continues to observe a folk hero’s vicissitudes in a feudal society—a tradition established by Hong Gil-dong—as it centers on yet another version of the Korean Robin Hood who lived in the sixteenth century.

According to the North Korean film version, Rim Kkeok-jeong was a butcher in the village of Yangju well known for his superhuman strength. The narrator’s grave voice catalogs the hardship people had to endure in 1550—the film’s temporal background: “During this time, all over the

country people suffered from exploitation. The thirteenth king of the Joseon dynasty, Myeongjong, ascended to the throne as a child, and the real power has fallen to the child king’s uncle, who abused his position to in-

dulge his greed. He increasingly demanded tribute from the people, and consequently the list of mandatory tribute grew exponentially each year. ‘To

make things even worse, drought decreased the harvest, and the entire

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country plunged into terrible disaster.” “he chronicle-like nature of this opening narration adds a sense of historical veracity to the events that are about to evolve. The film proceeds to show Kkeok-jeong’s victorious return

to his hometown after having repelled the Japanese invaders from the southern shores of Korea. Nonetheless, just like Gil-dong, Kkeok-jeong and his family are doomed to suffer insurmountable discrimination because of his profession, which classifies him as the lowest in the social caste system. The worst discrimination of all is that he cannot cultivate land for a living because of a national law that prohibits butchers from participating in agriculture. However, in reward for Kkeok-jeong’s exceptional valor during the battle against foreign invaders, he is granted the right to cultivate land. In the scene where Kkeok-jeong goes to the governor’s court to ask permission for this exclusive right, the fallacious inner workings of the feudal society become fully exposed: GOVERNOR: [he national law prohibits butchers like you from cultivating the land. However, such a law means little in the face of your heroic deeds to save our country. You may go ahead and start irrigating the land, but just be sure not make a huge display out of it. KKEOK-JEONG: Thank you, thank you, sir. I will not forget your benevolence. (Kkeok-jeong leaves the court.)

ATTENDANT: (Looking up at the governor worriedly.) Sir, what 1f someone

finds out about the breach of law? GOVERNOR: (With a sly smile.) What kind of idiot would follow the national law at a time like this? We are better off to tame a popular guy like Kkeok-jeong and use him later.

Given an exceptional permission to have an agricultural livelihood, grateful Kkeok-jeong works hard all summer, only to be deceived by treacherous officials who wait until the harvest to confiscate the butcher’s crops.

The governor’s betrayal of unsuspecting Kkeok-jeong resembles the king’s false promise to Gil-dong; both authoritative figures reveal the inherent flaw of the feudal system by which they govern and exploit ordinary folks. When protest does not yield any changes, just like Gil-dong, Kkeokjeong and his family are forced to the hideout in the mountains—a breeding ground for social outcasts. There he becomes the leader of the brotherhood of bandits who punish the greedy and help the needy.

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Although Kkeok-jeong in the original novel by Hong Myeong-hui is caught by the authorities and executed, just as with the historical figure, the North Korean film version does not bring defeat to end Kkeok-jeong’s life. Much as Gil-dong’s search for utopia is modified as an open ending, Kkeokjeong’s execution is replaced by a succession of modest conquests, forming

another open ending that makes him neither the sacrificial victim of the feudal past nor the revolutionary hero of the present. ‘The time and space in which Kkeok-jeong and his fellow bandits exist are dramatically differenti-

ated from those of the revolutionary age, primarily in that the hero, although he occupies the very margin of society, does not intend to subvert the oppressive social class structure. Instead Kkeok-jeong merely resists it

in a sporadic manner. Nevertheless, the underground hideout for the thieves appears as an allegoric transposition of Manchuria, where Kim IIsung based himself during his anti-Japanese resistance movement.

Last to enter the triumvirate of folk heroes is On-dal, a man of the Goguryeo dynasty (37 BCE-668 CE) who supposedly died in battle against the Chinese invasion in 590, as chronicled in The History of Three Kingdoms. However, the reconstruction of this historical figure in the North Korean film version is largely legendary. Just like The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong, the film opens with a narration that provides the audience with the historical background and establishes the aura of an authentic chronicle. Yet when compared to Hong Gil-dong and The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong, the narrator’s tone in this movie gains a folktale-like quality: “On-dal lived during the reign of King Pyeongwon of the Goguryeo dynasty. On-dal’s father died when he was only an infant, and his blind mother raised him single-handedly amid poverty and hardship. When On-dal was little, he sometimes had to beg in order to support his mother. He grew up to be a kind and hardworking man, but since he was a man of few words, people often called him On-dal the fool.” As the narration progresses, the impression of historical accuracy created by setting the Goguryeo dynasty as the historical backeround gradually glides into the realm of folktale. The folkloric narrative strategy becomes even more conspicuous with the introduction of a headstrong princess, Pyeong-gang, who insists on marrying On-dal, which gives the impression that the film is anything but a historical documentary. Princess Pyeong-gang’s rather stultifying obsession with the fool stems from an incident that took place during her childhood. The princess was a crybaby, and her father the king urged her to stop weeping; otherwise, he would have to marry her off to On-dal the fool. Princess Pyeong-gang takes what was meant to be a joke so seriously that when she reaches marriage-

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able age, she insists on marrying On-dal the fool. Infuriated at Pyeonggane’s ignominious intentions, the king plans to marry her off to the womanizing son of a corrupt official. What seems to be a cheery episode regarding the childlike insistence of the princess on fulfilling her father’s childhood joke figures another meaning in this film. ‘he king’s threat to marry her serves as a vehicle through which the king’s moral depravity becomes apparent: if he is not able to gain the trust of his own daughter, how can he gain the trust of the nation? Although set in a fairytale land, this movie, like the other two, shows an untrustworthy ruler whose authority is gravely compromised. Resisting the false patriarch’s tyranny and his threat to disown her if she does not accept his order, Pyeong-gang runs away from the palace in search of her destined husband. On-dal initially does not believe that Pyeong-gang is a human being and condemns her as the fox spirit trying to entice him, but at the end they become happily united as a couple. She teaches him how to read, while he teaches her how to do physical work: “Oh, how fun! How clever it is for people to have invented such a device!” the Princess cries in joy when Ondal teaches her how to mill. The princess’s running away from the sheltered life in the palace to a life of hard labor is not projected as condescending but as the righteous path of self-awakening. The virtue of physical labor is extolled in the movie just as it is in contemporary North Korea, an unmistakable parallel between the past and the present. However, this connection is not made to draw a similarity between prerevolutionary times and the present, but to lay claim to the past by making it familiar through the values of revolutionary society. What starts like a folkloric tale turns into a heroic saga when Pyeonggang discovers a dagger in On-dal’s mother’s closet that belonged to Ondal’s father, who died a hero’s death defending the country against Japanese invasion.’ On-dal discovers a cause greater than his personal life in his father’s death, which compels him to depart for the secret training ground. Disheartened by the prospect of separation, Pyeong-gang sees her husband off while her mother-in-law consoles her with unflinching heroic words:

“Women of Goguryeo must be as strong as men in order to groom their sons and husbands to become warriors.” Eventually, On-dal transforms into a valorous warrior who triumphs over the foreign invaders and is rewarded by the king, who finally accepts him as his legitimate son-in-law. While The Story of On-dal observes almost identical patterns of a hero’s journey from the humiliating abyss to the glorious zenith, this particular production approaches the realm of fairy tale more closely than the others.

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In addition, unlike the two previous productions, this film sheds a relatively positive light on the king. Can we see this shift in how North Korea viewed its past as related to changing sociopolitical circumstances of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult? Coincidently or not, in 1993, when The Story of On-dal was released, North Korea celebrated the grand reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb.

The tomb and the adjacent Jeongneung Temple went through a rapid restoration after Kim Il-sung visited the site in 1989 and instructed that it be renovated.® This event was a part of a larger historical project that provided the regime with a ground to argue that the northern part of the Korean peninsula was the originating site of Korean history and civilization: in addition to the reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb after intensive restoration, Kim I]-sung in January 1993 ordered the excavation of a tomb in the Gangdong district of Pyongyang. As a result of this effort, North Korean archaeologists declared that the tomb belonged to Dangun, the mythical figure who founded Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom. Although foreign archaeologists have not verified that the tomb actually belongs to Dan-gun,’ the North Korean historical project transformed Dangun from a mythical hero into a historical figure. In light of the same history-making endeavor, the North Korean state sanctified the monument of King Dongmyeong as a testimony to the historical legitimacy of the North Korean state as the successor of the glorious Korean past. King Dongmyeong was the founding father of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, where the action of the film The Story of On-dal takes place. Kim Il-sung himself took part in the reopening of the king’s tomb, out of which the media made a ceremonious public display: “On May 16, the Great Leader Kim toured the renovated tomb of Dongmyeong, the founding king of Goguryeo. The Party’s policy to preserve national legacy and treasure resulted in an admirable renovation of King Dongmyeong’s

tomb, which demonstrates thousand years of illustrious history of Goguryeo.'” The Great Leader Kim II]-sung said that the new generation erowing up should be proud of our wise and talented ancestors and that preserving artifacts from the past will foster a deep sense of national pride

and patriotism in future generations.”'' The event carried nationwide significance, so much so that Kim himself celebrated the occasion by adorning the tombstone with his own writing: “Commemorative monument for reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb” (Dongmyeong wangneung gaegeon ginyeombi).'

The buzz regarding the reopening of the renovated tomb was well de-

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served, if we look at the elaborate architectural details and lavish mural paintings in the adjoining pavilions. Freshly painted for the reopening ceremony, these murals depict the glorious founders of the Goguryeo dynasty as well as its worship of physical culture: they illustrate muscular bodies engaged in martial arts and wresting.'* The various scenes of bodily discipline

illustrated in the mural paintings at the alleged tomb site of the founding king of Goguryeo show the martial spirit of the dynasty, which prized corporeal strength as an essential national asset. These images of Goguryeo’s physical culture are strikingly similar to the scenes in The Story of On-dal where the hero goes to the secret training ground to become a warrior. The temporal proximity of the two visual texts—the murals and the film—in terms of their historical setting and the timing of their release in 1993 to the public makes clear that the North Korean leadership wanted to promote the state ideals of the Goguryeo dynasty, centering on physical and martial strength, as positive models for the entire nation to emulate. ‘The proximity between the contemporary North Korea and the Goguryeo dynasty is articulated in Kim Il-sung’s own words: People of Goguryeo were not only wise and brave, but also considered it their prime honor to pledge their loyalty to defending their nation. For this reason, men considered it their duty to master martial arts, archery,

horseback riding, and swordsmanship, and folk entertainment and sporting events were all primarily based on the basics of martial arts techniques. The Story of On-da/ tell us a saga of a hero who rose from obscurity to fame by exhibiting superb skills in hunting, and then went on to serve the country on a battlefield; this tells us that in Goguryeo, martial arts skills as well as wisdom and bravery were important standards by which to judge an individual.'*

What, then, made Goguryeo a unique time-and-space so distinctively different from the Joseon dynasty, which served as the background for Hong Gil-dong and The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong? For one thing, the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo was in a past distant enough from the present—separated

by more than a millennium from contemporary life in North Korea—that it presented itself as malleable via reimagination and reappropriation to reinforce the political agenda of the present as a positive model. In contrast, the Joseon dynasty, which came to an end in 1910, was not only of the immediate past but also regarded as a culprit in Japanese colonialism, for its rulers failed to provide effective leadership.!? But more significantly,

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Goguryeo was physically based in the northern part of the Korean peninsula, with Pyongyang as its southern capital. Attempting to position North Koreans as the successors of the valorous northerners, the North Korea government invented an ideal space out of Goguryeo in comparison to other past dynasties located in the south. Particularly in the tggos, when North Korea was becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, it felt more need to legitimize its own existence by way of illustrating its past legacy. The contemporary political divide between north and south was transposed in imagining the past in North Korean cinema, as can be witnessed in the contrasting semiotics of space in the three aforementioned films. Although Goguryeo was situated in the distant past on the site of contemporary North Korea, there must have been a risk in valorizing the kingdom: that it might obscure Kim Il-sung’s glorious founding of the current state. The folktale-like events in the film The Story of On-dal may be explicable in that the narrative devices involving fox spirits or the world of children’s imagination are meant to transform the narrative into a fairy tale featuring improbable yet entertaining elements; as a result, the film is deprived of any realistic implications. This way, a safe yet distant parallel is drawn between the past and the present, opening the possibility of looking at North

Korea as the contemporary reincarnation of this ideal ancient kingdom with a legendary aura. On a related note, a sense of inevitable destiny begins to surface when we look at the two visual texts of 1993 with the benefit of historical hindsight. Kim [-sung’s much-publicized visit to King Dongmyeong’s renovated tomb was like a rehearsal of his nationally mourned funeral, which

took place only a year later. Kim Il-sung’s stressing the importance of euarding the national treasure in his aforementioned 1993 speech seems to have emphasized to the whole nation the importance of guarding his personal legacy in the posthumous era. Interlacing the historical gravity with his personal destiny endowed the cult of Kim Il-sung with a sense of legitimate divinity, and without question, Kim Il-sung’s mausoleum far out-

weighs King Dongmyeong’s tomb in its significance as a site where mythopoetic past, glorious present, and utopian future of Korea are synchronized into a fluid continuum. The past is only useful as a historical framework with which the present and the future come to fully illuminate the national destiny toward socialist revolution. The stature of Kim Il-sung in North Korea is unparalleled, and in this sense, the kings of the feudal past only serve as inferior references to this

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ideal leader of revolutionized Korea. The relationship between Kim I]-sung and King Dongmyeong, no matter how ideally presented the latter may have been, can best be described in terms of distinction rather than equation. King Dongmyeong as the founding father of the dynasty may have provided an inspiration for the founding father of North Korea, but nevertheless he was of the distant feudal past and could not provide much-needed revolutionary enlightenment.'° Other feudal kings in Hong Gil-dong and The Story of On-dal equally fail in this respect. This is the main reason the folk heroes of the lowly social caste in these films have to provide the revolutionary vision. These folk heroes share many traits, one of which is their ability to invoke a question: What was the hero in feudal times in relation to the authentic national hero Kim I]-sung? ‘The three eponymous protagonists in the trilogy would qualify as contemporary revolutionaries in many regards. They all come from the lowliest class background and endure harsh discrimination, and yet they remain faithful to the people. This quality endows them with a certain legitimacy to carry out revolt, as analogues to an authentic hero, Kim I[]-sung, who carries out revolution. However, these heroes also experience failure as they all try to conform to the society ruled by deceptive authorities, only to be betrayed in the end. They can resist the social establishment as folk heroes, but they cannot be kings themselves, unlike Kim Il-sung, whose biography is reconstructed to show the transformation from one to the other. Thus, exile becomes an inevitable course of action for all three heroes, as On-dal and Kkeok-jeong go underground to realize their dreams and Gil-dong departs on a journey abroad in search of the uncertain future. Hong Gil-dong captures this fugitive moment in the image of a vessel floating on the sunset ocean, as the narrator deplores the drifting fate of the hero: He tried resisting the corrupt aristocrats. He also saved his country from grave dangers. But he was only treated to ridicule and discrimination. This is why people have forsaken their homeland and embarked on an uncertain journey. They set out to search for a country free of discrimination, hunger, and fear. But does such a utopia lie beyond the horizon?

Of particular significance in this passage is that the hero’s exile simulates and invokes Kim I]-sung’s exile to Manchuria during Japanese colonial rule.

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However, the uncertainty embedded in the final departure scene becomes the hallmark that distinguishes the heroes of the feudal past from Kim IIsung, who went into exile and came back to his homeland to successfully

subvert the system from within. The feudal rule that Gil-dong, Kkeokjeong, and On-dal resist is corrupt to the core under the tyranny of depraved feudal kings. Nevertheless, these male heroes cannot replace the king, nor can they thoroughly revolutionize their homeland. Occupying the

lower steps of the evolutionary chart that maps out the genealogy of national heroes, they were created to serve as the underdeveloped prototypes for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. For a future hero to embark on a life-determining journey and encounter his true identity is a common mythological structure, as James Frazer and Joseph Campbell have elucidated in The Golden Bough and Hero with a Thousand Faces, respectively. Kim Il-sung is no exception, which is evidenced by a wide variety of literary and visual examples illustrating his heroic journey from colonial Korea to Manchuria. This typical exile situates Kim I]-sung in

the familiar terrain of traditional heroes, but in order to distinguish him, there had to be a radical intervention to rescue Kim from any potential failure. This necessitated corollary steps to reinvent Manchuria as a place where Kim Il-sung planned his famous antirevolutionary resistance movement, faithfully providing a ground for future revolution.

Removed from the corrupting power of Japanese colonial rule, Manchuria, with its harsh winter storms and precipitous mountains as the embodiment of unflinching national spirit, was invented to provide a sacred haven where the hero’s tragic statelessness could be rectified. Korea as the physical territory under colonialism is replaced by the imagined nation, temporarily displaced to foreign Manchurian soil. Such a geographic design of the nation under colonialism was meant to achieve two objectives simultaneously in North Korean propaganda: on one hand, by deterritorializing the locus of the nation, Kim could disassociate himself from the national humiliation under colonial rule and place himself in diametrical opposition to the collaborators with the Japanese. But more significantly, it reinforced the notion that nation is an invented concept rather than an essentialist entity grounded in a physical space, which was a crucial tool for North Korean propaganda in laying claim on and reinventing the past.

Establishing the mandate for the North Korean ruler as detached from the Korean soil involved stories of his early childhood, which portrayed young Kim Il-sung on a sacred journey to achieve the nation’s independence. This movement to go away from the humiliated homeland gener-

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Figure 7. A mosaic mural of child Kim Il-sung on his journey to attain learning. The mural is located in Mangyeongdae, birthplace of Kim Il-sung. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

ated numerous visual texts, which could effectively embody the topography of a nation in exile. A twelve-year-old Kim is featured on Baekdu Mountain, at the border marking North Korea and Manchuria, where he would later find a revolutionary ground for his anti-Japanese resistance movement. The painting Comrade Kim Il-sung Departs for the Wilderness in Order to Establish an Underground Revolutionary Organization, published in Foseon Yesul in 1970 (see fig. 8), continues the reconstruction of Kim’s biography as he moves even further away from the Japanese yoke. The painting reconstructs the watershed moment when the future liberator of the nation takes his first step on the long journey that eventually takes him to the revolutionary training ground. The painting is accompanied by commentary: “In the early days of the revolution, the great leader Kim I]-sung stated, ‘Revolutionaries should not be afraid of death. They should resist no matter how harsh the challenge might be. Faithful revolutionaries who welcome the fu-

ture should embark on a road untaken at the dawn of revolution.’ This painting makes us think about the glorious revolutionary traits of Kim IIsung, who embarked on a journey to realize the grand plan of Korean socialist revolution.”!’ The North Korean aptitude for transforming the

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“imagined” into the “actual” conspicuously manifests itself in this painting. By projecting Kim in his formative years embarking on a resolute journey to save the country, the painting claims to recover faithfully the undocumented part of his actual life. As it was necessary to justify the legitimacy of the North Korean state,

theater and film productions invested much effort in establishing the mythic past of Kim I[I-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla movement and revolu-

tionary activities. Although little is known about Kim’s military victories against the Japanese in Manchuria,!* the invented mythic past was situated as the immediate past along chronological lines, clearly distinguished from the feudal past in which legendary folk heroes only partly succeeded. To locate the origins of the North Korean state outside of Korea was necessary as well, far away from the Japanese colonial rule viewed by North Korean historiography as a destructive force compromising the integrity of Korean identity. By interlacing the pure spatial images of rough mountains and snowy fields with the personal cult of the founding father of North Korea, the Kim leadership could establish the untainted origins and the mythic

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Figure 8. A painting depicting young Kim Il-sung embarking on his revolutionary mission, printed in Joseon Yesul 4 (1970): 7.

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.: ,See hue?” Gn i 7 Sty adel Ne ee Figure 9. A painting entitled Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun), printed in foseon Yesul | (1970): 7.

past of their state. The underverified history of Kim’s resistance movement in Manchuria was compensated for and reinforced through reproduced images, such as the painting Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun) depicting Kim Il-sung’s military advance in the Manchurian mountains (see fig. g). In

this painting illustrating the events in 1938 when Kim led his comrades through the harsh landscape under the Communist red flag, he assumes a vertically higher position as the unchallenged leader of the brotherhood, just like folkloric heroes in their community of supporters. The realistic style of painting, however, betrays the fictional subject matter. The timeand-space configuration of Kim’s emergence as liberator of the Korean nation is in the liminal zone between myth and history, feudal past and present, and illusion and reality. Manchuria as the sacred cradle of revolutionary movements, however, was meant to be a temporary haven at best. Designated as a hiding ground for revolutionaries in exile, it had to be a transitional space leading to the glorious return of the revolutionary heroes at the dawn of the birth of the new nation. As Carol Medlicott notes: “Any state’s exercise of authority is deeply bound up in a range of symbolic practices. Although states appear to be materially real—after all, their territory is mapped and their institutions are housed in physical structures that exist on the landscape—states’ sovereignty and their coercive power only become real and meaningful through symbol and performance.”'”

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The invention of sacred sites was crucial in realizing the new North Korean state’s sovereignty and power through ritualized performance. Physical sites, such as Baekdu Mountain and Samji Lake, assumed canonized status as spatialized metaphors of the birth of the nation, so it was natural that this patriotic space was repetitively captured through visual texts. Judging

from the monumental significance Baekdu Mountain occupies in the founding myth of the nation, it seems that propaganda intended to mark the hero’s transition in spatial terms as the fluid continuum between Manchuria as the site of revolutionaries and Korea proper. Baekdu Mountain, which is located along the border between North Korea and China, was chosen to mark the triumphant return to the fatherland. That continuum, from exile in Manchuria to homeland as essentially unified national experience, was literally transposed onto the family history of Kim Il-sung’s household, which, in turn, served as the metonymy of the entire nation as an extended family. Essentially related to this sacred site is the companionship between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jeong-suk, Kim Jong-il’s mother (see fig. 10): “Female revolutionary fighter Kim Jeong-suk raised her beloved

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Figure 10. A painting of Kim Jong-il with his parents in Baekdusan. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

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son on Baekdu Mountain. She had one sincere wish—that her son would inherit the revolutionary legacies of his father cultivated in the mountains

and become the future of North Korea, and the guiding star of the people.””? The transition from foreign soil to the native land is essentially tied to the female figure, the wife and the mother of two national leaders. It is no coincidence that the birth of the new nation is predicated on the female life-giving force, which is symbolized by the sacred water. For example, Samji Lake at the top of Baekdu Mountain is a locale symbolizing Kim Jeong-suk’s boundless loyalty to Kim I]-sung. A sculpture titled Water of Homeland stands at this site, which performs “the moment when Kim Il-sung entered the homeland in 1939. He was so moved that he stood there speechless when, with great reverence, Comrade Kim Jeongsuk presented to Kim I]-sung a bowl of water.”*! The symbol of water plays out in multiple registers in the narratives and visual images regarding Samji Lake. Perpetually narrated as the site of epiphany of the new nation, the lake on a microscopic level symbolizes the relationship between Kim IIsung and Kim Jeong-suk as partners in revolution, which logically yields the fact that Baekdu Mountain came to be tied to the birth of their son Kim Jong-il, through whom the patriarchal succession of the nation is fulfilled. Visually encapsulating the idea (see fig. 11), Kim overlooks his nation from the lofty summit of the mountain, with Samji Lake in the background. In the scene, the lake is not merely an animated part of nature foregrounding the revolutionary history but an animating force, entering the national history as its founding spirit. The juxtaposed images of life-giving father and water symbolize the site where the national essence originates. As the integrity and continuity of the North Korean nation were fully marked by the transition of power from father to son, Baekdu Mountain as

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the birthplace of the future leader gained prominence in North Korean topography. His actual birthplace is generally known to have been the Soviet Union, but this association between the heir designate and foreign soil

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Time and Space in North Korean Performance + 79

was erased from the official history. Instead, Baekdu Mountain, through numerous visual images and narratives, was mythologized into the sacred site

where Kim was born. Numerous songs and epic poems written by both North Koreans and foreign admirers”’ capture such an apotheosis, the work of an Indian poet, Lanta Gupta, titled “Baekdu Mountain” (“Baekdusan”) and published in 1992 being just one example. The mountain of Joseon Baekdu Mountain stands high Among the endless forests of Clouds and fogs You stand firmly

On your strong roots The holy mountain of revolution Baekdu Mountain On your peak The sky is blue And the sunset flames When Comrade Kim Jong-il was born He saw this limitless sky Spreading like the roof of Joseon The everlasting water of the lake on the peak Was the pure well of his dear home Grass that survived amid snow Its fragrance widespread Fle set out his first step On this vast land As if it were the fields of Joseon

Oh, tell me Baekdu Mountain, You roared with the gunshots of the anti-Japanese fighters! Where the sky meets the lofty peaks Lies the hometown of he Who is revered by the entire world Oh, Baekdu Mountain You retain General Kim I]-sung’s ‘Twenty-year anti-Japanese revolutionary history

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You are the cradle of revolution that greeted The birth of the star leading the way home Oh, the cradle of revolution Baekdu Mountain You,

Together with Mangyeongdae Where the Great Leader was born, Are the site of glory You are the birthplace of the Eternal sun of mankind You will shine forever.’*

The rhetoric associating Baekdu Mountain with national origin and prosperity via Kim Il-sung and his son, such as “cradle of revolution” or the “site of glory,” recurs in other poems as well. Peruvian poet Mario Luna’s work

titled “Baekdu Mountain and Jong-il Peak” (“Baekdusan-gwa Jong-ilbong”), for example, relies on similar panegyrics, such as “the first cradle of the Dear Leader comrade Kim Jong-il” or “the spirit of the Korean people and the Korean revolution,”’* whereas the Russian poet Aleksandr Brezhnev’s “Jong-il Peak” (“Jong-ilbong”) refers to the site as “the root of the juche ideology.””’ Yet another example, the song “Kim Jong-il Is Our Fate” (“Kim Jong-il-eun uri-ui unmyeong”) reiterates Baekdu Mountain as the cradle of Kim Jong-il’s revolutionary efforts. He left his marks on the lofty peaks of Baekdu Mountain And came to us with rays of spring sunlight He became the sunshine of our heart And unfolds a bright future for us We grew up in his bosom and Will defend him with our lives General Kim Jong-il, you are our fate.”°

Jong-il Peak as the sacred birth site of the founding father’s heir is visually reinforced not only through painted images but also by means of inventing the actual physical space. A photo titled “Morning at Jong-il Peak” (see fig. 12) appeared on the cover of Joseon Yesul 2 (1996), featuring a hut cocooned on snowy Baekdu Mountain, where Kim Jong-il was allegedly born. In the

upper left corner of the photo is Jong-il Peak, an actual summit on Baekdu

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Time and Space in North Korean Performance + 81

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Mountain, which was consecrated to commemorate the birth of the future national leader. The physicality of this invention is astounding not only because of the effort to impose illusion on historical reality but also because

the actual site creates cultural and educational practices that mobilize North Koreans through pilgrimages and excursions. Being a physical space,

it also serves as the archetype for numerous replications in the form of paintings and photographs, as can be seen in the painting Great General Comrade Kim Jong-il (Widaehan janggun Kim Jong-il dongji), which features

the same Jong-il Peak in the upper right corner, presented with photographic accuracy (see fig. 13). In these instances of visual reinforcement, Kim Jong-il is established not only as a child born from the bosom of the national spirit but also as its mas-

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ter who is in full command of the unruly natural environment. The painting illustrates Kim mounted on a horse looking down on the native land, paralleling the image of his father looking down upon the nation, with Samji Lake in the background. Presented as the heir born on national soil, he becomes the personification of the nation, just as his father was pre-

sented as the natural leader guiding the soldiers on the snowy field of Manchuria in figure 9. Kim Jong-il also occupies an elevated level measur-

ing up to the highest peak on the entire mountain range; thus he is positioned as the master of nature and the national spirit it embodies. Such physical sites commemorating the allegedly realistic revolution have become the source of inspiration for many artists in a very literal sense.

In 1960 drama critic Sin Go-seong wrote: “Many dramatists have visited the sites of the heroic antirevolutionary struggle not only to get artistic inspiration but also to conduct meticulous research for writing. As a result, the dramatists have produced numerous works that will go into the treasury of national literature.””’ Intensive research on the revolutionary sites was meant to reinforce the notion of the imagined past as an unchallengeable fact regarding the origins of the North Korean people’s sacrosanct leaders,

quite unlike the heavenly mandate of the Confucian rulers. A similar process took place in film as well, with much effort invested in cultivating

the veracity of the reconstructed history that allegedly took place in

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Manchuria. For example, film critic Chu Min wrote: “In the 1930s, the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Manchuria led personally by the Great Leader Kim I]-sung was a shift in history marking a transition from passive resistance to aggressive resistance, which incited a nationwide uprising of the working proletariat and peasants. This historical shift gave enormous hope for future victory and had a formative influence on the development of film, as the history of resistance stimulated progressive leftist writers to materialize their artistic vision in spite of the fascist persecution by the Japanese.””* Indeed, the theatrical and cinematic efforts to reinscribe the national history in the collective cultural memory resulted in many productions throughout North Korean history. The North Korean government claims that My Hometown, the first North Korean feature film, discussed in the previous chapter, is based on Kim I]-sung’s story.””? What deserved particular attention regarding time and space is that the film appropriates the visual image of Kim

Il-sung’s founding mythology, as seen in the geocultural symbolism of Baekdu Mountain, as a sacred entrance that marks the hero’s homecoming: “Tt opens with a panoramic model of Baekdu Mountain on the Sino-Korean

border and moves on to shots of pristine forests, spring fields, running streams, and finally, to the streets and houses of a village in south Hamgyeong Province, the ‘hometown’ of the title.”*” The film’s plot evolves around the

male hero’s return to his homeland, which functions as deus ex machina restoring the social order, family life, and national dignity. As Armstrong argues: “Above all, My Hometown is the perfect embodiment of the foundational myth of the DPRK: the creation of an independent Socialist state with little or no outside assistance, Kim I]-sung as the agent and embodiment of Korean liberation, and Manchuria as the space of revolutionary genesis.””!

The founding mythology of the state continues to dominate the North Korean filmmaking, often creating an interdisciplinary dialogue between various media where the verbal meets the visual, or where the individual creation of a poet meets the collective efforts of filmmaking. A feature film released in two parts in 1980, Baekdu Mountain (Baekdusan) was based on Jo Gi-cheon’s epic poem with the same title. There is almost a verbatim trans-

position of linguistic images onto the screen; the verbal and the visual collaborate equally in creating quintessential images of the Korean struggle for independence, liberation, return to homeland, and the founding of a socialist state. In the most exalted moment in the poem, the narrator gasps for breath to convey the excitement of crossing the Amnok River, the borderline between the strange land and the long-forsaken homeland.

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Partisans have crossed the Amnok River

This homeland subjugated by the Japanese Has no place for us to live, nor to die We have lost it all. ... Oh, Amnok River! Amnok River! But you will roar tonight You will raise waves

Splash! Splash! Roar up to shake the mountains and rivers Partisans have crossed you to spread the flames of liberation We burn our patriotic hearts to illuminate our path We raise high our rifles polished with our willpower The patriotic fighters have crossed into the homeland. Amnok River! Amnok River!*?

Exalted passages like this enter the filmic text in their original form, often functioning as bridging shots punctuating the rhythm of the storytelling. As one article aptly points out, “The film uses the epic poem as an editing principle, which brings disparate scenes into one unity.”’?

The idea that Kim Il-sung’s return to the homeland initiated a new chapter in national history, captured in various media, was not meant to be presented passively to spectators. Rather, these media invited active participation from audiences, who were to perform the story repetitively through various social practices in North Korea. Just as Mao Zedong’s Long March became the monumental journey to be reenacted by later generations of Chinese youth, Kim I]-sung’s journey in his youth was ritualized as a sacred past to be reenacted by students. According to one North Korean defector: Every child in North Korea has to participate in a pilgrimage commemorating the footsteps of our Great Leader Kim Il-sung. We were told that when the Great Leader reached 12 years old, he crossed Amnok River and walked 1,000 ri** to attain learning. When he reached 14 years old, he again walked 1,000 ri from Mangyeongdae to Samji Lake in order to unify his homeland. ‘The teachers would tell us that these were re-

markable achievements for a boy of his age, but our Great Leader showed unusual determination and perseverance even from the early stages in his life, which we all must emulate. In tracing the footsteps of our Great Leader, we participated in a walking pilgrimage every year— the same distance our leader had covered at our age. We would not only walk, but also post revolutionary maxims of the Great Leader on the knapsack of the student walking in front, so that we could walk and learn

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at the same time. Not all children in the rural areas could participate. ‘They had to be selected and endorsed by their school to participate in a march to Pyongyang. It was a great festival for all even though by the end of the march, our feet were stripped of skin and there were bruises on our toenails. But if our Great Father had done it, so must we, so must all of us if we were to carry out his great legacy and fulfill his desire to unify Korea.*>

As this testimony shows, the reenactment of Kim Il-sung’s journey, which delineates the fluid connection between Pyongyang and the rural areas, would reinforce the unique revolutionary topography, with Pyongyang embodying the superior space of the future and rural areas being the holy center of the past but subordinate to Pyongyang. ‘The unique place Pyongyang occupies in North Korean geocultural imagination, however, can only be understood when its founder Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary activities elsewhere are fully taken into account. This allows us to discern the diverging implications of the past and present, foreign and native, sacred and marginal. Spectacular Pyongyang: City on Stage and Screen, City as Stage and Screen

One foreign eyewitness described his impression of the histrionic North Korean capital in the following terms: “Pyongyang is like a huge stage set. It is the closest thing to Germania, Hitler’s grandiose and happily unrealized vision of the future Berlin.”*° True to the statement, the pompous yet controlling cityscape of Pyongyang gives outsiders an impression that it is the ultimate dream-come-true for tyrants, from the Roman emperor Nero to the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, who saw their cities as arenas for self-glorification rather than functional places serving the needs of their inhabitants.*’ In this light, dwellers in the city become anonymous supporting actors whose roles are reduced to silent mise-en-scéne, accentuating the ebullient presence of their rulers.** The North Korean stage and screen present Pyongyang as a metonymy of socialist paradise, while the city itself becomes a stage for a narcissistic

self-portrait of the North Korean state and its leader. Put more succinctly as the dynamics between Pyongyang on stage and Pyongyang as stage, the dialogic tension emerges from the simultaneous processes of theater productions staging the city and the cityscape embracing theater productions as a part of its landscape. The focal point that seamlessly links theater to the city is the physical and

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Figure 15. A panoramic view of Pyongyang. The pyramid-shaped building on the left is Ryukyeong Hotel. The construction of this gigantic hotel had been ordered by Kim Jong-il with the intention of opening in 1989 to accommodate visitors for the World Festival of Youth and Students. Structural problems and lack of funding left only the exterior of the building finished. Construction resumed in May 2008, after two decades of hiatus. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

Time and Space in North Korean Performance + 87

spiritual presence of Kim I[]-sung, who is constantly hailed as the sire of the city and theater and film productions. Kim’s image throughout the city in artifacts such as badges,’*’ portraits, and statues creates an impression of him as

the constructor of the capital and a choreographer of the fatherland landscape. Kim was also hailed as the sire of the national capital in productions that created a visual “continuum” between theater/film and city. In effect, Kim Il-sung’s presence throughout North Korea was so pervasive that the continuum between performance and everyday life became functional “homogeneity” tightly interwoven by immediately recognizable renderings of Kim’s images. Like mirrors reflecting one and the same object, Pyongyang and theater/film productions about Pyongyang become each other’s twin image conjoined at birth by their professed love for their creator. Nevertheless, Kim Il-sung is never reduced to a mere object of visual spectacle, but becomes an all-seeing subject himself, constantly monitoring patriotic performances of the North Korean people in his city. His portraits are omnipresent throughout North Korea, from gigantic ones hanging in the public squares to smaller ones in private households, providing an omniscient gaze that constantly polices the activities of city inhabitants.” In this respect, Kim Il-sung becomes both the object of dramatization and the privileged spectator of the performances about the city on stage and as stage. The city of Pyongyang and performances centering on the city inevitably lead a symbiotic life so as to become self-portraits and autobiography of each other in glorifying their creator. There are countless theater and film productions about Pyongyang varying in medium and genre, which have been produced from the 1g5o0s to the present day. Despite the extensive list of productions on the city, they all

capture the same ethos of Pyongyang as the rising capital of the socialist paradise, as evidenced by the title of documentaries such as Pyongyang under Reconstruction (Bokgudoeneun Pyongyang-si, 1954)'' or Pyongyang Rises (Pyongyang-eun ireoseonda, 1957). Similarly, a drama script published in 1963, My Pyongyang (Na-ui Pyongyang), also deals with the constructivist idea of rebuilding the city in the aftermath of the Korean War.** Of numerous pro-

ductions, I particularly focus on two revolutionary operas entitled True Daughter of the Party and Song of Geumgang Mountain,“ which stage a utopian vision of the capital city. The production images of the former, in particular, have been displayed on the streets of Pyongyang during patriotic mass games and parades. Exploring these examples provide an occasion to analyze the semiotic transformation of theater space when the performance about the city crosses the physical boundary of theater building to enter the cityscape, thus self-reflexively returning to the locus of its inception.

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Perhaps the symbiotic relationship between the city of Pyongyang and

these productions about the city could be summed up most effectively through Henri Lefébvre’s words: “Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies. ... Activity in space is restricted by that space; space ‘decides’ what activity may occur, but even this ‘decision’ has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order—and hence a certain disorder.”* Lefébvre’s observation on the bifurcating nature of space becomes much more complex when the particular space in discussion is theater. As Marvin Carlson lucidly demonstrated in The Haunted Stage, theater is a kind of space constantly invaded by the past memories; if theater is an empty space where visual illusions can fluidly be staged and erased, leaving possibilities for other productions to create alternative temporal spaces on stage, then theater productions staging a certain cityscape may take spontaneous forms of parody or satire, creating various versions of one and the same city each time a new show is produced. While this may be true elsewhere, in North Korea, a politically correct vision channels the process of staging Pyongyang in theater and film productions to guarantee that no free imagination distorts the profile of the city as the spiritual and physical center of the nation. Needless to say, the controlling mechanism involved in staging Pyongyang gives birth to an end product that is isomorphic to the actual city. However, the city does not regard theatrical and cinematic presentation of Pyongyang as a mere epiphenomenal reflection of itself. While it is true that Pyongyang as an actual city 1s the source of Pyongyang as theatrical and cinematic illusion, the real city becomes reshaped by the twin image it created on stage and screen, since the represented city functions as the blueprint of how the real city should be. In this respect, the North Korean production is faithful to the accurate depiction of Pyongyang, but at the same time, 1s still preoccupied with presenting the utopian version of the North Korean capital while not entirely risking the photographic depiction of the city. The overriding mission of every North Korean stage production is to simulate this ideal world as if it were already a part of reality, a phenomenon epitomized most conspicuously in revolutionary operas. However, the North Korean life the operas staged was filtered through a utopian imagination and presented to people as undoubted reality while it was really the blueprint of an ideal world. Thus, revolutionary operas existed in an ambivalent dimension created by the dual axes of the fictional

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utopian world of theater and the real world that was supposed to look like the ideal world theater fabricated. ‘The revolutionary operas were both the product of utopian imagination and the producers of the real city. Given the role revolutionary operas played in shaping cityscape, one can imagine what happens when they embrace Pyongyang as one of the most glorified themes on their stage. When the operas eulogize Pyongyang to the degree that the city transforms itself from a mere spatial background into a protagonist with a full-blown personality, the operas’ impact is not limited to theater space alone, but permeates the realm of everyday North Korean life. As can be seen in the title of an article in Rodong Sinmun (Korean Workers Daily), “Be a Human Fortress to Defend Pyongyang,”** the North Korean state constantly endeavored to establish the sacrosanct status of its capital so as to treat city dwellers as functional instruments protecting their city. A Korean junior high literature textbook also cites Kim I|-sung’s instructions to regard Pyongyang as the central pulse of the North Korean people’s livelihood: “Pyongyang is the heart of the North Korean people, the capital of the socialist motherland, and the site where revolution originated.” The sprit of upholding the city as the sacred center of motherland, as captured by these slogans, is reiterated in Magnificent Heart, a 2002 feature film that portrays the capital city as the legitimate site for constructing the Korean nation in the postcolonial era. The film centers on the crucial moments in Korean history, such as Korea’s partition in 1945*’ and the two Koreas’ declaration of respective governments in 1948. The film follows the political journey of Kim Gu, the leader of the Korean provisionary government in exile in China during the Japanese colonial rule, and his visit to North Korea at Kim Il-sung’s invitation in an effort to resolve the political division between the two Koreas. Kim II-sung appears in this film in the usual heroic persona—a leader who urges different Korean sectors to work together in order to prevent the partition and to create a unified government. Although the film is filled with historical inaccuracies,*? it nevertheless provides viewers with North Korea’s unique apparatus of canonizing Pyongyang; the film shows long sequences capturing Kim Gu’s amazement

when he sees Pyongyang’s factory chimneys constantly pumping out smoke—a progressive sign that the North Korean capital is the hub of industrial power, while the South Korean factories became “dusty, all covered with spider webs,” according to Kim Gu. Moreover, the city becomes a place where Kim Gu is reunited with his old comrades: he encounters the old mother of his comrade from the days of Korea’s independence movement. Kim Gu also meets his former assis-

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tant who left searcing for a socialist utopia and found one in Pyongyang. Finally Kim Gu is reunited with his fallen comrade’s young son, who used to beg for food in China; but in Pyongyang, the boy now attends a military school established by Kim I]-sung himself. Kim Gu is moved to tears when he sees the young boy’s transformation from a beggar into a dashing mili-

tary cadre: a bright future bestowed upon Pyongyang residents by the magnificent leader Kim Il-sung. ‘The auspicious nature of the city, with its capacity to bring separated family members and friends together, is entirely attributed to the benevolent leadership of Kim Il-sung. Family members separated by war being reunited in Pyongyang is one

of the quintessential events in North Korean performances on stage and screen. In one of the revolutionary operas, Song of Geumgang Mountain, a long-separated father and daughter identify and finally embrace each other in Pyongyang. In this opera, the male and female chorus in unison exudes the joy of the family reunion: “For twenty years they have been separated,

but finally they are reunited in the bosom of the Supreme Leader. No mountain could be loftier than his benevolence. No sea could be deeper than his affection.”°! The lyrics proclaim, without any ambiguity, that the presence of the Supreme Leader is what endows the city of Pyongyang with its miraculous potency, which is reiterated in another lavish ode to the city in the same production. The ode stipulates not only the unchallenged dominance of the capital in the spatial hierarchy of North Korea, but takes one step further to pronounce the significance of the city as the fountain of a life-giving force. Ah, our Pyongyang Flow beautiful our red socialist capital is! Capital of revolution where our Supreme Leader resides. We fully experience happiness in the city. The entire world sings about the Sun of juche ideology. Here we see how its brightness shines through. Ah, our Pyongyang, prosper forever, our red socialist capital!

Once again, the profile of this glorious city is determined by Kim I]-sung, whose presence is manifested through solar imagery. As the ultimate source of energy presiding over the course of nature, Kim illuminates the glorious city and empowers it to be the “red socialist capital.” Pyongyang draws its authority as the dominant space precisely from the fact that it is the city erected and inhabited by the Supreme Leader himself, whose presence is compared to the ultimate life-giving force. The filmed production faithfully

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reflects such a notion of the vital city by building a visual composition around a rising sun illuminating the efflorescent city. Equally significantly, the city of Pyongyang in revolutionary operas becomes a sanctuary bearing the image of the Supreme Leader. True Daughter of the Party is a unique production among revolutionary operas in that it

stages the future image of Pyongyang as its dramatic climax. The main characters of this opera—a military nurse and foot soldiers—are fighting the American and South Korean enemies in a small South Korean village during the Korean War. The opera is set in a time when Pyongyang in its contemporary shape is yet to be built. While the soldiers are asleep on the battlefield at night, the nurse has a proleptic vision of a future Pyongyang. As the nurse immerses herself in reverie, the battlefield gradually fades out from the screen, and soon the camera introduces a close-up shot of Kim IIsung’s statue, which is painted as a backdrop; then the camera slowly zooms out to capture the entire panorama of Pyongyang, also painted as a backdrop, at the center of which stands the sacred statue of the national father. This scenographic rendering of Pyongyang is a near photographic de-

piction of the real city’s skyline; the female protagonist envisioned Pyongyang many long years before it was built. Arguably, this improbable accuracy—resulting from the verisimilitude between the theater character’s

utopian vision of the city during the Korean War and reconstructed Pyongyang in the postwar era—stems from meticulous calculation (rather than anachronistic elision of time), attempting to show that Pyongyang as we know it today was destined to develop as such.

The teleological determinism embedded in this scene of future Pyongyang gains persuasive power when Kim Il-sung’s image is projected as the mediator between the dark present of the Korean War and the utopian version of North Korea. Kim’s statue, which marks the center of the city, is not a monument erected to the glories of the past, but a point of reference in the future. In this light, theater productions staging Pyongyang served as

an ideal ground for inventing rather than memorializing the tradition. In the filmed version,°’ this sequence directs viewers to capture the statue of Kim I]-sung as the entry point to the city, thus establishing him as a sacred center of the city. As the camera manipulates the viewer’s gaze, Kim’s domineering statue becomes the point of origin from which centrifugal force diffuses to the entire city. It also becomes a centripetal destination to which the energy of the city converges. This visual presentation of Kim’s statue, framed by a circle that gradually enlarges as the camera zooms out from Kim’s image, unmistakably resembles the shape of the sun and its spreading rays. When the camera zooms out to capture the entire city of Pyongyang,

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dancing girls stage the image of blossoming flowers under the merciful sunray. Life effloresces under Kim’s presence, and Pyongyang claims the advent of spring when the red sun illuminates the entire world, the ethos of

which resonates with the text of the ode already quoted. Just like the promised land of Canaan where milk and honey flow, Pyongyang beckons

the exhausted North Korean soldiers fighting in enemy territory. Significantly, because of the accurate architectural references on stage, this paradise-like staged city is not merely a mirage, but a real city in which the audience members are situated at the time of the opera’s performance. Such a proleptic vision of future Pyongyang at the time of its complete

destruction can be found in numerous other examples. For instance, the 1963 film script My Pyongyang depicts the city at its infancy under the postwar reconstruction efforts, but it features visions of the rising city under reconstruction.** Significantly, the scenario begins not with a bird’s-eye view of the urban utopia of the future, but from the retrospective vision that links Pyongyang to the ancient past.

Looking from far away in the sky, Pyongyang in the month of May seems to be immersed in silence. Pyongyang is an ancient city with 1,530 years of history, but still in the twentieth century it tells us a dreamy tale. Silvery streams of the Daedong and Botong Rivers moisten curvy hills and valleys of the mountains, while high-rise buildings sprawling over well-constructed large roads shine brilliantly under the rays of summer. If we descend from the sky and get closer and closer to the city, we can see the bustling lives of young people charged with passion and energy. We will also be able to listen to the songs of inhabitants, old and young. Their songs are rhythmic and elegant, and yet are surging with joy, gradually reaching out to the infinite blue sky.”°

The description of the cityscape does not present an entirely modern space made triumphant by modern technology and adorned with high-rises and spacious roads. Rather, it retains the ideals of mythic space, just like Baekdu Mountain as signifying the sacred origins of the North Korean state. Pyongyang’s cityscape in My Pyongyang is presented as a source of creative en-

ergy retaining rich symbols of life, such as rivers, rays of sun, and forests

whereby it invents itself as the natural successor of the mythic Baekdu Mountain. Just as the mountain was the holy ground marking Kim Il-sung’s return to homeland, Pyongyang as the basin of sacred leaders punctuates the beginning of the new socialist era in national history.

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The script of My Pyongyang is written to reveal the presence of a narrator who features a particular point of view in capturing the city. he narrator clearly positions herself or himself as someone looking at the devastating postwar destruction from a perspective of prosperous future: “Here and

there vendors were spreading out their goods on the side streets of Pyongyang, which had yet to emerge as a modern city. Trolley buses traveled along the rails on narrow streets, which were then regarded large. But the

future roads were already under construction.” The editing directions present an overlap of the current city in destruction with the future glories the city was bound to achieve. The script features a messenger who brings a telegram from the war headquarters to one of the protagonists at the war

front while the cannon shots are still prohibiting the protagonists from dreaming of future utopia. “Commander, soon the reconstruction of Pyongyang will begin.” Chisam’s hands holding the telegram were trembling. Despite his middle age, his face turned ruddy with excitement. The commander suppressed his heaving excitement and turned his gaze to the telegram. On the image of the telegram appear overlapping images of dear Pyongyang where streams of cars exude brilliant headlights. ‘The images of urban life appear and disappear.*’

Such a juxtaposition of wartime efforts with the mirage of the utopian future in the scenario strikes a similar chord in the aforementioned reverie of the nurse in True Daughter of the Party. Like chiaroscuro painting, the dark destruction of the wartime Pyongyang only illuminates the brilliant potential of the future city. The writers’ vision for the city is effectively built on contrasts, which take the form of montage sequences: scenes of devastating wartime destruction are frequently invaded by the scenes of future construction. However, what makes the future bright and hopeful is the dark wartime devastation that Pyongyang suffered. The passage in the scenario captures the destruction city had to suffer: Gun shot! Gun shot! Gun shot!

A flock of birds, with their wings spread wide, fly mellifluously in the clear blue sky.

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Byeong-su is walking along the destroyed streets of his hometown. He is wearing a discharged soldier’s uniform and is carrying a large combat backpack. ‘The familiar streets that used to bustle with ebullient life have disappeared and instead, there are only few chimneys sticking

out from the rubbles. All the familiar roads and bridges have been severed. Heavy iron gates of former schools and hospitals lie in the middle of tall weeds sprawling out of destruction, and bullet-ridden signs of state-run stores and private shops lie by the riverbanks. Byeong-su’s heart beat faster.

His steps became quicker. ‘The next minute he was running. He ran by the broken electric pole, through the blackened Botong Gate, and ran to climb onto the old walls of the city to look for his home. “Tome! Where is home? Where did I live before in this city?” Nothing was on the site where his home used to stand but a huge, dark scar left by the bomb. Rooms, kitchen, side doors that were filled with laughter and merriment were now all gone. A half burned tree was the only thing that remained at its place to greet Byeong-su. Byeongsu caressed the tree. The remaining branches with lush leaves rustled and told him many tragic stories they witnessed. A bird nest on top of the tree also were destroyed. ‘There was only a mother bird sitting on a broken branch.**

However, the elaborate description of the city’s destruction and the inhabitants’ devastation do not turn into a prolonged lament. Instead, they only serve as the prelude to the heroic reconstruction efforts that follow. Soon Byeong-su gives up the idea of going back to college and persuades the construction committee to let him join the project. He is so engrossed in the idea of building a massive amount of housing that he passionately argues

with the housing construction committee members to choose manufactured homes over brick houses. Byeong-su gives a heated speech.

“The heroic Pyongyang is the heart of our people. ‘he city marks the origin of the revolution. Now it’s being reborn like a phoenix by the hands of our party members and people. We will go with the manufactured housing!” He lifts up a brick and smashes the podium with it. A shot of surprised and frightened crowd. A shot of broken brick falling onto the floor.

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Once again, an energetic marching music starts to play. A huge lifting machine elevates construction materials. The main strip in Pyongyang brilliantly unfolds. ‘Tall trees on sideways spread out their lush branches and flowers blossom in the gardens. Reflecting the shadows of trees and flowers, the

river flows as if it dances. Birds sing and the mandolin music resounds.

At the every corner of the democratic capital of Pyongyang there are simple, modern, yet elegant high-rises.” Although brick houses may satisfy the aesthetics of the city more than manufactured housings, the passage here shows a strong concern for rapid reconstruction of the city in the aftermath of war: practicality wins over aesthetic concerns, and speedy reconstruction over careful urban planning.

The wishful visions of the city in many scripts and productions were erounded on concrete facts: the city of Pyongyang was completely cleared by the insurmountable destruction it suffered. The eradication of Pyongyang’s concrete historical sites during the Korean War created a positive

ground for Pyongyang to worship the founder of the new city almost in a biblical sense. How, then, did the city on stage serve as the blueprint for the construction of the real city? How did theater productions about the city transform the vision of real city? A city whose history dates back to the first millennium BC, Pyongyang was once a capital of the ancient Korean kingdom Goguryeo in the seventh century.” The city was chosen as the North Korean government’s capital in

1948 to function as the political, economic, and cultural center of the northern part of the Korean peninsula. But during the Korean War, the capital suffered a devastating bomb attack that left a once-bustling city with nothing but debris. ‘The destruction Pyongyang suffered during the war has been documented by scholars and journalists. Peter Atkins notes: “During

the Korean War, about three million Koreans died, mainly in the North. Pyongyang was effectively obliterated by blanket bombing by the UN force. The DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) claims that 400,000 bombs were dropped, destroying all public buildings and 65,000 houses and shops.”°! Similarly, Bruce Cumings, in North Korea: Another Country, quotes a Hungarian correspondent who was present in Pyongyang during the war to show the devastating destructiveness brought to the city: “We traveled in moonlight, so my impression was that I am traveling on the moon, because there was only devastation . . . every city was a collection of

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chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that—that was all.”° The destruction of the city necessitated excruciating reconstruction efforts, but at the same time, the evacuation of the previous city opened all kinds of possibilities for the new one to rise from scratch. When most of the traditional architectural monuments disappeared almost without a trace,” Pyongyang was left like an empty stage where any kind of space could be created at will. As Atkins aptly remarks: “The elimination of all historic structure and function in Pyongyang created a timeless space onto which could be projected an ideological simulation of the authorities’ choosing,” just as the film script reflects. The city was like a blank canvas where anything could have been drawn without making efforts to coordinate and har-

monize new artifacts with already existing ones.© In this respect, Py-

ongyang was not genuinely a “haunted stage” in Marvin Carlson’s mnemonic sense. Carlson argues that “the empty spaces that have been utilized for centuries for theatrical events are particularly susceptible to semiotization, since they are almost invariably public, social spaces already layered with associations before they are used for theatrical performances.” Pyongyang after the Korean War was left as an empty space, but instead of being haunted by the ghosts of the past, it emerged as a place where visions of the future loomed large.

Although the destruction of Pyongyang cost North Koreans tremendous manpower and resources in rebuilding the city, it provided an opportunity for Kim I]-sung to put what he regarded as one of the Communist duties, “to master and remake nature,” into practice.® A brainchild of the Great Leader, Pyongyang was invented to be the showcase of socialist par-

adise and the new face of the Korean nation. The new landscape of Pyongyang gladly inscribed new sets of signification onto itself as the spatial center of hierarchal power structure that organized and operated North Korea. James Duncan’s observation is particularly conversant with what took place in Pyongyang during the reconstruction efforts: “The issue of the rhetoric of landscape is interesting because it raises questions about the processes whereby the landscape as a text is read and thus acts as a communicative device reproducing the social order.”°* The invented landscape in Pyongyang made blunt statements about new order, an example of which appeared in Kim II-sung’s article titled “Pyongyang City must be an Exam-

ple for the Whole Country in All Spheres of Politics, the Economy, and Culture.”°’

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Thus, was it more than a coincidence that the modern city of Pyongyang became a simulacrum of theater as plans for rebuilding the city emerged in a theater building? On July 27, 1953, on the day an armistice was signed between North and South Korea, Pyongyang Review wrote: While streets were in flames, an exhibition showing the general plan of

restoration of Pyongyang was held at the Moranbong Underground Theater, the air raid shelter of the government under Moran hill. On the way of Victory . . . fireworks that streamed high into the night sky of the capital in a gun salute briefly illuminated the construction plan of the city that would rise soon with a new look.”

Pyongyang in its current form rose from the rubble through the sacrificial labor of its inhabitants, as is evidenced by the 1958 song promoting the reconstruction of the city, “For the Workers Constructing Pyongyang.” Dawn in the morning blazes in the sky Colorful flags flap on the streets over Daedong River Young workers line up in a row Construction sites calls you forth, forward! Beloved Capital, Streets of Heroes!”!

But the North Korean state gave all the credit to Kim I]-sung by propagating his image as the constructor of the city. Figure 16 shows the painting titled Reconstruction of Pyongyang, in which Kim Il-sung is depicted as direct-

ing the rebuilding efforts. This painting testifies that Kim was represented as the sire of the city not only on stage, but also in other forms of visual culture reaching far beyond the physical boundaries of theater space. A strikingly similar visual composition of this painting is replicated in a 1960 photo that centers on Kim Il-sung directing the construction of the Pyongyang Grand Theater (see fig. 17). Here, the national father is portrayed as the one who gave birth to the physical venue where theater performances would serve the people of his city. Not by coincidence, Kim Jong-il, twenty-six years later, continued to carry out the constructive spirit of his father and order more theaters to be built in the city of Pyongyang: “We need to build more contemporary theaters in Pyongyang. In the eastern part of the city we should build a theater for youth and another largescale theater. Since we have many celebrated gyoye (circus) artists, we should

build an arena where artists could stage ice shows or water shows. We

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should also construct an international movie theater where we can show movies and stage music concerts.”’* The son’s statement reaffirms the lead-

ership’s vision of the North Korean city not only as the cultural capital of the nation, but also a place that functions like a theater itself. As intensively as North Korean propaganda wanted to create a continuum between theater stage and the city through forms of visual culture, so the iconic scenes from the revolutionary operas became intermediaries to achieve homogeneity between stage and city. For example, images of immediately recognizable stage and film characters from propaganda perfor-

mances saturated the city, becoming an integral part of the cityscape. Through this process, Pyongyang was established as a fluid location functioning both as a theatrical stage and the space of everyday life mediated by the opera characters whose omnipresence blurred the boundaries between the idealized world on stage and the everyday. The images of the fictional characters from the revolutionary operas were painted and displayed outside of public buildings in Pyongyang, such as Pyongyang Grand Theater. The theater displays the history of how the North Korean people heroically achieved their socialist revolution. In the mural outside of the building two celebrated female characters from the revolutionary opera productions can be found. The image of a girl with a bunch of flowers (see fig. 18) represents Kkot-bun, the leading character in Flower Girl (1972). The image of an elderly woman (see fig. 19) represents Mother, the leading figure in Sea of Blood (1971). Uhese are famous tableaux

from stage productions and film adaptations of revolutionary operas, and were immediately recognized figures throughout North Korean society, the evidence of which is their appearance on the covers of widely read magazines (see figs. 20 and 21). Apart from proving the popularity of these stage personas, the images on murals and the scenes from theater and film productions on the magazine covers demonstrate a photographic accuracy in transposing fictional characters onto the city’s public space. In my view, this invasion of stage characters into everyday life eradicates the boundary between the stage and the city. Moreover, it creates a seamless continuum between the illusory world of theater and the real world of everyday life, especially in the way in

which these fictional characters are presented as exemplary models of “nonfictional” North Korean revolutionary history. Whereas paintings and murals are a static genre that does not necessarily involve the bodily discipline of the masses in its production and consumption, the production of parades, by contrast, necessitates collective

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Com OT SBE LA euvee ge i198 @2iF I tm Figure 22. A poster with the caption “Let Us Now Start Saving Fertilizer for Next Year! Households with High Piles of Fertilizer Will Harvest More Surplus Rice!” (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.)

vating the serious shortage of adult male workers.”'°° Foremost, the cheo/-

lima movement brought about the empowerment of women and the younger generation as new sources of labor on the rural front, which was reflected in, and forged by, cultural representations of these demographic eroups. In the plays, films, and paintings centering on rural life, we see the overwhelming presence of females and youth as the guiding lights of the rural economy. Provided that these demographic groups were also likely to have a strong desire to leave provincial areas and join the modern life that urban areas had to offer, it was even more necessary to project them as the backbone of the national rural economy and production. Casting a sidelong glance at the Soviet Union, Victoria E. Bonnell illustrates a similar point in

Time and Space in North Korean Performance + I11

the case of female farmers in Soviet posters who are happily engaged in agri-

cultural productions: “The smiling woman tractor driver appeared in posters not as an accomplished fact but as an indication of what should be, as an incentive to make it happen.”!°! Likewise, North Korean propaganda features not the reality of rural life, but a wishful version of what it should be.

The disparity between urban and rural standards of living was a direct result of imbalance in distribution of resources in these two areas.'°* Local productivity was increasingly important in the rg5os to run a highly cen-

tralized government in North Korea, and in order to boost the morale of farmers, factory workers, and soldiers serving the rural area, the state not only produced performances that extolled the diligence and innovative pro-

duction methods demonstrated by rural workers as the highest socialist virtues, but also allowed local farmworkers to express their fulfilling lives on

the socialist farmland through amateur plays, some of which appeared in amateur journals, such as Sseokeulwon.

The centrifugal urge to export Pyongyang-based policies to rural areas left visible marks in the terrains of performance, but something of the reverse also materialized in the realm of the cultural imagination. While external living standards and the degree of modernization left rural areas as the backwater of urban space, in terms of moral impulse, the rural life was privileged as the stronghold of Korean essence, which was predicated on highly nationalistic sentiment. Overall, the success of spartan economic plans mostly relied on the perseverance of the North Korean people, but on the other hand, it intensified the visceral ethnocentric sentiment in those involved.'”? Consequently, the countryside became increasingly associated with the tradition embedded in nationalism, which groomed distinctively Korean performances. Ethnomusicologist Keith Howard argues that the cheollima movement was meant to “firmly establish artistic independence from Chinese and Soviet models. Certainly, it side-stepped what had happened in both states, following the death of Stalin and a loosening of central control over art begun in China in 1956.”'" However, the nationalistic sentiment and perspective that sustained the cheollima movement geminated even before its official launch; already in the first North Korean feature film, My Hometown, in 1949, there is an abundant attempt to recover the national dignity that had been forfeited under Japanese colonial rule. Armstrong argues that the socialist element of class struggle is not as prevalent in this film as is upholding the idyllic purity of the rural life: “Its message of revolutionary transformation is less impressive than its emotional evocation of the Korean landscape, village life, and the

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pure, uncorrupted spirit of the peasants, especially women. Nae gohyang [My Hometown] expresses a sentimental attachment to the innocence and simplicity (sobakham) of the Korean peasantry, a kind of Socialist pastoralism, alongside the Socialist realism adopted form the USSR.”!” North Korean culture in the 1950s and 1960s provided abundant examples of such work, and the tendency is revived ever more aggressively in the 1ggos when deadly famine impaired the rural economy and claimed a devastating toll of

human lives.'"° The grotesque juxtaposition of utopian ideals of rural life and the dystopian reality of its dismal condition captures the tension in North Korean rural life as it oscillates between two extreme poles. The dual aspects—as a stagnant as well as moral ground—represented by the countryside are even more complicated when the following factor is taken into consideration: Given that the nation’s founding myth was predicated on the cultural landscape of a mythological time and space of exile, and on the capital city of Pyongyang as the glorious site embodying the erand plans of the national father, was the countryside less likely to be burdened by the duty to mythologize national past and its leaders? Theater and film productions set in the countryside provide more room for artistic flexibility to explore humor, failure, and even sexuality—a long-standing taboo subject in North Korean public discourse. This may be why we find more experimental and ambiguous characters than in productions set elsewhere featuring the strict dichotomy between immaculate heroes and obvious villains. Subversive moments of exploring failure, although extremely rare, make incursions into rigid narratives for the official propaganda feeding clear-cut revolutionary ideology to its spectators. Among the most intriguing aspects associated with the countryside as an alternative to other types of time and space is found in amateur dramas of the 1950s and 1960s. This is especially true for works written and published in a journal entitled Sseokeu/won,'”’ or “members of the circle,” specifically targeting the workers belonging to “circles”’—small grassroots organizations at each workplace functioning for workers’ political education and socialization. In this body of works, which started to appear in the late rg5o0s, there is virtually no shortage of those exploring the liminal realms of political correctness and surreptitious moments of human sexuality. These dramas explore heterosexual relationships with graphic images of the body as a site where carnal pleasure and desire are nurtured. So how do the socialist way of collective life and the individual’s open expressions of sexual desire go hand in hand? ‘This question may sound oxymoronic if we consider how

North Korea’s official culture was shaped by the stringent suppression of

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sexual desires in the public sphere. However, a careful scrutiny of dramas set in the countryside, written by workers on collective farms and published in amateur literary journals of the rg50s and 1960s, must confront the conventional wisdom projecting North Korean culture as driven to construct collective citizenry devoid of sexual fantasies of individuals. Often transposed onto images of nature and farmland labor, the sexual desires of the main protagonists, who are usually heterosexual couples of marriageable age, charge their relationship with erotic tension, defying our conventional wisdom about socialist subjects whose intention should be to “produce,” but not so much to “procreate.” What is at stake in this rare moment in North Korean cultural history is whether the fissures within the hegemonic governing ideology of North Korea open up the possibility for individual desire to manifest itself surreptitiously. Romance in the countryside becomes a predominant element in plot development, transforming rural villages into a space replete with procreative activities, a stark contrast to the works set in Pyongyang, Manchuria, or Baekdu Mountain. Jang Se-geon’s one-act play entitled The Water of Life Flows (Saengmyeongsu-neun heureunda),'°* for example, is set in a small farm

village struggling to solve the problems of irrigation in the springtime. From the very beginning of the play, romance surfaces as the main propeller of plot development. ‘Twenty-three-year-old Hye-seon has set her eyes on her twenty-five-year-old neighbor Dong-hyeok, who is blind toward her affection because he is completely focused on the construction of a water pipeline. Dong-hyeok is more in love with the project than with his admirer—this seemingly odd choice being justified because a successful harvest depends on the outcome of the construction. Heartbroken, Hyeseon relieves her pain by trying to look beyond the personal emotion and

focus on her given work task. In the end, when the construction brings plenty of water to the agricultural fields, Dong-hyeok proposes to Hyeseon, thereby elevating water from the material prerequisite for agricultural production to the symbolic signification of life-generating source. If we allow a psychoanalytic imagination to decipher the image of strong gushing water along the pipeline pouring out on the rich soil, on the background of which joyfully stands the enamored young couple, then water as the lifegenerating source gains a concrete corporeal dimension of human sexuality. Likewise, U Rim-ho’s one-act play written in 1959, The Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth (feotso-ga saekki nanneun nal), illustrates the countryside as a place of burgeoning romance. The play centers on family life in a mountain village as farmers experiment with artificial fertilization of cows to produce

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more milk and beef. Just like the male protagonist in The Water of Life Flows, the family in The Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth senses a communal duty to succeed in order to increase the food supply for the entire village. Man-bok,

the head of the household, emphasizes everyone’s need to serve the state well as he praises the new political regime for making it possible for his son to attend university and his wife to wear silk clothing. The play ends triumphantly with the divine intervention of natural force when the cow gives birth to a healthy calf—the first one to have been artificially inseminated on the collective farm. The imagery of reproduction and regeneration, however, does not unfold on any abstract level, but is concretely predicated on the tangible language of physical labor, the birth of the calf being directly associated with the provider of farm labor, and with a concrete source of food.

The daily language of labor and production, however, remains relevant not only on a material level, but also on a subconscious level in other plays dramatizing rural life on the collective farm. Playing on a subject similar to that found in the 7he Water of Life Flows, the play News from Ongnyu Riverside (Ongnyu gangbyeon-eseo on sosik), written by the Literary Circle Members of the Naeok Village Collective Farm in northern Pyeongan Province,

takes bold steps to appropriate the language of labor as an unexpected instrument of flirtation between male and female protagonists. News from Ongnyu Riverside continues the genealogy of countryside drama by centering on the life on a collective ranch. However, various events on this farm are not beautified by the purely poetic expressions of bucolic paradise, but remain on the level of daily activities of agricultural production and breeding animals. In News from Ongnyu Riverside, two pairs of young male and female workers constantly milk cows, which is presented in the play as a series of

flirtation sessions between two pairs of lovers rather than the sanguine time of socialist labor. Although the two couples use the language of farm labor in expressing their romantic feelings, soon it is subverted into blunt expressions of their sexual desire. Against the backdrop of the milk cow’s full breasts, the young female worker Geum-sun confesses to Chang-ho, her male coworker, how happy she feels: “Comrade Chang-ho! I feel like my breast is going to swell whenever I sing.”!”’ In Korean, the word gaseum, which I translate as “breast,” can be read in two ways—with its primary referent being chest or breast, the body part, and its secondary mean-

ing being heart. hus, Geum-sun’s line can also be read as “my heart is going to swell.” However, for an appropriate translation of ga-seum,

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“breast” gains currency over “heart” especially when the scene features an imagery of cows being milked. Concrete descriptions of their breasts follow the aforementioned line when workers discuss problems of how to increase milk production. In the same fashion, another pair, Ok-hui and Cheol-ju, discusses how important it is to increase milk production for the health of the nation. CHEOL-JU: Comrade Ok-hui . . . as the chair of the Party’s Central Com-

mittee recommended, we should keep experimenting. Before milking cows, let’s bathe them and let them rest for an hour and feed them. ‘hen for twenty minutes we can caress their backs and breasts. OK-HUI: Yes! Flow wonderful it would be to succeed in this experimenta-

tion and have milk flowing like tap water... CHEOL-JU: ‘Then how happy all the kindergarten children would be. OK-HUI: Why suddenly mention kindergarten children? . . .

CHEOL-JU: Because they are the flowers of the future... and... our... OK-HUI: What? ... CHEOL-JU: Comrade Ok-hui! OK-HUI: . . . (Enamored, glances at Cheol-ju.)'"”

The dialogue between young male and female workers progresses from the ordinary language of labor and production to that of romance and procreation. The reference to children is by no means subtle, nor is the carnal de-

sire exchanged between the male and the female workers. The concrete bodily image of the cow and her swelled breasts transposes itself onto the body of the female conversationalist, which opens up the possibility of mating between the two workers. The images of female body and copulation are almost always mediated by images of food and its production. ‘This is not surprising given the fact that all those activities fall under the same purpose of creating, maintaining, and propagating life, establishing the foundational importance of the coun-

tryside, where basic necessities of life in its most primitive sense are satisfied. While the countryside might lack the lofty mythological ideals of Baekdu Mountain, where Kim Il-sung dreamed of liberating Korea from the Japanese colonial yoke, or the glories of Pyongyang as the holy founding city of the national leader, it nevertheless becomes the source of North Korean life. These amateur plays from the 1950s, when set against the later plays of the 1960s and 1970s, are striking in their openness to the romantic feelings of protagonists. Likewise, the vivid corporeal images associated

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with women’s procreative body eventually became substituted by the productive bodies imbued with ideological correctness as the state’s control and censorship tightened in the rg6os.''! As the female in the countryside in post-1g6o0s North Korean drama approached the stereotype of positive heroes defined in the tradition of socialist realism, she nevertheless appeared as a pale caricature, devoid of flesh and blood, when compared to the previous generation of women with their wondrous combination of carnal desire and communal, if not entirely communist, spirit. In the early 1970s, with the advent of revolutionary operas, Kim Jong-il’s ambitious projects implemented by highly trained urban theater and film professionals, pure spoken dramas declined in the performing arts scene. It is interesting to note that parallel to this transformation, the revolutionary operas do not feature productive rural life imbued with laughter and procreative energy, unlike spoken dramas written in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘Iwo out of the five revolutionary operas—Sea of Blood and Flower Girl—are mostly set

in rural villages in the North;'’’ their time is the Japanese colonial era, disclosing atrocious conditions Korean peasants suffered. Revolutionary operas produced by Kim Jong-il were preoccupied with glorifying Kim Il-sung’s achievements, and therefore the time-and-space coordination of these operas focused on the holy mountainous areas and the glorious city of Pyongyang. As a result, happy pastoral life on the socialist farm lost its chance to be represented in the prestigious revolutionary operas.

No matter how marginalized the problems of constructive rural life might have been in the overall scheme of the production, there were still numerous spoken drama scripts being published throughout the 1970s. Evergreen Pine Tree (Pureun sonamu, 1970)''* and Red Agitator (Bulgeun seon-

dongja, 1970) are two examples, both tackling the question of how to revo-

lutionize peasants who retain feudal traits of the past.''* Both written by anonymous workers on collectives, the plays improvise on the aforementioned amateur plays in the sense that instead of focusing on healthy farmworkers, they represent peasants as a challenging enlightenment project and the fulcrum of the dramatic tension. The second production, in particular, features characters who are headstrong and resistant to any changes, sabotaging the Party-led reform efforts to bring a new work ethic to the countryside. In this sense, the play becomes the experimental ground on which the most difficult cases of converting

traditional peasants are boldly put on display. As one anonymous North Korean critic noted, “The portrayal of the extremely negative peasants in this play contributed to the veracity of the events, in which these negative

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characters eventually become the members of working class, quite logically and persuasively.”!! The countryside as significant time-and-space model for theater and film make a visible comeback in the 1g80s with renovated patterns of plots and conflicts among characters. One of the noticeable features of theater and film productions set in rural areas in the 1980s is an open acknowledgment of the backwardness of the countryside and country people’s need to emulate the models of the city. This is not coincidental when we take into consideration that predominantly professional urban writers worked on these scripts from a central government’s perspective with an eye on invigorating rural agricultural production in order to overcome the crisis of national economy. While young characters in the 1950s and 1960s were seen to lead joyful, self-fulfilling lives in the countryside, their counterparts from the 1980s onward seem to share a common understanding that life in the countryside is a work in progress. Emulating urban standards of living is presented as one way of catching up to national standards rather than succumbing to a country youth’s vain thoughts. ‘The young characters, especially women, have to

cope with the temptation to forsake their home village and leave for the city. But without exception, they all realize that their true mission to uphold socialism lies within the rural community. Such a tendency seems to reflect the crisis of young people and women as the two pillars of the rural economy in this time period, the idea of which has been established in the early dramas centering on rural life. Considering that hunger has taken a devastating toll on human lives in the North Korean countryside starting in the 1980s, the rural drama’s task was to make the rural residents realize that their duty is to guard the backwater of the national economy. Consequently, a strong sense of self-sacrifice replaces the sexual bodily imagery of the characters of the rg5os and 1960s. Jeon Pyeong-chang’s 1986 play Cuckoo Bird Sings (Ppeokkuksae-ga unda) exemplifies the shift the rural plays brought about in the 1980s, in that selfsacrifice of young rural women becomes the fulcrum of the moral lesson. The dramatic conflict arises from other characters’ misconception of a girl’s desire to modernize and urbanize her rural hometown. Ok-sil, a young girl of a small village, is planning to improve the living standards of villagers by

building high-rise apartments, theaters, and paved streets, but villagers think that she is madly in love with the city and wants to escape by marrying a young man from the city. In reality, Ok-sil is in love with a boy from her village, Hyeon-cheol, but everyone, especially the elder generation, thinks that she has fallen for the city boy Yeong-ho.

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The villagers’ misunderstanding of the protagonist is predicated on the comic play of mistaken identity. The village elderly Man-ho is afraid that a model worker like Ok-sil might leave the village, so he spies on her to find out what her true intentions are. One day, while secretly pursuing Ok-sil, Man-ho notices a notebook she has dropped, but instead of returning it to her, he scrutinizes it with a hope that he will find out about her plans. As he reads through, he notices scornfully what he thought was Ok-sil’s plans to escape to the city: “Huh? .. . ‘my future apartment, theaters, and paved sidewalks?’ Ha, she acts as if she has already become a city girl. (He has a bitter expression on his face).”''° Man-ho’s anxiety of losing the model worker is compounded by the incident, and he goes so far as to hide behind a tree to spy on what Ok-sil and

Hyeon-cheol’s father Kim are talking about, but soon Man-ho is mistaken for someone else and is dragged from behind the tree by villagers, humiliated by public laughter. The final comic touch comes when Man-ho urges Ok-sil’s mother to hold back her daughter from leaving. Ok-sil’s mother, whose dream is to attend the land they have been irrigating for a lifetime, becomes angry at the news of her daughter’s potential departure. However, the mother, just like the klutzy Man-ho, inadvertently ends up staging a comic show at the cost of her own ridiculousness: she comes out to scold her daughter wearing the daughter’s flowery parasol and high heels, only to be laughed at by villagers for trying to look like a young marriageable girl.

The generational divide in this play between hardworking, faithful young people and the misguided, clumsy elderly gets resolved in a clear vindication of the young generation, which is well captured in the chorus song. CHORUS: A girl and a boy run together to bring blossoms to the farmland But the head of the work unit misunderstands the girl’s intention and wreaks havoc by accusing her of planning to run away to the city. Look at the ridiculous way he runs! Oh, the belated cuckoos sing their song.

They procrastinate, and then sing “Coo-coo.”!!’

In the end, villagers overcome the generational divide and everyone rejoices at Ok-sil’s plan to transform her beloved village into a modernized town. MAN-HO: Only now I came to realize the truth. If I stop trusting myself and others, then I will lag behind and become the laughingstock of

modern times...

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HYEON-CHEOL AND OK-SIL: Comrade Head of the Work Division!

MAN-HO: (Trying to calm his excitement.) | hear the engines! ‘Vhat sound

urges me to move forward. That sound for me is the heartbeat of our time. MRS. RI: So let us seniors march together with the younger ones. MAN-HO: Yes, let us be united and make our village a cultured socialist farmland, a civilized place where nobody is envious of city life.

Along the mountain hills, contemporary buildings in two or three stories

are lined up neatly. Brand new parks and pavements accentuate the beauty of the scenery. In the center of town stands a cultural center with dashing roofs as if they were wings ready to be spread out over the sky. HYEON-CHEOL: (Pointing at the backdrop.) Vhis is a future plan of our village. EVERYONE: It is as good as a city. (Liveryone looks at the backdrop in wild rapture. Chorus sings.)

Cuckoo birds sing their songs In my lovely hometown. Labor opens the path of happiness Labor brings flowers Oh, always a happy place Oh, my hometown—mother’s bosom.!!®

The play ends in an outlandish celebration of Ok-sil’s wisdom and leadership, which will bring a brighter future to the village. Upholding the young generation in this play becomes coterminous with ridiculing the older generation, particularly men. The reversal of the traditional gender and age hierarchy is significant in light of the long-standing Confucian tradition of upholding male elders as village heads. The reversal of the conventional order becomes possible only because of the rural area’s special place in the

spatial hierarchy within North Korea. Distanced from the physical and symbolic center of the nation, Pyongyang, where the sacrosanct patriarchy is very well guarded, the countryside can reverse the norm, with folkloric laughter dismantling the conventional authority of the patriarchal village head Man-ho in a Bakhtinian moment of carnivalesque decrowning of the king figure. At the same time, the last line of the chorus song, “Oh, my hometown—

mother’s bosom,” resonates as a reminder of the traditional vision that

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equates home and the earth with the mother figure. The comparison clearly

establishes the bridge between the rural area and the female life-giving source, and therefore ironically reaffirms the old village head’s anxiety that the village will lose young women of procreative age. As stultifying as the village head may be, his worries proved to be realistic. Losing women is not only about losing a workforce, but entails much grimmer consequences; it equals losing the ability to produce future generations, ultimately dismantling family life in the countryside. The village head talks to himself: “In case Ok-sil marries a city boy and leaves this town, all other girls will dream of leaving as well. Then what do we do... ? (He ponders.) Aha! I will make him wait for Ok-sil in vain so that he gives up at some point.”'!” The village head’s reasoning is echoed by another male villager, a local engineer, Yongho: “At one point we country young men had difficult time finding girls since all the country girls were attracted to city boys.”!”° While the urbanization of rural life brought by the younger generation and female workers is taken as a sign of progress, the play does not fail to remind its readers of the most traditional task rural women face—procreation of future generations. Or more precisely, the future labor force in the countryside is a significant part of women’s duty. While preserving the pastoral status quo is not part of the utopian formula, inscribing urban markers onto rural life should not result in the evacuation of a valued labor force. While Cuckoo Bird Sings extolled the virtues of country women who steadfastly held onto improving rural life, subsequent films and plays that came out of North Korea took one step further to introduce female protagonists who voluntarily give up the comforts of urban life in order to dedicate their lives to the betterment of the countryside. The 1989 film Traces of Life (Saeng-ui heunjeok) tells the story of a widow whose husband dies in a suicide mission to blow up a South Korean ship. The widow protagonist suffers from guilt over having argued with her husband on the night he left to sacrifice himself for the nation. In order to redeem herself, the wife em-

barks on a self-imposed exile to the countryside, where she becomes a farmer and eventually raises rice production to unprecedented levels. She thus transforms her mourning and loss into love and rebirth in the countryside. At the end of the film, when Kim I]-sung himself comes to the farm and praises its success, her sacrifice reaps its reward. The film projects the female protagonist’s journey to the countryside as a self-imposed exile, and thereby accentuates the inherent logic of North Korean society, by which the urban and the rural divide exists only on the vertical hierarchy. It is only

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with the epiphany of the national leader in the countryside that the latter becomes a glorious space essentially tied to revolutionary struggle at large. Ra Seong-deok’s 1990 stage play New Generation (Sinsaedae) continues the motif of the urban girl choosing hard life in the countryside, but unlike Traces of Life it put a comical spin on the subject. The play mediates various

levels of interest between male and female, urban and rural, and military and civilian. he central conflict of the play emerges from the misunderstanding between a female railroad ticket controller Jeong-ok, a young and inexperienced Pyongyangite, and a discharged male army officer Yuncheol. Yun-cheol served in the DMZ area and lost his vision while defending the border in a military conflict with South Korea, after which he was honorably discharged from the army. ‘The play begins with the conversation between Yun-cheol and his subordinate Gil-nam at a train station as they are on their way to return to Yun-cheol’s home in the countryside. However, the blind man has misplaced the ticket, which causes a heated bantering between the soldiers and the ticket controller Jeong-ok. Not having recognized that Yun-cheol is blind, Jeong-ok refuses to admit them on the train when they fail to present their tickets. The soldiers miss their train, but before leaving the station to find a place to stay in Pyongyang for the night to catch the next day’s train, disgruntled Gil-nam, unbeknownst to Yun-cheol, tells Jeong-ok that Yun-cheol must have lost his ticket because of his blindness. Jeong-ok realizes that Yun-cheol is the blind hero whose story she recently read about in the newspaper.'*! Embarrassed by her own rudeness, bewildered Jeong-ok wants to make up for her mistake by inviting the soldiers to her parents’ home and save them the trouble of finding a night’s stay in Pyongyang. When they arrive in Jeong-ok’s place, Gil-nam and Jeong-ok pretend to Yun-cheol that they are in a hotel. However, when Yun-cheol discovers that they are at the home of the railroad ticket controller, he refuses to burden Jeong-ok’s family and insists on leaving. Jeong-ok’s parents urge Yun-cheol to stay, but his upright nature

and thoughts of his old mother waiting for him make him insistent on his departure. Unable to persuade Yun-cheol, Jeong-ok’s father tells him: “I want to keep you here in this efflorescent paradise and let you enjoy all the happiness of this capital city.”!’° Resembling the propagandistic epitaph reserved for North Korean capital city, Jeong-ok’s father’s comment on Pyongyang is a blunt reminder that the divide between the urban and the rural is an unchallenged fact for North Koreans. Nevertheless, the blind military hero’s lofty heart and nature moves the young city girl, and toward morn-

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ing, Jeong-ok persuades her mother Yeon-hwa to let her follow Yun-cheol to the countryside as his lifetime companion. YEON-HWA: If you marry him, you will have to work in the field, and you sumply have no idea what it’s like! JEONG-OK: If I have to work in the field, then I will do it!

YEON-HWA: What nonsense. When you returned from a couple of days of

volunteer labor on a farm, you said that you cannot imagine a life outside of Pyongyang.'”°

Here, Yeon-hwa is certainly concerned about her immature daughter’s rash decision to follow a virtual stranger. However, an even more grave concern is that the daughter is about to follow him to the countryside, and the ur-

banites’ blunt prejudice about rural life emerges without much critical filtering. For Jeong-ok’s mother, a harsh life marked by backbreaking labor is all that exists in the countryside—a generally true reflection of the North Korean view. Jeong-ok’s decision to leave Pyongyang reflects the opposite mind-set of the conventional desire of other young North Korean women. Not only do the young women of Pyongyang want to remain in the city, but the women from rural areas want to move there by finding Pyongyangite husbands. Such widespread sentiment is reflected in popular culture. One defector vividly recalled a comic sketch aired on Pyongyang Central TV

Network in the 1980s: “A midget hunchback husband, a native of Pyongyang, found a beautiful bride from the countryside. One day, when they went to a bathhouse together, a man in the ticket office by the entrance told the husband: ‘Children are not allowed to enter.’ The husband asked the bride to lift him up to the ticket counter and told the man: ‘Hey, comrade, don’t you see that I am the husband of this woman?’”!** Through the de-

vice of laughter, the comic sketch implies that the mismatch between a midget hunchback husband and a beautiful bride is justified by the bride’s obtaining the right to reside in Pyongyang. The physical deformity of the husband can be neglected if she gains the privilege of spending her life in the capital city. In New Generation, the disability of the husband is actually

presented as a valorized marker of patriotism, a kind of physical euphemism, so as to lure a girl to give up her privileged urban residency. Although in the end Jeong-ok manages to persuade her parents and departs with Yun-cheol to become his lifetime companion, New Generation ends “with the brilliant neon light of the capital city,”!*? which projects

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Pyongyang as the glamorized utopian space, an image that fuels everyone’s desire to live there. Even though the play shows the female protagonist’s voluntary decision to move from an urban to a rural area, it nevertheless reaffirms the binary opposition Pyongyang-versus-rural by asserting that lives in those two spaces are fundamentally different in their material and

cultural circumstances. Jeong-ok’s decision to follow Yun-cheol to his hometown in the countryside is presented as the young Pyongyangite’s selfsacrifice, thus affirming the idea that life in the capital is far more desirable for her: throughout the play, Pyongyang is defined as a comfortable space

with concrete material qualities—comfortable, well-furnished rooms, broad streets, high-rises, beautiful parks—and leisurely activities constantly alluring the viewers. In the stage plays that center on Pyongyang, including New Generation, urban pleasures are state-sanctioned, far from the decadent pleasures associated with consumerist culture. However, as is explored in Cuckoo Bird Sings, sustaining rural life is coterminous with retaining young women in the countryside as guarantors of the future labor force, and in this respect New Generation, together with Traces of Life, pushes the notion to a higher register by making urban women go to the countryside. This theme reaches its zenith with the 1993 film Urban Girls Come to Get Married (Dosi cheonyeo sijibwayo). Its title presupposes a spatial divide between urban areas and the countryside. The dichotomy is accentuated by the visual juxtaposition of two disparate spaces, which are later used to valorize urban girls’ decision to settle in the countryside. The film centers on Ri-hyang, a young fashion designer in Pyongyang, who eventually gives up the coveted urban lifestyle to marry Seong-sik, a model farmworker whose lifetime dream is to increase the national food supply by producing a better breed of ducks. The unlikely coupling of Ri-hyang and Seong-sik begins

with their accidental encounter in Pyongyang when Seong-sik comes to town to discuss his breeding methods. He enters the city as a country bumpkin with ducks waddling around him, one of which inadvertently steps on Ri-hyang’s fashion illustration. When Ri-hyang reprimands Seong-sik for behaving senselessly, as if he were on a country farm, Seong-sik bashfully replies: “So, comrade, you only think of clothing, but don’t you also consume food?” The film sets up Seong-sik’s question as an entry to illus-

trate the point that the spatial divide between the urban and the rural is transposed onto the divide in the production of clothing and food, with which Ri-hyang and Seong-sik are respectively associated. Seong-sik implies that life would be impossible with only one product or the other, that

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a person must have both clothing and food in order to live. Likewise, a nation could not exist if there were only urban or rural, and there must be both in order for it to sustain itself. The initial petulance of Ri-hyang toward Seong-sik eventually turns into a feeling of admiration when she and her coworkers at the garment fac-

tory volunteer to help do farmwork that the movie calls “battle for rice planting” (#onaegi jeontu). Ri-hyang gradually learns about Seong-sik’s unconditional dedication to his calling, and their relationship develops into

romantic courtship. Ri-hyang’s supervisor, Gwang-ho, encourages the young couple’s courtship, as he has a plot in his mind to lure a model worker like Seong-sik to his factory in case the couple gets married. Ri-hyang also hopes for Seong-sik to follow her to the city, but his dedication to farmwork is unflinching. He tells her why he sees his work as a national mission: “Our

Father, Comrade Great Leader [Kim Il-sung], has visited our farm three times. He instructed young people not to leave their hometowns and to build ideal Communist land here.” Hearing the instructions of the Great Leader, Ri-hyang seems to understand the unflinching will of her potential suitor and stops urging him to leave his hometown. ‘The couple is separated

when Ri-hyang and her comrades return to Pyongyang after completing the volunteer work, a separation that drives both to sentimental depression.

Having noticed that his plan to bring Seong-sik to the city has been thwarted, frustrated Gwang-ho urges Ri-hyang to convince Seong-sik to join her in the city. She replies: “I miss him, but I do not miss him as an individual. I miss the spirit of our young workers whose minds stream toward the construction of a socialist countryside.” Ri-hyang finally gives her job in the city and goes to live with Seong-sik. Thus, the film issues a definitive verdict through Ri-hyang’s speech—that there is a national mission which

transcends that of individuals. Moreover, the film ascertains that the coupling of the young lovers should ideally take place in the countryside rather than in the city. Only then will the personal and the collective mission be in harmony. The same year that saw the release of Urban Girls Come to Get Married, a play by Ri Jeong-u entitled Girl from Pyongyang was published, which fea-

tures an almost identical plot line. The play is set in contemporary rural farm that is struggling to come up with better rice production plan. A native of the village, Chang-seop, attends an agricultural institute in Pyongyang with a hope that he will be able to aid his hometown farmers to im-

prove their plan to increase production. But while studying in the capital city, he falls in love with Hui-gyeong, a native of Pyongyang. When Hui-

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eyeong’s parents find out about their romance, they secretively meet with Chang-seop and pressure him to find a job in Pyongyang so that they can remain close to their only child. In the meantime, Chang-seop’s younger sister Ok-ryeon, who drives village tractors filled with fertilizer derived from animal droppings, joyfully ereets her soon-to-be sister-in-law Hui-gyeong, who plans to come live with the family in the countryside. Ignorant of Hui-gyeong’s intentions, Ok-ryeon bitterly complains when she discovers her brother’s plan to escape the harsh rural life and settle in the city for the sake of his fiancée: OK-RYEON: Who doesn’t want to live in Pyongyang? Who wants to run around with a sunburned face in remote farmland like this? Do you think I wouldn’t enjoy wearing high heels and carrying a flower-patterned parasol? Do you think that’s why I, the unmarried girl, run all around the village carrying animal dung? It’s because rice is precious, it’s because I treasure rice . . . Do you think people can fall in love without eating? !”°

Ok-ryeon’s vitriolic speech about the hardship of country life focuses concretely on the insulted feminine pride that she gives up to provide labor. High heels and flowered parasols in Cuckoo Bird Sings figure as the symbol of urban femininity, or the objects of desire for rural women. Just as in Urban Girls and Traces of Life, it is the female sacrifice that serves as the moral fulcrum of the play. A girl deciding to give up life in the city is the most important element and saves the play or film from a conflict without end. In response to Ok-ryeon’s speech, Hui-gyeong says: We cannot forsake the calling of our time and deceive your family for the sake of love. Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il said that the countryside is the utmost front of guarding socialism. Only if we have rice can we protect socialism. How could we run away from such a mission? Isn’t it possible to love only under socialism?! Rice must be our love and fate!'*’

Such a pitch-perfect demonstration of Communist slogans is not farfetched given the realities of the hunger-stricken rural North Korea in the tggos. The play promotes the logic of such sacrifice, as difficult as it is. The play acknowledges the rarity of Hui-gyeong’s choice to abandon her comfortable life in Pyongyang, as a journalist visits her to introduce this urban

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girl’s story in a newspaper article.'** Hui-gyeong’s speech, more than anything else, reflects the dismal food crisis that created the national anxiety to rescue the countryside from hunger. It seems that the jolly mood of procreation and regeneration of rural life as presented in performance texts in the 1950s and 1960s degenerated into a desperate cry in the 1ggos, as captured

in Hui-gyeong’s speech. ‘The urgent call to boost the production of rice weaves the plot of the play, in the form of the villagers’ obsession with cultivating a special kind of rice, a grain of which “measures up to a chestnut, or even a peach.”!”? A plot like this where romance ultimately comes to literal fruition finds numerous variations in North Korea. Han Yeong-sun’s 2004 poem, “Girl from Pyongyang and a Veteran Soldier Groom,” is titled almost identically to Ri Jeong-u’s play and features the same coupling of the Pyongyang girl and the country boy: Everyone praises the hardworking maiden, Whose face is as pleasing as her potato seed planting skills. A veteran soldier just discharged from the service Carefully approached the girl and asked: Comrade, where is your hometown? With bright smile on a sweaty face The girl gently replied to the soldier: The hometown that I can never forget Is the capital city of our prosperous country Pyongyang where the General [Kim Jong-il] resides. ‘Touched by the maiden’s heart, which upheld The instructions of the General and chose to come to the countryside, The soldier proposed to her they work hard together And present the General great pleasure by yielding plenty of potatos. They promised each other, the promise of love.!*°

This imagery of abundant potato crops in the poem and the super-rice blown up in gargantuan portions in Girl from Pyongyang ultimately became

the grotesque poster image of the rural utopia of the 1990s and the new century, when in fact millions of people were staving to death in an apocalyptic famine. In 2003, the aggrandized symbols of livelihood and the glories of country life literally entered the cityscape of Pyongyang as if to demonstrate the

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robust support that the rural economy had shown for the center of the nation. In the film documentation of the aforementioned 2003 parade, a moment is devoted to a moving platform featuring North Korea’s agricultural achievements; a gigantic platform passes through the squares and streets of Pyongyang, on top of which are painted slogans: “Arirang of National Strength and Prosperity,” “Cultivate the Land and Yield Crops ‘Twice a Year!” and “Socialism Is Ours.” The front side of the moving platform features a cornucopia of crops, while the rear was piled with cartons of milk and cans of food, in all different sorts and sizes. The moving platform is surrounded by dancing male and female bodies; women are wearing traditional Korean dresses and punctuating their movement by beating drums, while men are dancing and beating small gongs. The folk music produced by the harmony between drums and gongs alludes to nong-ak, or Korean farmers’ music and dance, thus tying agricultural production to the notion of tradition. This appears to be the reason why the

most visible slogan on the moving platform is “Arirang of National Strength and Prosperity,” since arirang, as the best-known Korean folk song arguably captures the quintessential spirit of Korean tradition. In contrast to the previous platform, which extolls the technological advancement

of the twenty-first century, its futuristic aspect accentuated by scientists wearing white lab gowns, this agricultural platform is to be associated with the Korea of the past, holding itself as the guardian of tradition. Among the performing bodies of musicians and dancers wearing traditional costumes, a small group of performers wear exaggerated masks in the shape of eggs and farm animals. The liveliness of these puppetlike participants is enhanced as the multitude waves artificial red flowers when they pass by the tribune where Kim Jong-il and other leaders stand. North Korea by 2003 had suffered tremendous loss of human lives to starvation, and it is quite significant that the platform parade emphasized the tangible imagery of crops and factory-produced food products, gleefully supported by the dancing people of the countryside. This scenery—desperately attempting to create the illusion of vigorous livelihood—appears grotesque vis-avis the hidden tragedies of the food crisis. What is not shown in this ecstatic moment is the apocalyptic dimensions of human tragedy, and in this aspect, the hunger crisis accentuates a noticeable vacuum in the state pageantry, including a variety of theater and film

productions pompously demonstrating state power. This significant absence, for the sake of projecting an agricultural and gastronomic utopia while turning a blind eye to human lives, had to be masked by traditional

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performances of farmers’ dance and music, turning the viewer’s gaze toward the distant countryside. ‘Uhis is why arvirang accompanies the march of animals and food from the countryside as the procession enters the stage called Pyongyang, creating the only passable image of the North Korean countryside as an affluent and dutiful supplier of food for urban and national consumption.

CHAPTER 3

Revival of the State Patriarchs

Kim Il-sung as the Founder of National Essence

Can there be eternal and unconditional love between the citizen and the state? Can a citizen’s love survive the passing of its object into oblivion and continue to worship only one person forever? Kim IIl-sung passed away in 1994, but the majority of North Koreans still pledge unflinching love and loyalty for the deceased leader with an intensity that is often incomprehen-

sible to outsiders. In every major publication and at every landmark in North Korea, the slogan “Our Great Leader Comrade Kim II-sung Is Forever with Us!” is written in large flaming red letters.

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The memory of the dead leader is so fiercely guarded that he is still the nominal president of the country, making North Korea a nation governed by a dead man, whose right to rule was inherited by his surviving heir, Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il has the official title “Chairman of the National Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”—a modest step down from the title of “President.” ‘The intense admiration for Kim I]-sung is a striking element that often surfaces in conversations with North Korean defectors. The testimony of a defector who participated in the construction of Kim Il-sung’s Presidential Palace in the early 1970s offers a glimpse of the boundless love North Korean citizens feel for their leader: Incredible human effort had been poured into it [the construction of the Presidential Palace], and no expense was spared. Silk blankets wrapped

pipelines that were supposed to go underneath Kim Il-sung’s living quarters. All kinds of expensive trees, Chinese junipers, laurels, and many others, came from different provinces to be used as construction materials and garden decorations. White cement, ground marble, and limestone were mixed to create the best kind of wall finish for the exte-

rior of the building. Thousands and thousands of workers dangling on ropes tied to the rooftop hammered the exterior walls of the Presidential Palace as they descended to the ground. It was a remarkable sight; they looked like zillions of ants against the blinding white wall finish. As the hammering went on incessantly, the ground marble became exposed and

shone in dazzling sunlight. Soldiers worked with neither sleep nor breaks for meals, as if they were on a battlefield. Once concrete was mixed, everyone dismissed the thought of taking a break and went on working until the concrete ran out. ‘The soldiers’ loyalty to the Great Leader Kim I]-sung was such that everyone voluntarily worked around the clock. ‘The belief that the collective purpose was higher and greater

than individual well-being was strong enough to eclipse any other thoughts. . . . Nobody could stop us, and the Presidential Palace came out so solid that even a nuclear bomb would have had difficulty damag-

ing it. he building stood there, a bright shimmering white, as a testimony to the remarkable love all the construction workers had for the

Great Leader. When the heroic construction efforts ended, I was awarded the rank of a second lieutenant.'

The voluntary love of these soldiers, without which the massive scale of construction would have been impossible, produced the edifice in a re-

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Figure 24. A female cadet looking at

Kim Il-sung’s photo outside the

—_— —_ __. Geumsusan memorial palace where his

— is enshrined. (Photo courtesy of an ee.SSS ——body ~ ~— anonymous donor.) markably short period of time. Embodying the power of the collective love and loyalty for the national leader, the Presidential Palace stands today as

the eternal sanctuary where his embalmed body reigns as the honorary president. North Korean people’s love for their state father is expressed in ways too numerous to count, with a typical example sounding like the interview I conducted with a former high-ranking official in the foreign trade department who defected to South Korea immediately after Kim’s death: “I did not have any problem in North Korea. In fact, I lived a very comfortable life

in the north as the general manager of the foreign trade department in charge of supplying all the foreign-made consumer goods to hotels in Pyongyang. Given the nature of my job, I had numerous chances to travel abroad, which was very exciting for me. But when our Dear General died in 1994, I lost all hope. I felt like there was no reason for me to remain in North Korea. Our Dear General was the only reason for me to love my country, so when he passed away, I decided to defect.”

Considering that these are the statements of defectors who have forsaken their homeland in search of a better life, it is simply astonishing to observe

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their continuing commitment to and love for the deceased leader of the country they have deserted. Journalist Bradley Martin highlights the same point and admits how effective the propaganda is in upholding Kim I]-sung

as all-loving and all-giving: “People were constantly telling me stories about Kim I[l-sung’s benevolence. For example, he supposedly sent a team of doctors with medicine ‘worth the cost of a small factory’ aboard his personal airplane when he heard that a resident of the mountains was critically ill. Even writing off g9 percent to propaganda, it was clear that Kim possessed considerable political genius. In his ability to make North Koreans feel close to him and personally indebted to him, Kim operated much like a successful old-time American big-city boss. Whatever anybody got in the way of goodies came in Kim’s name, as a ‘gift.’”’ Perhaps of all expressions of North Korean’s patriotism, one of the most distinctive rhetorical devices is to identify the country with a single leader. The notion that the state and

its leader are completely fused culminated in the state’s ritualistic commemoration of the founding father. How did this collective love for the father-nation come about? What are the historical-cultural circumstances that created a belief in patriarchy as fierce as religious passion?

The twentieth century began with a crisis for Korea. ‘The traditional Confucian system led to bankruptcy through humiliating incidents resulting from the pressure of the outside world. While Japan was eagerly modernizing after the Meiji Restoration, Korea held onto its insulated mode of existence, resisting the inevitable process of opening up to the outside world. Koreans were faced with a crisis involving national essence (guksu) far more concrete than any intellectual debate in China. The annexation of Korea by Japan in 1gro and the consequent harsh pe-

riod of colonial rule deprived Koreans of time and resources to develop their thoughts about the nation itself. With the unprecedented oppression of free speech, Korean nationalists, despite threat and danger, strove to define the Korean national essence through language and culture, but their activities generated only an escalated level of oppression.’ According to his-

torian Andre Schmid, as Japanese colonial rule prohibited free speech in Korea, there was a move away from state-centered definitions of the nation, which offered an alternative strategy of resistance: “Now that the state and territory had been taken over, national survival could be redefined through more spiritual concepts, less as an effort to civilize and progress until the criteria for sovereignty were achieved and more as a collective effort to sustain a sense of self by nurturing those facets of the nation such as history, language, and religion—areas that were less accessible to the soldiers and

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bureaucrats of the colonial state.”® As a result, the center of debate on national liberation had to move away from the colonized territories to diaspora communities, such as in northern Manchuria, Hawaii, and the Russian Far East, where Koreans could operate in a relatively free environment and reassemble resources for further activities to liberate Korea.’ The sense of lost nationhood had emerged from the lack of a strong national leader in Korea, which had a long history of upholding the Confucian tradition of identifying the nation with the patriarchal leader, who conventionally passed down his status to the designated male heir. As Korea lost its head of state in the early twentieth century, the lineage of the Korean royal family came to an end when the last king of the Joseon dynasty, Sunjong, married a Japanese princess to symbolize the annexation of Korea to Japan. More crucially, the last ruler of the Korean dynasty did not give the people a sense of strong leadership when the nation was in unprecedented crisis. The impotence of the rulers reminded Koreans of why they had been subjugated to foreign powers and harsh colonial rule. Consequentially, the people of Korea desired a charismatic figure, both as a practical commander-in-chief in military affairs and as the symbolic embodiment of national sovereignty, to lead them through crisis. Upon his return to Korea after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Kim I]-sung made an attempt to present himself as the provider for the Korean people with a promise of reviving a strong, independent nation. Moreover, the army unit he led, consisting mostly of poor peasants who had lost their family, became an ideal surrogate family, which offered a vision of a radically different future where the traditional familial authority would not exist. The effect of Kim’s anti-Japanese resistance activities in Manchuria is obscure.® Historical accounts testify to the fact that “the major organized efforts to resist the Japanese in Manchuria during the life of the Japanese puppet regime, Manchuguo, from 1933 to 1945, were carried out by the Chinese Communists and not Koreans . . . there was no separate organized efforts by the Korean Communists,”” according to political scientist Suh Dae-Sook’s [Seo Dae-suk] biography of Kim. And the largest number of partisans Kim led was some two hundred. Despite, or because of, his lack of credentials as a leader, there was an urgent need for Kim to fabricate military legends for himself, including escaping death in an attack by the Japanese police, endowing himself with the status of an underground hero.'® As a result, “Kim’s participation in the anti-Japanese guerrilla activities in Manchuria won him the first recognition, and toward the latter part of his campaign he was important enough

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for the Japanese to post a reward for information leading to his arrest.””! Furthermore, North Korean historians unanimously assert that Korean partisan groups were formed in southern and eastern Manchuria about 1934 and list members and localities involved. These historians further claim that Kim organized these and other Korean partisan groups to form what he called a Korean People’s Revolutionary Army in the spring of 1934. But the later version of Kim’s biography has changed the date to February 1936.

The veracity of numerous contradicting claims about Kim’s activities is not as crucial as North Korea’s assertion that such an army existed in the colonial era. As Suh argues: “More important than the juggling of dates is the formation of the army itself. There is, of course, no record of such an army. It is a name that has been invented to designate a Korean group that operated under a Chinese guerrilla army.”!’ The fabricated version of the national past may not be a reliable source of historical facts, but it is an entry point to understanding the origins of unconditional love and obedience cultivated through manipulation and persuasion. The importance of Kim’s resistance activities prior to the foundation of North Korea lies in the significance attributed to them by revolutionary operas and other films of later generations, which identified this resistance period as their major source of inspiration for myths about the newly founded Communist nation-state. This period of the resistance movement also constituted the teleological historiography of North Korea, in the sense that it designated the anti-Japanese struggles as an inevitable historical step toward the state leaders’ coming to power and the subsequent realization of the Communist utopia. The foundation of North Korea in 1948 opened an unprecedented era in which the traditional East Asian values of Confucianism and the social system of Communism, which originated in the political economy of the West, merged into a new hybrid. Eric Cornell in North Korea under Communism points out that a fundamental influence of the Confucian structure on the new regime was “the principles for relations between people—between ruler and subject, between father and son, man and wife, older and younger brother, and between friends. With the possible exception of the last one, they are all clearly hierarchical and connected with authority.” ’

Paradoxical as it may sound, the Korean Communists’ claim to have eradicated the feudal culture of the past never restrained their relentless effort to establish the patriarchal figure of the nation as one of their leaders. The Confucian tradition of identifying the father with the nation itself was

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manifested in every aspect of social life. Armstrong has noted that “the Kim

cult would go well beyond Stalinism and Maoism in its pervasiveness, longevity, and extension beyond the individual to the family of the Great Leader himself [. . .]| Kim’s immediate family became a kind of substitute and symbol for the family of the Korean nation. In the use of family metaphors and symbols, North Korean nationalism has been typical of postcolonial nations, if more literal than most.”!* However, even if there are similarities among postcolonial nations, and

we have in mind the personal idolization of Mao in China, Kim Il-sung took a different path because of the different roles the two leaders played in the formation of the new socialist regimes. Mao’s position as a recognized leader of the Communist Party was undoubted when he declared the foundation of the PRC. Quite the contrary, Kim Il-sung, whose main guerrilla activities took place outside of Korea, was almost unknown to native Koreans when he returned from the Soviet Union in 1945. Unlike Mao, who was

the undisputed central figure in the Communist struggle to grasp hegemony, and who gained victory over the Guomindang at the end of the civil war (1945-49), Kim Il-sung played virtually no role in national liberation. When he returned to Korea, he was aligned with one of the five factions of

power competing for leadership of the newly founded North Korea.» Thus, unlike Mao, Kim had many internal enemies to fight in order to establish himself as the legitimate leader. It was only in the late 1g50s that Kim successfully eliminated the other fractions and established himself as the uncontested head of the country.'® This difference in the positions of Mao and Kim led to a gap between the rhetoric of family in the two countries: while both regimes were obsessed with legitimizing their leaders by investing them with the patriarchal authority of a traditional family, Kim promoted himself as the only father figure much more intensely than Mao ever did. If Mao’s personality cult mostly concerned elevating and empowering him as an individual state leader, Kim’s personality cult had much deeper, statewide repercussions, since it was fundamentally conflated with the North Korean state itself. Kim’s process was

based on the logic that the empowerment of the family patriarch would result in the empowerment of the family-nation, which blurred the boundary between an individual leader and the state organization. This partly explains why North Korea consolidated the hereditary socialist state, whereas Mao’s biological sons were not regarded as his natural heirs. Kim Il-sung’s insecurity as leader, even after the complete purge of his political competitors, emerged from the fact that he, unlike Mao, could

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not demonstrate evidence of past partisan activities that had a decisive impact on the foundation of North Korea. Such insecurity stemming from the lack of an actual power base, with the symbolic system created to represent the leader’s legitimacy, engendered a stronger personality cult in North Korea. Kim Il-sung took measures to ensure his fragile position not only by aggrandizing his achieve-

ments, most of which were histrionically captured in _ paintings, illustrations, and episodes in the performing arts, but also by transforming his entire household into a pantheon of revolutionary heroes. Numerous visual presentations depict Kim and his family members—his parents, wife, uncle, and son—as Communist heroes.

Part of such efforts were persistent claims that cultural productions based on Kim II-sung’s anti-Japanese revolutionary saga were grounded on historical facts. Numerous articles reinforce the notion that literature, theater, and film productions of the 1g5os faithfully reconstructed events as they had happened. In an article on how Kim inspired writers with his revolutionary activities, the anonymous author recalls how he was moved by the presence of the leader and uses direct quotations in order to deliver Kim Il-sung’s words as they were spoken by the leader himself. Yes, this is the General Kim Il-sung. Yes, this is the very magnificent general who brought iron fist on the heads of the Japanese invaders and subdued them everywhere! And we were having a meal with him now. What an honor. | badly wanted to hear about his revolutionary days, and that moment, one writer asked: “General! We writers want to hear from you about your anti-Japanese revolutionary activities in your own words. This is the biggest wish we all have.” Having heard this, he looked around in the audience... . “We all had to arm ourselves by taking back the enemies’ arms and

weapons. [his was a life-threatening matter, and this is why on every weapon we have nowadays, there are bloodstains of our fallen comrades.”!?

The anonymous writer concludes that listening to Kim [-sung’s experiences in what turned out to be an all-night conversation was like receiving a university-level education on Marxism and Leninism. And thanks to that unforgettable conversation, the writers in attendance were able to create masterpieces such as My Hometown, Baekdu Mountain, and Thunderstorm.

Visual arts supply abundant comparable examples to accompany the

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Figure 25. A painting illustrates child Kim Il-sung visiting his father, imprisoned for his anti-Japanese revolutionary activities. The caption provided in the text indicates that Kim was inspired by his father to become a revolutionary at an early age. Joseon Yesul 6 (1968): 7.

verbal narratives. Paintings and photos reproduced in this chapter are just a few of the many that enjoyed a wide circulation. The idolization of Kim, as these images suggest, created a biography of a revolutionary household embracing three generations. In these paintings, Kim I]-sung’s childhood is reinvented as a germinating period when his revolutionary father and mother not only awaken his consciousness but also live the lives of revolutionaries themselves. Kim’s father is shown imprisoned, a martyr who sacrifices himself for the cause of regaining national independence (see fig. 25). The disconnect between father and son—prison bars in this case—calls forth an emotional response from the viewers, who cannot help noticing how frail the boy is. Nevertheless, he appears resolute, seemingly focused on his own determination to carry out plans to rescue the nation from turmoil, while his father’s gaze is focused on him. Instead of focusing on the personal (the father), the boy looks beyond the confines of his traditional family and looks into the national future. In North Korean revolutionary legend, the boy promises to

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carry out retribution in the name of the family and fight against the Japanese enemies. The painting is accompanied by numerous tales, creating a realistic impression through countless repetitions: “At the age of seven he and his mother visited his imprisoned father, whose countenance had ‘sadly changed from the torture endured.’ After the visit his mother told him that he would never see his father again. ‘I want you to grow up fast and avenge your father!’ she cried, whereupon Kim, hearing these words, ‘swore before his mother that he would avenge his father without fail.’”!® The Confucian tradition of upholding family elders’ honor plays a major part in justifying the revenge plot. Sheila Miyoshi Jager has pointed out the deeply rooted Confucian vision that fertilizes the nation’s first step toward revolution: “Past meets present in the future avenging of the father by the son. The narrative behind Kim’s narrative is thus one of a fantasy of self-regenerating fatherhood and patriarchal power. But it also offers a redemptive vision of history in which the failures of the father are redeemed by the successes of the son.”'” The father-son relationship creates a timeless continuum with duplicated images of another father-son link, this time between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il as his heir. This guarantees not only a lineage of a few individuals but also a connection between the leadership and the people, who see a metonymical presence of the entire nation embodied in these individuals. These paintings and photo extend the story of a revolutionary household far beyond one individual to that of a traditional family. North Korea’s idolization of the state father passed down to the next generation, as it did not in the PRC, and Kim Il-sung’s heir also displayed the traditional Confucian virtue of a pious son. Kim Jong-il built a museum and erected a statue of his mother, Kim Jeong-suk, in her hometown after he became prominent in North Korea in the late 1970s. ‘The display of filial piety was intended to strike the chord of traditional Confucian values in the minds of the Korean people. This helped Kim Il-sung and his son establish a virtuous image. Cornell points out that this effort resonated with the absolute power of the ruler of the traditional society: “Against a background of the ‘mandate of heaven,’ the cult of personality—if not all its trappings—was natural. .. . Further, the presentation of Kim Il-sung’s son as successor was logical. At

the same time, it is tempting to see both a national and a hierarchical element in the way in which all of Kim I[l-sung’s ancestors were made out to be eminent revolutionaries. What was this, other than an insistence upon aristocratic breeding of a suitable sort?””’? Cornell’s observation is grounded on

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the fact that Kim’s personal idolization resonated with an old aristocratic practice of upholding the prestige of the entire household. But I contend that a closer look at these illustrations reveals that Kim’s personal idolization was also an attempt to present the leader as an approachable, ordinary member of the family: as a child of caring parents, a father of a son, relationships in which many Korean people would find themselves.

The efforts to establish Kim as the founding father of the state influenced all aspects of social and cultural life in North Korea. ‘The notion

that he also fathered national art and culture legitimized his advent as a ruler and established the family’s position as the foundation of national essence. One of the ways to project the state father as the provenance of revolutionary spirit and culture was to attribute to him specific linguistic expressions, such as “origin,” “seed,” and “source,” the frequent use of which created an impression that Kim “fathered” the revolutionary productions and thereby opened an era of new national culture for revolutionized Korea. By attributing to the state father the creative principles of national art, North Korea could create and consolidate the images of their leaders as the progenitors of national essence. Kim Il-sung, who could show no concrete evidence of his artistic expertise or creative activities, was hailed as the author or inspirer of numerous revolutionary plays after coming to power. As one example, a literary histo-

rian, Ri Sang-tae, noted in 1960 that Kim organized a dramatic circle to propagate revolutionary ideology in the 1920s, from which later emerged a revolutionary dramatic tradition of North Korea.*! It was imperative to invent Kim Il-sung as the authentic creator of revolutionary art, since this not only compensated for his lack of an artistic career but also created a sense of tradition for North Korean culture dating back to the preliberation period of the 1930s. Kim’s and his clan members’ lives were designated as the legitimate source for inventing tradition, which further endowed the leader and his nation with authority. In an effort to conceal the breach between historical fact and fabricated versions of history, North Korea produced and circulated vast amounts of immediately recognizable visual propaganda depicting Kim II-sung as the

founder of Korean socialist art. These images were carefully choreoeraphed to show that his career was persistently invested in developing and

supporting socialist arts even before the foundation of North Korea. A painting that appeared in foseon Yesul (1982) shows young Kim leading a eroup of entertainers to villagers, which resonates with the socialist ethos of making art serve the people. But it is Kim’s youth that deserves the most

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attention. The depiction of him as dedicated to the people’s art from such an early age legitimizes his status as the founder of Korean socialist art. Another painting that also appeared in Joseon Yesul (1969) was also part of eforts to fabricate the mage of Kim as the person who shaped people’s entertainment and art: in figure 26, Kim is giving instructions to performers on their acting, thus resiliently reinventing himself as not only a valorous military leader, but also an artistic visionary participating directly in the creative process. If this painting captured Kim’s creative endeavor in the making of drama off stage, figure 27 shows him at center stage among performers congratulating him and giving him flowers.’? This narcissistic illustration of Kim shows the reversal of the conventional relationship between the performers and the spectator. ‘Che performers are depicted as worshiping the spectator of their show, who occupies the center of their gaze. As a result, Kim IlIsung comes to occupy the place conventionally identified with the main performer, indulging himself in his usual roles, that is, as creator, critic, and patron of North Korea’s national art. By setting the emergence of the revolutionary cultural tradition as simultaneous with Kim’s anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in the 1930s and

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Such a condescending perspective on South Koreans as an extension of the enemy was found in North Korea’s visual culture even before the outbreak of the Korean War. On the cover of the January 1950 issue of The Arrow (Hwalsal) (sic) magazine, the South Korean leader I Seung-man is de-

picted leading the Japanese enemies back to Korea. The caption in the illustration reads, “I Seung-man inviting back the enemy whom we have dispelled.” The South Korean leader is wearing a Western-style coat and a pouch with a dollar sign, marking him as an ally of the Americans. ‘The Japanese who follows Rhee wears a cap with a dollar sign on his head, placing

himself in the same category as the South Korean leader. North Korea equated South Korean leaders and Japanese by presenting them both as the racial “other”: the South Korean leader’s white complexion, together with his Western suit, represents him as the betrayer of true Koreanness. Nevertheless, the portrayal of ordinary South Koreans in the North Ko-

rean popular imagination diverges from the rigid formula of projecting them as bitter enemies. North Korean productions centering on South Koreans seem to distinguish between people from the regime and the common

people; often, the portrayal of South Korean civilians (nongovernment, nonmilitary personnel) takes a sympathetic turn, as in True Daughter of the Party: tor North Koreans, South Korean civilians are brothers and sisters who have been forcefully separated from them by greedy imperialists who forsake the Korean national interest for the sole purpose of realizing their ambitions. North Korean propaganda dictated that South Koreans were ig-

norant of the existence of socialist life in North Korea; therefore, it was North Koreans’ national mission to liberate the devastated South Koreans and accomplish the long-awaited national unification. The ambiguity of South Koreans presented a unique challenge for propaganda producers, who had to navigate between the “negative” and the “salvageable” without obscuring the transparent ideology of propaganda. Such limits in representation are fully explored in the 1969 film The Choe Hak-sin Family, which centers on the vicissitudes of one family whose mem-

bers take different political sides during the Korean War. The patriarch, Christian minister Choe Hak-sin, is a revered local community leader in Pyongyang. He blindly believes that Americans will save Korea and let Christianity prosper. His youngest daughter, Seong-mi, joins the undereround Communist resistance movement under the American occupation of the city. Choe’s only son, Seong-geun, fights for the South Korean army under the American leadership and returns to his hometown with the occu-

pying forces. Only when his elder sister Seong-ok is abducted, sexually

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harassed, and killed by an American soldier do the father and the son realize the fallacies of American promises and wake up to see the Communist Korea as the only viable future of their nation. The film elaborates on the process by which Choe Hak-sin and his son reach their ultimate conversion. By the director’s own admission, Choe Hak-sin, who embodies the ideological journey from Christianity to Communism, is a complex character: He blindly worships Americans, but also claims that he does not support everything America presents. He claims not to follow the path of Communists, but openly declares that not all Communist politics are bad either. he challenge I faced as a director was to reconcile these various traits into one personality. ... Did this mean that I was supposed to create a neutral character? ‘That was impossible. ‘That would have meant paralyzing the hatred for the enemy and dissipating the passion for the things we should uphold. That is why we have to criticize harshly the pro-Americanism of Choe Hak-sin and to embrace him wholeheartedly when he comes back to the side of the people. Dividing the lines between these two tenets was crucial in the portrayal of Choe Hak-sin.””

The director further points out that the stage version of the story produced in 1955 did not express the ambiguity of the character. Instead, it made the mistake of denigrating Choe as a follower of everything American from the beginning, thus losing the opportunity to create the dramatic reversal at the end. The pivotal aspect of Choe, as the film director saw it, was the persuasive political conversion that came after a long process of deliberation, but the story’s ultimate aim was not the construction of a multifaceted charac-

ter with complex psychological dimensions but the dramatic ending reaffirming that Communism is the only viable path for both Koreas. What seems to be ambiguity in portraying civilians without clear political orientation ultimately reinforces typical North Korean propaganda in

other productions. A 1974 film entitled Fate of Geum-hui and Eun-hui (Geum-hui-wa Eun-hui-ui unmyeong) centers on the diverging fates of twin sisters who were separated during the Korean War and consequently led

contrasting lives in the two Koreas. While the elder sister, Geum-hui, erows up to become an artist under the auspicious guidance of Kim’s leadership in North Korea, the younger, Eun-hui, ends up a prostitute exploited by heinous capitalists in South Korea. By having the same actress play both roles and using the identical cam-

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era angle to capture the same gaze onto the divided lives of the twin sisters, the film effectively demonstrates the schizophrenic existence of Koreans, whose lives could differ dramatically depending on which Korea they belonged to. Just like The Choe Hak-sin Family, this film uses the traditional family structure to speak of the tragic division, expressed as the separation of the inseparable. ‘Uhe forces that disperse members of the family-nation are highlighted, which ultimately amplifies the culpability of these enemies. Not Even an Iron Chain Can Stop Us (Cheolsoe-ro uri-reul makji mothanda,

VHS release by Mongnan Video in 2002) is based on fictional events involving long-term North Korean prisoners in South Korea. These prisoners were captured during the Korean War by the South Korean army and became among the longest-held political prisoners in the world by refusing to denounce their Communist convictions. The film shows graphic scenes of torture in a South Korean prison as well as the South Korean authorities’ psychological coercion, trying to convert them by using the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Eastern bloc and by giving false information about their fellow prisoners’ betrayal. Although the South Korean authorities are presented as the most atrocious enemies of the North Korean state, the film also presents ambiguous pictures of South Korean civilians, who are under the wrong regime and therefore should be shown a clear political vision. For instance, one of the long-term prisoners, Choe Nam, has a grandson in South Korea who is used as bait to convert his stubborn grandfather. The film at times approaches Choe Nam’s life from the grandson’s point of view, and thereby presents the unflinching ideological struggle from a naive outsider’s perspective. The film viewer’s defamiliarized perspective temporarily merges with that of the South Korean grandson, thereby creating a rapport between the two. In the end, the grandson comes to realize that his grandfather died for the greater cause of the nation, which makes him a true believer in his grandfather’s political vision. The North Korean government also suspects that there are “internal enemies” within the national boundaries of North Korea who appear neither as racial nor as political others. However, unlike Americans, Japanese, or South

Korean leaders, who conspicuously embody the traits of the racial other, these internal enemies require careful scrutiny by the legitimate members of the family-nation. If the purpose of defining an enemy is to establish the boundary between “us” and “the other,” then discerning the enemy within is a demanding but necessary step in order to learn oneself more clearly. The most intricate play treating the boundary between an internal en-

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emy and an ally is Ob, Tell the Forest, introduced in the previous chapter. The male protagonist, Byeong-hun, serves as a lackey of the Japanese police with the purpose of getting much-needed information and reporting it to Kim I]-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla camp. Because Korean villagers living under the Japanese colonizers are not aware of Byeong-hun’s true identity, he is despised by the entire village, including his own family. Out of despair and shame about her father’s ignominious job, his daughter attempts suicide, which serves as an occasion to reveal the inner conflict of Byeong-hun, who has to play the role of an enemy to his own people. This moment in the play reveals the reverse process of justifying the existence of the imposter-enemy. By revealing the emotional conflict of the undercover hero, the production calls attention to the boundary between “us” and the enemies. What does such a boundary ultimately divide? Although the boundary may not be crossed randomly, according to individual determination and decision, it illustrates the potential transformation of allies into enemies and vice versa through each character’s willingness to perform a role of a certain kind. In a similar example from Sea of Blood, Yong-pal, a villager who is sympathetic toward the secret anti-Japanese resistance movement, pretends to be constantly drunk and flatters the pro-Japanese village head in order not to invite any suspicion. By playing two sets of roles—the real revolutionary, which he conceals, and the fake Japanese ally, which he embodies—Yongpal is able to unveil what it means to act as a truly dedicated model citizen in North Korea. By crossing the boundary between enemy and ally, these protagonists show that revolutionary heroes are able to tame the enemy by shrewdly embodying them. “Enemy,” in this sense, becomes a temporary and unstable identity for heroes, who sagaciously master how to play the role. Doing so opens the possibility of destabilizing the identity of the other by allowing the self to fake it until the acting process is complete, and thereby asserts that the seemingly stable position of the enemy is nonexistent. Hero’s staging the other is condoned only because it is an illusive performance, its justification lying in the ephemeral nature of playing the wrong role just for the time being.

CHAPTER §

Acting Like Women in North Korea

Between Tradition and Revolution

The rapid political shift from colonialism to socialism in the northern part of the Korean peninsula in the middle of the twentieth century inevitably brought about transformations in the social and cultural sectors that were

manifested in everyday life. This political shift was more palpable in women’s lives, since women were by and large not an integral part of public

discourse prior to the twentieth century. This chapter addresses how women as a political trope entered the public discourse of nation-building with the establishment of the new socialist state and the ways performing and visual arts shaped as well as reflected the everyday life of North Korean women. One foundational aspect of North Korean women’s lives, regardless of political regime or social circumstances, is that women’s identity is seen through the prism of familial relationship. In a Confucian notion of the traditional family, women are defined in relation to male family members as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. However, as the notion of family was brought out of the traditional domestic realm and expanded to the level of the state, so were the notions of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters considered on a larger national plane. Women in representative propaganda productions, such as Sea of Blood and Flower Girl, became not only the focal point of visual composition within the traditional family structure but also the agents of ideological awakening for the newly founded socialist state. Revolutionary operas and numerous other productions depicted as well as 205

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forged the new gender order within the structure of the “imagined” family, which gained supremacy over blood ties. ‘The imagined family was defined by the degree of commitment to ideological and political struggle, which separated “us” from the “enemy.” The process of imagining a family thus intended to liberate women from the domestic realm and encourage them to be a part of societal currents. Women’s role in traditional family life had been a social topic of debate since the early twentieth century, when Korea was under increasing pressure to open up to the outside world. ‘The humiliating colonial experience under occupation by the Japanese, traditionally despised as “barbarians,” propelled Koreans to evaluate their weakness vis-a-vis the concrete threat to their national sovereignty. Women’s backwardness was regarded as directly related to a national problem, and many Korean intellectuals explored the question of how to modernize Korean women, whose traditional ways of life were seen as an urgent enlightenment project. In the age of social Darwinism, when international politics was viewed through the concept of the survival of the fittest and the strongest, female weakness was immediately perceived as one of the primary reasons for a nation’s backwardness. In light of their nation’s fragile future, Koreans with modern education saw traditional family life, one of the most ancient institutions in Korean society, as the main culprit holding back the progress of women as well as the nation’s modernization. Proportionate to the increasing criticism of the

oppression of traditional family life, the traditional mind-set of denying women’s visibility in the public sphere came under scrutiny. Females seen in

public prior to the twentieth century were mostly despised professionals, such as shamans, giseng (courtesans), and medical experts. Although these women were of disparate class backgrounds, all of them were often viewed as notorious compromisers of men’s morals and, in the case of shamans and gisaeng in particular, corrupters of public decency. The custom of either confining women within the nonvisible domestic sphere or acknowledging their significance when they played a man’s role in

the public sphere started to change in the early twentieth century, when women’s questions became social issues for the public in their own right. Propelled by the liberal atmosphere created by modern education and urban life, women had a self-generated awakening that expanded their realm of activity beyond strict domestic confines. Social icons groomed to represent ideal women, however, were closely linked to a strong patriotic sentiment that saw women as instruments in the national project to restore a lost sovereignty. Ryu Gwan-sun, for instance, was one of the key figures who

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marched in peace to protest the harsh Japanese colonial rule on March 1, tgtg. After Liu was arrested for her participation in the march and died in prison, she became an icon of selfless political resistance, providing inspiration for generations to come. Popular theater and film productions played a crucial role in forging the new type of women in the social life of early-twentieth-century Korea.' The earliest example was Shriek (Gyuban), written and published in 1917 by I Gwang-su, a writer who persistently addressed issues of public education,

equal rights for men and women, and the oppressive nature of traditional customs. I’s drama centers on the devastating situation of the lonely wives of overseas students. Even though the female protagonist in this drama lacks the strong will of Ibsen’s Nora and is a victim who becomes insane after her husband’s betrayal, the drama poignantly captures the irrational cus-

tom of arranged marriages, which, most of the time, were imposed on young people against their will. Likewise, Kim U-jin, an English major at Waseda University, in 1925 wrote I Yeong-nyeo, which realistically portrays how an underprivileged young woman struggles to survive as a mother and wife within a traditional family but is doomed to fail because of the systemic failure of the society without an exit from poverty and discrimination. In 1936, Ryu Chi-jin, the

most prolific Korean dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote Sisters, in which he ambitiously addressed multiple aspects of modern women’s lives, such as their pursuit of education, career, marriage, love, social status, and a role in the rapidly transforming society. But when Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was staged in Korea in 1934, three years prior to the Chinese adaptation of the play, it did not stir up a significant debate over the issue of women’s emancipation, as it did in China.” North Ko-

rean theater historian Choe Chang-ho comments that the social mood for such a debate had not developed yet, and the play was by and large received as a typical melodramatic story of a fallen woman,’ by which he implies that

the revolutionary consciousness could not have germinated fully under colonial rule. In Choe’s view, which represents official North Korean historiography, true revolutionary ideology involving gender could only blossom under Kim []-sung’s revolutionary resistance activities in Manchurian exile. However, in reality, Kim Il-sung’s resistance effort was only one of the many factions within the socialist revolutionary movement, which consisted

of many other top-to-bottom movements seeking to reform gender relations. Mostly initiated by the intelligentsia during the Japanese colonial rule, these movements aimed at restructuring the repressive nature of the

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traditional family, and were predicated on emancipating women. Socialists were one of the most active groups, with a specific aim of transforming both men and women into a labor force usable for the impending Communist revolution. This process was interlaced with the deployment of highly effective anti-Japanese sentiment to coat the emancipation of women with a feeling distinctively nationalistic rather than socialist. The North Korean Law of Gender Equality (Bukjoseon namnyeopyeongdeunggwon-e daehan beom-

nyeong), promulgated on July 30, 1946, stipulated the historical urgency to liberate women as stemming from the necessity to restore national dignity more than instituting women’s rights: For thirty-six years [under Japanese colonial rule], women of Joseon had to endure endless humiliation and cruel exploitation. ‘They had neither political nor economic rights, and never had a chance to participate in cultural, social, and political life. Feudal family relations from the Middle Ages bound women politically and economically. Humiliation, ignorance, and spite became the fate of the women of Joseon. However, the

status of women changed when the Red Army liberated North Korea from Japanese colonial rule. The democratic reforms being carried out on a domestic front created conditions for women to be liberated from their unequal positions in political, economic, and family life.*

Although the law was modeled after the parallel cases from the Soviet Union, which presided over the northern part of Korea at the time the law was promulgated, the North Korean version was clearly grounded on antiJapanese sentiment, which was sure to provoke nationalistic response. Underneath the conventional rhetoric of women’s emancipation and gender equality, there lay the urgency for the North Korea’s leaders to build its identity as the liberator of the North Korean people who have been oppressed and humiliated by the Japanese. The subtext of the preface to the law reads as a promise to guard the dignity of North Korean women from humiliating violation, including sexual violation by foreign forces. At the same time, it was also the state’s claim to exercise the rights to use female labor forces for national reconstruction in return for this protection.

Women had joined the labor front upon the outbreak of the Korean War. As manpower was concentrated on warfare, industry and agriculture were left to women’s care. But even after the war, the North Korean leadership urged women to continue participating actively in the reconstruction

of society. According to therg58 report “Plans to Hire More Female

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Laborers in Various Economic Sectors,” North Korea was planning to (1) increase the percentage of female workers in education and health care to 60 percent by 1961; (2) hire women instead of men for jobs women could handle; (3) open more daycare centers to accommodate working mothers’ needs; (4) increase the ratio of female students in higher education.” However, even though women’s enrollment in higher education actually increased, we should not read this plan as an achievement of gender equality in the workplace, for “there are disproportionately fewer women in other fields, such as government, business management, engineering, or trade and finance.”° The state’s true motivation in encouraging women to join the collective labor force was to fill the empty places that men had left when they joined the army. For North Korean men, it was “mandatory to serve the army for approximately ten years,” which created “more demand for a female workforce.”’ As marriageable men were serving the state long term, women’s marriage and pregnancy years were retarded accordingly. ‘Thus, instead of having families of their own, women were driven out of the domestic sphere

and into the public sphere, in such a radical manner as to make Helen Hunter note that “it is doubtful that any society has accomplished a more basic change in so short a time.”* Because of the practical social demand for a female labor force, women’s emancipation from the domestic sphere was legitimized under the pretext of “achieving gender equality.””? As Hunter points out: “In 1947, only 5 percent of industrial workers were women; by

1949, the number had jumped to 15 percent. By 1967, women accounted for almost half of the total workforce.”!” The official claim that full equality exists between the sexes was “promulgated as law in the Law of Equality, enacted in July 1946 and later in-

corporated into the Constitution of 1948. Under the law, North Korean women are guaranteed full equality ‘in every phase of life, including political, economic, and cultural life.’”'! Even though the government promised the same work privileges, wages, social security, and education as men, in practice, women are not paid comparable wages for essentially comparable work, and they are not promoted comparably.” The actual gender discrimination in society notwithstanding, the image of working women in the public sphere was endorsed by the leadership for practical reasons of supplementing the labor force and paved the legitimate way for representing ideal women in revolutionary operas. Alongside the highly codified projection of a new male citizenry consisting of soldiers, peasants, workers, and intellectuals examined in the previous chapter, there

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emerged a systematic depiction of working women as empowered national subjects in the revolutionary operas and other performance genres, yet they managed to retain visible markers of traditional femininity in all aspects of their bodily performances involving gestures, costumes, and action. The creation of ambidextrous women—working subjects as well as docile females—is one of the most conspicuous innovations in North Korean arts.) However, this process had its own set of dilemmas. ‘The endorsement of women in the public sphere, as depicted in revolutionary operas, primarily aimed at utilizing women’s labor as a social resource. Emancipating women from the domestic sphere actually doubled their duties in the domestic and social spheres while keeping their rights status quo. ‘The dilemma raised by the Marxist women question—that women’s rights could not become a societal issue so long as women did not contribute to social production—had

no solution in North Korea. Promoting a strong image of women whose existence extended beyond the domestic realm was part of the attempt to mobilize women as a labor force by creating an illusion of women’s liberation without addressing gender equality in the social and domestic areas.

North Korea produced many statues and posters of armed women in the public sphere and replicated the images of female revolutionaries on stage and screen. Theater and film, together with other visual art forms, perpetuated the impression of women’s liberation through countless repetition of images of the emancipated woman to the point that they became the real

foundation of everyday life rather than a mere reflection of it. The conflicted gender politics in North Korea, as expressed in revolutionary performances, is manifested on various planes, such as body politics, experimentation with sexuality, gaze, and fashion, which comprise iterative questions about female protagonists’ making the physical move from the domestic to the public space.

Every major female character in North Korean propaganda performances bids farewell to the traditional family life bound in the domestic sphere. Crossing the boundary of that traditional life becomes a crucial step for character development, or more precisely, an inevitable rite of passage for female characters who become genuine protagonists. Stepping out of the inner domestic world for these women is a risky and occasionally deadly event. Nevertheless, it is a crucial moment that transforms these women into heroes, and one without which the task of revolution cannot be carried out. [This is exemplified by the female heroes Kkot-bun in Flower Girl, Mother in Sea of Blood, and Yeon-ok in True Daughter of the Party. In fact, crossing the boundary between the domestic and the public not

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only became the signature action of revolutionary heroines but also retroactively reshaped the female protagonists living in feudal times, before the twentieth-century revolutionary struggle. The North Korean perspective actively cast the well-known folk heroines in a revisionist light, rein-

venting them as belonging to the immediately recognizable paradigm of revolutionary heroes. Theater pieces and films set in feudal times galvanized the heroism of women—the upper class as well as the lowest caste— to step out of the oppressive patriarchal household in search of social equality and justice. While their crossing the boundary between domestic and public was evocative of their male counterparts who left traditional fathers for state fathers, it also paved the way for inventing traditions of revolutionary women in prerevolutionary times. Historical accuracy was never really a concern for the producers of these performances, which allowed for anachronistic liberated working women in feudal times. At the same time, such creative moves allowed North Korean producers to claim the world of fantasy as a political terrain and to reinvent the world of legends, folktales, and the imagination in general according to immediately recognizable socialist ideals. Inventing the past in North Korean propaganda performances was inherently an ideological maneuvering.

Princess Seon-hwa,'* published in 1956, is one of the earliest known North Korean plays to feature an audacious female protagonist who is driven equally by a sense of social justice and individual passion. ‘This five-act play is based on the folk legend of the beautiful princess Seon-hwa, who was

the third daughter of King Jinpyeong (?-632) of the Silla dynasty (BCE 57-935 CE). The legend that serves as the raw material for the play has little historical veracity, but reinvented by North Korea’s dramaturgical imagination, it centers on the princess’s daring acts of speaking against her father king—transeressing the absolute authority of her biological father, who is also the ruler of the feudal kingdom. The dramatic tension erupts when a song spreads through the kingdom

spreading rumors about the illicit nocturnal encounters between the princess and her secret admirer Seo-dong, who is a commoner from the neighboring kingdom of Baekje. Seo-dong claims to have met the princess and immediately fallen in love on a spring day when she came out to the field to watch blossoming flowers. Shortly after, a raunchy folk song about their love affair spreads rapidly: “Princess Seon-hwa secretly fell in love with Seo-dong / She takes him into her quarters stealthily in the middle of

the night.”’? The king becomes infuriated with his beloved daughter for having defamed the royal household, and issues an order to arrest and exe-

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cute Seo-dong. Seon-hwa feels sympathy for the wrongly accused admirer and pleads for justice, only to be dismissed by the king. That night, she secretly helps Seo-dong escape and becomes enamored of the brave commoner, turning groundless rumor into reality. For this act of betrayal, the princess is exiled deep into the mountains and is finally sentenced to death, but just before she swallows poison sent to her by her father, Seo-dong appears to rescue her and both live happily ever after as commoners. Princess Seon-hwa appears as one who dares to speak the truth and challenge the wrong assumptions of the ruler who wields boundless power. When the king orders the execution of Seo-dong, whose only crime consists of unbridled passion for the woman he cannot dream of having, Seonhwa kneels before the king and pleads: Father, Your Majesty, I have one wish to ask: I deserve to be punished a hundred times and more If I have ever defamed the lofty court and its people. But 1f you execute innocent people Under the pretext of carrying out law and justice And let the innocent Seo-dong die because of me He will become a ghost to haunt you. I implore you to value the lives of your people."

The princess’s daring speech, which challenges the strict hierarchical power of the male ruler, is quite akin to what Foucault terms parrhesia, or “a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness.”'’ The fearless speech involves the speaker’s courage and risk, since it is a daring act by a person of lower status frankly speaking about a person of higher status. It challenges the authority and power of one whose

supremacy is undoubtedly predetermined by social agreement. In Foucault’s own words: “The orator who speaks the truth to those who cannot accept his truth, for instance, and who may be exiled, or punished in some way, is free to keep silent. No one forces him to speak, but he feels that it is his duty to do so.”’® In the North Korean propaganda tradition, one of the major risks the revolutionary heroes endure is the threat of punishment for speaking the truth about social injustice and inequality despite the grave

danger frank speech imposes on them. Likewise, the princess’ parrhesic speech reserves her a place in the lineage of revolutionaries in North Korean tradition. The female protagonist’s willingness to speak against the

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ruler became a recurring motif in the plays and films of later years, amplified with explicit reference to socialist revolutionary themes. Princess Seon-hwa appears to promote antifeudalism in the guise of a romantic legend from the past, but at the same time, the play also predicates the question of women’s emancipation on their crossing the boundary between the domestic and the public. When Seon-hwa is found challenging

the absolute order of her father, she is expelled from the household and goes into exile in the mountains. Only there, away from the repressive court life, does Seon-hwa succeed in transgressing her father’s order by refusing to swallow the poison. Instead, she starts a new life as a commoner, one of the people whose lives she holds dear in her heart. This event also indicates that she is now a working woman who has to participate in daily labor and provide for herself and the household—a point that is not literally stated but clearly implied in the text. Although the exile is not initiated by Seonhwa herself, it nevertheless authenticates the play as populist, if not socialist, by upholding a theme of oppressed women embarking on self-emanci-

pating journeys by leaving home and adopting the commoner’s life—a recurring theme in the years to come. However, this play occupies a unique position in the North Korean dramatic repertoire by centering on a positive ruling-class protagonist. In the North Korean imagination, feudal kings were unreliable agents of social progress, which was the ground for justifying the advent of socialist state patriarchs. It is Seon-hwa’s gender that makes the process possible, since as a female, she is assigned a marginal place within feudal society, which allows for the subversion of the hierarchical order. This rather understated subversion serves as a rehearsal for future revolutionary acts carried out by female protagonists, showing the genealogy of the revolutionary heroines in North Korean performance traditions. As opposed to Princess Seon-hwa, which centers on a ruling-class woman, Ryu Jong-dae’s musical Gye Wol-hyang (1957)'” evolves around the tale of Wol-hyang, a female courtesan who lived in the Joseon dynasty. Giseang, or courtesans, were the lowest of all women in the strict caste system of the Joseon dynasty and feudal Korea in general, since their profession directly violated the Confucian female virtue of serving only one man throughout their lifetime. In addition, gisaeng were located outside of the traditional family structure, the appropriate place for women of decency; hence the society’s contempt for this particular group of women. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that giseang was one of few pro-

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fessions available to women in premodern Korea, and so allowed for the potential association with the socialist notion of the working class. Combined with their despised status in feudal society, gésaeng in a way constituted the

working-classization of women upheld by the North Korean state. However, gisaeng as a profession that capitalizes on female sexuality had to be ad-

dressed and cleansed under the socialist imaginary, which nominally suppressed all forms of sexuality.

Set during the Japanese invasion of Korea known as the Imjin War (1592-93), the musical centers on a Pyongyang courtesan, Wol-hyang, who voluntarily offers herself to the Japanese general with the intention of helping to assassinate him, in a plot masterminded by a patriotic Korean general. However, the local Koreans—not being aware of her plan—excommunicate this already marginalized woman from society for serving the enemy who invaded their homeland. Only when she carries out her plan do these local folks come to project her as a national martyr. When she is arrested after the assassination, she is tortured and sent to the execution ground. On the way to death, she recites the following farewell poem: My homeland, where flowers bloom and grasses are green under the sun’s rays! Prosper forever. I bid farewell to the people For whom I sacrifice my humble life.

No regrets can taint my departure. I’ve expelled the enemy. Bright sun shines on our homeland. All sorts of birds sing and thousands of flowers bloom. When people’s laughter resounds in this land I will smile brightly even in my tomb.

Dear General, please take care of yourself and drag all our enemies into the deep blue seas of our southern shore so that this girl’s death will be avenged.””

The dying woman’s song exudes a sense of righteousness, which helps to canonize the lowly gzsaeng as a sacrificial martyr. What brings this gisaeng of

the Joseon dynasty closer to people living in contemporary North Korea who read the libretto or watch the musical performance”! are the specific allusions in the song to Kim I]-sung, such as “bright sun shines on our home-

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land” or “Dear General.” As mentioned in chapter 3, Kim I]-sung was the only person to whom the sun as image referred, an unmistakable solar symbolism of which the most explicit example is the Sun Festival, the official title of Kim I]-sung’s birthday celebration. Likewise, although “Dear General” here primarily refers to the character who carries out the assassination of the Japanese enemy, it is the unmistakable appellation reserved in modern times for the state leader. By sharing immediately decipherable phrases with general propaganda practices, the musical bridges the time gap between the past and the present as well as laying claim on the past, which is now turned into a familiar terrain of socialist revolution. Regarding gender relations, what deserves our particular attention is that it is the Korean general, not Wol-hyang, who ultimately assassinates the Japanese enemy. This general, whose image overlaps with that of Kim Il-sung, escapes after the assassination so that he can continue fighting the

enemies. This act is predicated on the voluntary self-sacrifice of Wolhyang, who is left behind to face the deadly consequences. Women’s suffering here not only is justified but also becomes a prerequisite for supporting

the state leader’s public activities. Sexuality can be used as the means, so long as the ends signify the patriotic cause. While the only positive placement of women outside the traditional family is related to the process of social awakening, the only allowed type of female sexuality is the one instrumentalized to expunge enemies from the fatherland. The lineage of revolutionary females leaving the domestic realm for the public reached full divergence from tradition in the 1970s, when revolutionary operas were produced to capture the essence of socialist struggle. This emphasis on grooming nationalistic socialism as being predicated on gender revolution also marked a shift from dramatizing the distant feudal past to galvanizing the immediate past—the Japanese colonial period, the time of Kim’s guerrilla resistance struggle—to motivate patriotism in the present. Accordingly, ideal female heroes in revolutionary operas were imagined as a ghastly exploited class, which set up a natural genealogical arc away from heroines of previous generations, such as Seon-hwa and Wol-hyang. One common feature of female protagonists in revolutionary operas of the 1970s, such as Mother in Sea of Blood and Kkot-bun in Flower Girl, is that their domestic life within the traditional family is complicated by poverty and physical labor. In order to be righteous agents to carry out revolutionary tasks, these women have to come from the exploited and underprivileged class, so the condition of their domestic life is presented as divorced from material comfort. Nevertheless, they do not desire to leave the

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household voluntarily; most of them desperately cling to the traditional family, which is doomed to disintegrate. When these women finally step out of their traditional life, they nostalgically look back on it as a lost utopia that

the male members of their family failed to protect. The life from which these females step out is depicted as an inevitable failure, but it is a necessary step since the family’s downfall propels the further development of the female characters.

The next step for these “homeless” female protagonists is to join the collective lives of the revolutionaries. Mother in Sea of Blood becomes a member of the secret resistance movement. She works in league with other women who also carry out risky tasks and contribute to the collective cause of revolution. In Flower Girl, when Kkot-bun’s brother is arrested by the Japanese police, she also steps out of the traditional household and travels to the jail where he is confined. In the process, she encounters numerous compatriots who have lost family members to the Japanese colonial yoke.

When they make a futile attempt to see their imprisoned relatives by putting in a request to the prison guards, these suffering people establish a sense of community by sharing painful feelings of loss as well as hatred toward the Japanese. Likewise, Yeon-ok in True Daughter of the Party lives among her comrades, whom she projects as her family sharing life and death on a battlefield.

This type of collective organization for women who have left their household makes their presence, and even their labor, socially visible. Transforming invisible labor into visible labor demonstrates that channeling individual labor into a social commodity to be used for the revolution-

ary cause was an important agenda for the North Korean government. Women are reborn as a professional workforce when they leave the domes-

tic realm and join the collective. What really matters is their ultimately joining the collective workforce so as to provide the society with more trained and professional skills. Nevertheless, these women retain an auxiliary role as laborers, secondary to men. Women’s work in the public sphere is similar to their work in the domestic sphere: supplementary service to assist the more crucial missions carried out by men. And yet revolutionary operas project women’s leaving the traditional domestic role as a critical moment of political awakening. As observed in the previous chapter about model citizens, the labor of all society's members coalesces in the ultimate aim of glorifying the Party and its leader. The individual state leader is viewed through an extended perspective of the nation-state, so the distinction between male and female, the

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inside and outside of traditional family life, the individual and the collective, private and public blurs in the overarching effort of glorifying the state and

its leader. Thus, combined with other factors such as body politics and filmic manipulation of the gaze, women in revolutionary operas are made to represent the collective entity, indistinguishable from the male workforce but subordinate to the state patriarch and his party. Chen Xiaomet’s comment on the PRC’s issues of gendered labor resonates with the North Korean case as well: “Once accounted a new life as a woman warrior, however, she is further distanced from womanhood by the fantasy that a new woman like herself can break away from the family structure that restricts women to their men and hence impairs women’s capacity to act together with other women. Although the existence of such women led the official press to assert that it was a historical fact that the revolutionary army was drawn from the people and was thus of the people and for the people, this political history concealed the discursive practice that ruthlessly erased gender differences to sacrifice female subjects to the agenda of the nation/state.””? As in the PRC, stepping out of the domestic realm and joining the collective does not, for the most part, improve the quality of women’s lives in North Korea, even if their labor becomes part of the visible collective resources. However, the propaganda performances, through countless repetitions, created an impression that there is a continuum between life inside and outside the traditional family structure, a continuous realm of existence in which the private family life is negative and doomed to fail. By separating the inner and outer spaces, these performances could deceptively portray the public space as the only legitimate place to invest collective energy in reconstructing the society and the nation. Caught between tradition and

revolution, North Korean women in the end had to maintain the same Confucian virtues despite conspicuous political changes and social reforms. Between Erotic and Heroic Gazes: Female Sexuality as State Property Every film made by Sin Sang-ok has modified the way North Koreans think about film, but no work has revised the expressions of sexuality in cinema more than his 1984 film Love, Love, My Love. The film was Sin’s second cinematic attempt on the well-known tale of Chun-hyang—a heroine from the Joseon dynasty period famous for her beauty as well as unflinching loyalty to her husband. ‘Twenty-three years earlier, in 1961 in Seoul, Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui collaborated on Seong Chun-hyang with Choe playing

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the chaste namesake heroine. However, unlike this first production, which captured the pure virtues of Chun-hyang, the 1984 version bared the erotic male gaze, which has been rarely staged or screened in the history of North Korean performing arts. GOVERNOR: Don’t be too polite and come here, closer. (luspects Chunhyang.) Oh, just as your reputation goes! You are neither too flamboyant nor too coquettish. I like your shy manners. I’ve seen many beauties throughout the country, and as they say, even the perfectlooking jade ball has hidden defects. Some beauties had noses that

were too sharp, others had eyes that were too slanted. Everyone is bound to have some kind of defect, but no matter from which angle I look at you, you are just perfect... . CHUN-HYANG: I am guarding my chastity while waiting for my husband.

It is inappropriate for a married woman to entertain anyone else. GOVERNOR: (Laughs and sings merrily.) Your face, your words, they are so

lovely. You are beautiful both inside and outside. But youth is like an ephemeral flower. When you wither, no butterfly will visit you. So adorn yourself and serve my needs.

A corrupt governor’s tempting Chun-hyang to entertain him during her husband’s absence is a rare moment in North Korean performance history for its open expressions of male sexual desire and the objectification of female sexuality. This scene featuring the conversation between Chun-hyang and the governor has traditionally been regarded as an emblem of Chunhyang’s heroism and spirit of chastity, as was the case in The Story of Chunhyang (Chun-hyangjeon, 1980), an orthodox North Korean film production of the same tale. While The Story of Chun-hyang emphasizes the defiance of the female protagonist in guarding her loyalty and chastity and therefore introduces

the encounter through her perspective, Sin’s film Love, Love, My Love achieves quite the opposite effect by accentuating the governor’s perspective, the prurient gaze of the powerful male who scrutinizes the helpless

Chun-hyang, the daughter of a lowly courtesan who belongs to a significantly lower caste than he. The bold expression of sexual desire embedded in the governor’s adulation of the heroine, using concrete physical imagery, was a striking subject for the screen in North Korea, where open statements of erotic desire were never a part of public discourse. Although the governor’s projection of Chun-hyang as a sexual commodity was sup-

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posed to invite critical responses from audiences reviling him as the embodiment of corrupt feudal power, to what degree does this ideological safety belt hold back the viewers from identifying with the governor’s perspective? How do the audience members check and balance their gazes to accord with Chun-hyang’s perspective, not with that of the governor? Do they always take the politically correct path and identify with the heroes? Or is there any possibility the spectators will identify with alternative, not officially prescribed gazes? The problem of the gaze is important in accessing theater and film, be-

cause the relationship between the subject and the object is a hierarchical one that operates in a semiotic network of power. The problem of seeing involves the way actors relate to spectators, both within and outside of film, affecting characters’ relationships to one another and actors’ relationships to audiences of the film. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema” directly touches upon the power of spectators’ gaze within the visual network in film, which can be applied to both channels of visual communication previously outlined: “As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.””° Mulvey renders Freud’s concept of scopophilia in explaining one of the possible pleasures cinema can offer, as associated with “taking other people as

objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”’* The wellknown maxim “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” can be translated into a slightly modified version: “Power is in the eye of the beholder.” On the opposite side of this power, there remains a question of whether the object of the gaze has any influence over its viewing subjects. This con-

cerns whether the act of seeing is a reciprocal performance between the subject and the object of the gaze, or put more concretely, whether the positions of “the one who sees” and “the one who is seen” are equivocal binary opposites that even allow exchange between them, ultimately implicating their inseparable roles in making the performance. ‘Io what degree do the actors and actions on stage/screen invite spectators to identify with them— or alienate them? For further analysis of performances related to the hierarchical nature of gazes, dance historian Susan Manning’s case study on the dancer-spectator relationship of the early modern dance is useful. Having contemplated the critiques of both Ann Daly and Jane Desmond, who see kinesthesia and the projection of generalized ethnic racial types, respectively, as the quintessential aspects of modern dance,’? Susan Manning derives her characterization

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of early modern dance as a kinesthetic dismantling of the voyeuristic gaze and the projection of an essentialized notion of identity.7° Such a bifurcating perspective on early modern dance, in my view, is helpful in illuminating the complex dynamics of gaze involved in North Korean propaganda performances. Manning notes that “unlike the spectators of the nineteenthcentury ballet, whether male or female, who rarely had direct experience of the movement techniques presented on stage, many female spectators of

early modern dance did have such direct experience, which surely intensified their kinesthetic response to the performers they witnessed.””’ The spectators’ kinesthetic response allowed them to empathically experi-

ence and identify with the dancer’s body on stage, or “to identify the dancer’s flow of bodily motion as reflective of their own.””* Applying the idea of kinesthetic power that brings performers and spectators closer to each other facilitates an understanding of the identification

between the spectators and the performers involved in North Korean performances. Although these spectators were strongly encouraged to identify with the revolutionary heroes on stage and screen by emulating their political ideology, this does not mean that North Korean spectators had personally experienced dancing or singing techniques needed to experience kines-

thesia in the sense described by Manning. But some limited, yet conspicuous, measures were taken to bring such performing skills closer to the audience. The first example concerns dance. In order to increase the kinesthetic response from the audience, traditional dance, especially the court dance movements, were drastically simplified and altered. According to dance

scholar Judy Van Zile, Korean court dances involve “moving elegantly through circle, square, and line formations . . . [WJith arms frequently extended sideward, the dancers walk, almost as if floating, while gently bending and extending their knees. They punctuate their movements with flicks of the wrist that gently propel their sleeves upward and outward.”’’ These

disciplined movements meant to perform elegance and beauty were modified in order to achieve simplicity and broad participation by the untrained mass. From the early days of North Korean performing arts, there were multiple publications pertaining to the popularization of dance, the process of which was coterminous with expelling foreign elements and nationalizing dance forms while making this art accessible to nonspecialists. For instance, Kim Je-heung in 1957 wrote: “Traditional dance in the past was a cultural commodity exclusively patronized by the upper class. Under the auspicious protection of the party nowadays, it became the treasure of

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the people.”*® He further goes on to mention that “hyangbalmu used to be a type of elegant dance performed usually by eight dancers, widely enjoyed by the royal court. Nowadays there can be more people participating in this performance.”’! Many traditional dance forms were made accessible to ordinary people, accompanied by music typified into evocations of nationalistic themes, composed to ring familiar chords in the minds of the listeners.°? Thus, the viewers of dance productions were practicing some essential movements in everyday life on numerous occasions, including mass parades and evening balls for citizens during the Sun Festival, so the kinesthetic response would have been unavoidable. A second example is the revolutionary songs found in theater and film productions, widely circulated via various publications for educational purposes, which were often sung during marches and parades, thus creating a strong connection between the spectators and the performers who demonstrated those songs in performances. In this area, it would be far-fetched to symmetrically apply Mulvey’s view on the one-sided flow of influence—trom spectators to desired object of the gaze. Another paradigm is needed to explain the flow in the opposite direction—from performing subjects to spectators—as well. Ostensibly, the gaze of the spectators cast onto performing subjects was not supposed to be based on erotic pleasure, but rather on mutual understanding of the same choreographic, musical, and ideological templates.

Generated from the common movements familiar to both parties, these templates were designed to consolidate as tangible reality the projected image of the utopian nation. The mutual flow of influences between the viewing subject and the viewed object based on both the principles of voyeuris-

tic gaze and kinesthesia was designed to emerge from—and contribute to—a larger manipulative scheme of creating essential ideals of national identity, which was nonexistent in reality.

In revolutionary operas, there are frequent moments when the screen montage demonstrates a visual hierarchy, with the patriotic figure almost always occupying the center and the villains pushed to the periphery. In popular productions, the central heroic figures are often women, as in Sea of Blood and Flower Girl. What is noticeable is the dramatic transformation

of the female characters during the play. In the beginning, these women appear as powerless victims of historical turmoil and social injustice, especially as potential candidates for sexual exploitation by the landed class. In the film version of Flower Girl, Kkot-bun has to endure the possibility of being sold as a concubine to the landlord if her family does not manage to pay their debt. In True Daughter of the Party, Yeon-ok may have to endure

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sexual harassment and degradation if she is captured by the enemy during the war. However, they overcome the challenges imposed on them and join the imagined family unit, often composed of newfound friends, such as Communist Party comrades and members of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement. In the process of transforming from hapless victims of predatory males, the female characters turn from passive objects of the erotic gaze to active holders of the heroic gaze, exerting influence on their onlookers as models to be emulated. But what about the erotic gaze of the governor that scrutinizes Chunhyang in Love, Love, My Love? No matter how discouraged the spectators may be from identifying with the villainous character, does he not provide a chance for them to have a stealthy glance at the lost world of open sexual expression, to sneak a rare moment of erotic pleasure? How did the North Korean producers try to prevent this from happening? Artistic expression to exclude any kind of eroticism from heroism in North Korean performances mandated that the female characters call forth a feeling of heroism in the viewers via kinesthetic responses. ‘Io ensure that female characters and performers do not incite erotic pleasures, almost all the female protagonists in orthodox propaganda performances are projected in familial relationships, as mothers, sisters, and daughters of other heroic characters, and since spectators were supposed to identify with heroes, as family members of spectators as well. ‘To feel sexual desire for kin would open up the forbidden path of incestuous attraction, and this familial setup became the ultimate device to discourage any erotic gazes from falling on female characters. Many revolutionary heroines are introduced in films or filmed theater productions via close-ups at the moment of their political awakening, which glorify equally their physical power and ideological achievement. These film phrases are by no means associated with an eroticizing gaze; rather, the semantic dominance is put on women’s physical strength and heroic gestures. As part of an effort to effectively convey the idea of heroic women, the

producers of revolutionary operas and performances endowed elderly women with crucial roles. Elderly women often occupy roles as central as their younger counterparts in establishing heroic images of women, such as the mother in Sea of Blood. In contrast to the younger women whose physical qualities involuntarily open up possibilities of attracting the spectators’ attention, these elderly women have the double merit of being asexual and female. ‘Thus, much as the younger women of the revolutionary class be-

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came visible to the public eye, elderly women became a pervasive social icon

to be viewed by the entire nation. The venerable construction of these women’s image induces what Manning calls kinesthetic response from the audience, inspiring heroic deeds in the spectators, who were supposed to identify themselves with the female protagonists on stage and screen. For instance, the plot of Sea of Blood centers on Mother’s transformation from an ordinary housewife to a revolutionary hero. Her political awakening is the dramatic climax of the production, the only revolutionary opera in which the mother figure becomes the only and true protagonist. The production is a strong reminder of the Soviet film Mother (1926), based on Maksim Gorkii’s novel (1907) and directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, which was later adapted by Bertolt Brecht into a stage play Die Mutter (1932).°* The Soviet film was translated into Korean and introduced to North Korea in 1955.** The two films show striking parallel images of Mother firmly standing up against oppression, in which the position of the camera is significantly lower than her eye level. In addition, Mother in both films glances to the far distance with an expression of purposefulness, showing her heroic determination to lead the people on the revolutionary path. As a result of this camera arrangement, the spectators are forced to adopt a worshiper’s point of view, looking at an object that inspires awe and veneration. This is a prevalent point of view that pedestrians were made to adopt when strolling on the streets of the Soviet Union, prior to its downfall, or in the present PRC and North Korea, where gigantic statues of revolutionary leaders, peasants, and soldiers on high pedestals subdue spectators and force them to look up to their majestic presence. The mother’s glance in Sea of Blood dictates that spectators follow her lead, and thereby establishes a strong bond between performer and viewer, which diametrically opposes the class enemy’s eroticizing gaze. As observed, both young and elderly women work in tandem to establish the heroic female image in the eyes of spectators. By posing as the object of

the social gaze, women, young or old, establish for themselves the notion that they are merely tools for accomplishing the objective of the revolution, and in more concrete terms, as Chen notes, they consolidate the unchallengeable authority of Kim Il-sung. However, to end my analysis at this level would explain only half the story regarding the dynamics involved in gazes. What about the villains’ lurid gazes cast upon female protagonists in various performances? Although sexually charged gazes are exclusively assigned to villains, do they ever become an alternative to the politically correct gaze for spectators

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looking at stage and screen heroes in propaganda performances? In exploring this question, Mulvey’s idea of predominantly male-oriented spectators’ gaze has to be scrutinized once again: is there any possibility the spectators, both male and female, view these vulnerable females with the same eroticizing gaze as some malevolent male characters do within the film? Can

young female protagonists, who are supposed to incite heroism among viewers, accidentally provoke sexual desire instead?

The ambiguous representation and reception of some female protagonists, such as Chun-hyang, whose performance could be construed as both sexual and heroic, is a complex question in North Korea, which officially dismisses eroticism as an expressive vehicle for revolutionary struggle. In principle, the state-sponsored art practice, which is arguably the only art practice in North Korea, attempted to cleanse itself of any sexualizing expressions. But as ironic as it may sound, art endorsed and sponsored by the state is the only sphere where members of the society can explore the clandestine visual pleasure of the sexualized gaze, since any form of art expressing individual erotic desires does not openly exist for public consumption.”° Even though state-sponsored art is not in the least intended to evoke sexual desire in the spectators, there may be gaps and fissures through which certain aspects of tantalizing engagement with sexual allusion are manifested in revolutionary operas and other propaganda films.*°

These clandestine gazes are fundamentally differentiated from the 1g50s amateur dramas romanticizing the countryside in that the countryside dramas openly used sexual tropes to address augmenting agricultural productivity. The stealthy sexual gazes currently under discussion are also distinguished from the conspicuously sexualizing gazes: while the conspicuously sexualizing gaze of the governor in Love, Love, My Love does not allow any disconnection between his intent to seduce Chun-hyang (signified by the gaze) and his action, there may be a discrepancy between the intent

of the propaganda producers to invoke heroism by creating a exchange of heroic gazes between the heroes and viewers and the sexual effect these scenes inadvertently have on the audience. Chen has noted a case study on the PRC’s yangbanxi (model theater works)*’ quite similar to that of North Korea: “Model theater contributed one of the most ingenious examples of the patriarchal appropriation of women’s bodies to serve as the beautiful object of the gaze. The sexualizing elements of women’s bodies—their hair, poses, and wounds—were cleverly employed to popularize the glorified power of the great man. Women’s bodies became a social, institutionalized language and an open space for cultural signification.”*®

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The subtly sexualized expressions of the female body situated as the beautiful object of the gaze may also describe what the viewers see in Chun-hyang. Her vulnerability, accentuated by the sexualizing gaze of the governor, ultimately glorifies the power of the male leader, that is, her husband, who is absent while his helpless wife is threatened, tortured, and condemned to death for refusing to comply with the governor’s request. But he nevertheless comes back just before Chun-hyang’s execution to flaunt his masculinity. The weakened, abused, and emaciated body of Chun-hyang is presented to the husband as a trophy dedicated to the shrine of his ebullient ego, decorated with his wife’s chastity and self-sacrifice. The appropriation of Chun-hyang’s tortured body, beaten up and disarranged to expose her very human nature (she has a superhuman will to resist fear and temptation, but her body bleeds like the rest of us), quite possibly invites sadistic imagination from onlookers. In-

tentionally or not, the gaze of the governor may open the opportunity for male spectators to indulge in the stealthy pleasure of projecting themselves as full-fledged males in a society where their masculinity is compromised by their demotion to the status of children of the state fathers. It is undeniable that Chun-hyang incites heroism in viewers by creating a strong ideological rapport concerning loyalty and resistance, but this type of politically sanguine gaze 1s not the only gaze involved in viewing the film. Just as women’s transition from tradition to revolution has been framed by

their enduring role in the Confucian patriarchy, so women’s sexuality on stage and screen is trapped in the vague and largely unexplored zone created by the overlap between heroism and eroticism, with the only clear element in this diagram being that women’s sexuality, no matter from which angle it is regarded, belongs to the state as its rightful property. Women’s sexuality as state property, malleable to instrumentalization and transformation, succumbs to the hierarchy of the North Korean state, which prioritizes public over private, collective over individual. In The Story of Chun-hyang (1980), which is much more astringently regulated in terms of sexual expressions than Shin’s Love, Love, My Love, the issue of the own-

ership of female sexuality is brought to the forefront in the dialogue between Chun-hyang and the governor. When Chun-hyang keeps insisting on guarding her chastity, the governor finally loses his patience and shouts: GOVERNOR: Nonsense! Although the moon went hiding behind the clouds, it still is the moon. You pretend you are a woman guarding her chastity, but you are still who you are. Stop teasing me and hurry up to move in and serve me.

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CHUN-HYANG: | implore you to stop saying those meaningless things and instead pay attention to people’s livelihood. GOVERNOR: (Laughs.) Pay attention to people’s livelihood? ATTENDANT: It’s none of your business to worry about, and the governor

will take good care of people. You just listen to what he tells you. If you refuse his invitation too many times, it will not be good for you. You’d better attend to his needs while he is charmed. CHUN-HYANG: I am not a courtesan but a chaste wife who is waiting for her husband to return. GOVERNOR: (Ezraged.) What nonsense!

ATTENDANT: You are only the daughter of a lowly courtesan! And to say that you are guarding your chastity is too absurd!

CHUN-HYANG: What law mandates that all daughters of courtesans should be courtesans, and what law mandates that women of lowly classes are not entitled to guard their chastity? ve never heard that only high-class women should guard their chastity. GOVERNOR: What?

CHUN-HYANG: You are a governor who should look after the people. Why

is it that you want to ignore common ethical understanding and violate a married woman?

This lengthy conversation between the lowly daughter of a courtesan and the highest official in town is more politically charged than a parallel scene in Sin’s Love, Love, My Love. The orthodox North Korean version features a

carnivalesque inversion on various levels: the conventional division between man and woman as respectively being in charge of the public and the

private domain seems to have been shattered. Although Chun-hyang’s erave concern as a married woman is to keep her chastity, at the same time, she keeps reminding the governor of the Confucian virtues he should abide by as an official, such as wise governance of the people and protection of the common ethics. By doing so, she emerges as the guardian of these values of public service. On the contrary, the governor, a public servant, is motivated by his personal desire in pressing Chun-hyang, thus prioritizing private matters over public and betraying his duties as a male ruler. Added to this inversion of conventional gender roles is the conflation of the frivolous with the serious. Chun-hyang as the daughter of a courtesan inadvertently inherits the duty to entertain and thus induce smiles in her patrons. However, it is the governor who instead fulfills the role of jester. When Chun-hyang speaks, the camera

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provides a close-up to capture the seriousness of her expression—a typical film phrase reserved for revolutionary heroes in the North Korean tradition—whereas the governor’s speech is always captured in medium shots that feature not only the governor but also the clownlike attendant who mimics what the governor says. The persistent juxtaposition of serious and intense close-ups and clumsy medium shots makes viewers identify with Chun-hyang, who emerges as the true heroine at the end of this sequence. As the verbal duel continues, unrelenting Chun-hyang even more daringly corrects the governor’s stance by pointing out his confusion over ethical principles and his compromise of ethics for personal gain. CHUN-HYANG: (Cuts hima short.) Of low caste I may be, but I am not a

prostitute. GOVERNOR: How dare you speak! CHUN-HYANG: There is neither loftiness nor lowness in women’s chastity,

just as there is not in men’s loyalty. When our country is subjected to great misfortune by the invasion of horrific thieves, would you serve the thieves just because you are afraid of them? Would you serve two lords?

Chun-hyang defies the governor by preaching that her chastity is rather a matter of public morality than an object of an individual’s fantasy, while the governor relies on the implied logic of viewing his sexual desire as the will of a public servant, which should take precedence over this individual’s de-

sire to guard her chastity. Although their points of view diverge, one perspective that both Chun-hyang and the governor share is the notion of fe-

male chastity as belonging to a discourse involving the state: for Chun-hyang, wives’ loyalty to men is a clear allegory of men’s loyalty for the state; for the governor, women’s sexuality should be in service of the state and its officials. Thus, two diametrically opposed characters—a villain and a heroine— surprisingly arrive at the same conclusion regarding the place of women’s chastity and sexuality at large. Both Chun-hyang and the governor regard female sexuality as a matter in which the state should be involved. Such a perspective surely embodied the prevailing ideas and practices of the state, which carefully engineered women’s sexuality for its own benefit. The erotic and heroic gazes that defined the reception of performances featuring female sexuality, or lack of sexuality, entered a realm of public discourse through fashion as well, shaping the normative as well as clandes-

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tine desires for ideal female bodies, a fashioning that will be explored in the next section. Fashioning the Socialist Utopia

North Korea is a fashion-conscious’” nation where political leaders strive to dress its people through rigid regulations, imposing uniforms on various social sectors and systematically recommending certain designs to civilians.*° North Korean leaders have issued numerous statements with an in-

tention of promoting fashion as a national project meant to groom ideal corporeality and build national strength through centrally monitored practices. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il have predicated their ideas about national strength and bodily well-being on sartorial projects.*! In this process, visual arts, including theater, film, and posters played a seminal role in constructing and propagating the ideal bodily image of women through fashion codes. Anyone investigating North Korean women’s fashion is bound to make a discovery about the bifurcation of femininity. While some other socialist and authoritarian states glorified masculine clothing as a preferred means to represent revolutionized women,” North Korean fashion has continuously explored and expressed degrees of femininity, seemingly contradicting the astringent revolutionary spirit often identified with masculinity. The varying visual representations of traditional femininity and state-organized socialist ideals predicated on masculinity collide in North Korea, marking a unique sense of fashion for women clearly distinguished from its closest neighbors—the PRC, the former Soviet Union,” and South Korea. Still retaining the traditional Confucian ideals of a male-centered soci-

ety, the North Korean leadership perceived women as a national project distinguished from men, which meant forging different corporeal practices for two genders. ‘The PRC presents an interesting comparison. Chinese historian Tina Mai Chen has pointed out that “since the early twentieth century, liberated body parts represented new sociopolitical and gendered visions of China, but these visions tended to be imagined on the bodies of women by male intellectuals or masculinized political parties.” As with the PRC’s conception, in North Korea the notion that femininity is a gift bestowed on national subjects by the state, or more specifically, by male state leaders, provided the ground for forging and regulating gendered bodily practices within national subjects. However, North Korean female fashion

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constituted distinctive practices, quite unlike practices during the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where genderless body expression made it difficult to delineate differences between male and female fashions.» There is no shortage of representations of the ideal body in a North Korean visual media, including stage productions, films, magazine illustrations, paintings, and posters. My aim is to present a critical overview of North Korea’s body politics by exploring how the new idealized vision of women was produced and consumed from the 1gs5os to the present. Fashion in visual media manifests the central ideological issues that the state

wanted to present as tangible models of disciplining its people. Jane Gaines’s observation that costumes in films “primarily work to reinforce narrative ideas”*® is pertinent to understanding the North Korean case, as dress codes became an entry point to materializing the ideology involved in bodily practices. But more significantly, like fashion, visual media in North Korea are not merely objects of consumption, but by far the most important form of communication. Their functions are wide in scope—they educate, entertain, and mobilize people. In a society where ideals shape reality itself, the way in which visual images are coordinated and circulated is far from being spontaneous. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that visual media in North Korea set the parameters of available fashion choices. In North Korea, images of women on stage and screen, in photos and posters function not only as the objects of visual consumption, but also as concrete models to emulate, thus imposing on viewers the desire to produce ideal bodily presentations. Examining the dress codes of female protagonists on stage and screen illuminates how the state set out to craft ideal female bodies as constantly navigating between revolutionary masculinity and

traditional femininity.*’ Taking into consideration that daily practices in civilian sectors are by no means formulated accidentally, it would not be farfetched to claim that such practice would have been impossible without a state endorsement of women’s fashion that the leadership saw as beneficial to managing the state. Although North Korea is a tightly controlled nation across its political structures and cultures, its women’s fashion is as diverse as anywhere else in the world. At a first glance, there is nothing conspicuously socialist about

North Korean women’s fashion. Most North Korean women wear their hair in elegant perms at shoulder length, while younger schoolgirls wear girlish braids, creating a stark contrast to the genderless hairdo and clothing of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. ‘The ubiquitous femininity

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in hairstyles is paralleled by clothing; most women wear skirts instead of trousers, and even in military uniforms, feminine traits are distinctively marked by the preference for skirts. Such distinctively feminine manifestations in women’s fashion come about as a result of a code shift from colonial modernity to nationalistic joseonot and then military uniform to a more eclectic mixture of styles. Each fashion paradigm reflected different stages of state-led reforms and social

agendas as the North Korean policy toward women changed over time. However, these fashion codes nowadays do not exist as separate signifiers of

consecutive time periods, but rather as synchronous manifestations of eclectic styles expressing various degrees of ideal femininity accumulated over time. I trace back three stages of fashion development that yielded

foundations for contemporary North Korean women’s fashion codes: joseonot of the 1960s, promotion of military uniforms in the 1970s, and the mix of fashion codes that has risen since the 198os. Away with Colonial Legacies: Joseonot as a New Socialist Fashion Code

With the success of post-Korean War reconstruction efforts, beginning from the 1960s, the North Korean leadership had a chance to view the importance of fashion as a marker of a new socialist state.** Fashion became an

instrument to mark historical periods that separated past and present; the way people dressed under the oppressive feudal culture of the past and the liberating socialist culture of the present featured irreconcilable differences

in the North Korean imagination. On November 16, 1961, only two months after the Fourth Party Convention, during which Kim I]-sung emerged as an unchallenged leader of North Korea, Kim gave a speech at the National Meeting of Mothers in which he criticized a few women in the past “who went about dressed to kill and wearing fancy hats” and stated that “these women have been removed from their posts and the ranks of the Women’s Union.”*” Kim uses fashion codes to sort out the corrupting element within North Korea as remnants of the pre-North Korean colonial stage. The increasing stability North Korea achieved in the 1960s created an occasion to look at its internal dissent and gage the standards of bodily correctness predicated on fashion. In the same speech Kim inscribed cor-

rect ways of life that were emblemized in fashion codes: “How can Women’s Union work be conducted by the so-called enlightened women if they are ignorant of the factory and rural life and only know how to apply

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make-up and hair curlers? ‘To tell the truth, it is not so essential to have curly hair and wear pretty dresses, and neither are these things difficult to

learn. Even rural women can learn these things easily once they are taught.”°? What deserves particular attention here is the historical development of women’s clothing in Korea that led to this moment in 1961, when certain fashion codes were marked as a bad example to be openly derided in public. Kim Il-sung’s disparaging remarks about certain fashion types counteract the distinctively marked working bodies of laborers and farmers—the ideal citizenry of the newly established North Korea. Concretely described as “make-up,” “hair curlers,” “pretty dresses,” and “fancy hats,” these para-

phernalia would surely interfere with backbreaking work on collective farms and in factories. Retaining distinctively Western features, this negative fashion type, in addition to countering proletarian working bodies, defies the ethnocentric look of Korean women’s traditional dress. Western fashion codes such as these were introduced preceding, but mostly during, the Japanese colonial period and were regarded by many as compromising

national purity. As Susie Kim has illustrated, Western sartorial norms, which encroached upon a segment of the Korean population at the turn of the nineteenth century, were filtered through ambiguous encounters between Korea and Western culture, often framed through the Japanese sensibility of the West. Kim points out that women’s fashion reform was carried out particularly by female students who had an exposure to the new ideas of womanhood through education abroad and at newly established modern schools in Korea where they could vicariously experience the ideals of the West. The movement during the colonial era to reform traditional dress into a more functional dress code was not only motivated by a practical sense that Western-style dress would permit better mobility, but more significantly, by a symbolic order that promulgated the idea that Western clothing was a

gesture toward civilization in the globalizing economy and in cultural trends. Western-influenced fashion codes filtered by colonial modernity were in most cases accepted by educated upper-class women, whom the state labeled as oppressive bourgeoisie: “So-called simyeoseong (New Women) could partake in this new material culture insofar as their social standing and economic means, often through their wealthy families, would permit it.”°? These fashion codes had to be eradicated from women’s wardrobe as remnants of the colonial past and the cultural traits of the enemy class, the bourgeoisie. The spirit that guided this process was akin to that during the

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Chinese Republican era, when clothing reform was viewed “as a rite of ethnic rehabilitation that would expunge . . . ignominy and reinvigorate the nation to redress its recent humiliation.”°” Out of erasure of sartorial markers for colonial modernity rose new clothing norms for socialism, which suggested an alternative to Western garments that came to Korea through the corrupt Japanese filtering of culture. As the nascent North Korean leadership envisioned it, the new socialist era’s departure from the past would not necessarily mean devising a brandnew dress code, but restoring the clothing details found in the sacred memories of the leader’s household during the anti-Japanese struggle in 1930s Manchuria. The official North Korean historiography, assisted by visual

media such as paintings and photos, persistently cultivated the idea that Kim Il-sung’s family embodied the epitome of national purity by resisting the Japanese aggressors. Although many historians have argued that Kim Isung’s father attended a Christian school and was an obscure figure in the

Korean independence movement, North Korean history tells a different version of his life as sacrificed in prison for the cause of rebelling against the Japanese colonizers. Oxymoronic as it may sound, North Korea’s brand of

socialist modernity and progress found its prerogative in traditional dress

codes rather than the preceding colonial period, when modernity for women meant more westernized garments—a marker standing for nonworking bodies. An alternative to the corrupting feminine bodily practice of the past was designed in an old-fashioned mold: the traditional Korean dress joseonot became the new signature code for women under the socialist state. Since a

large number of women were still wearing this traditional dress, having failed to accept Western clothing during the colonial period, no thorough dress reform was required to promote this dress type. A poster (see fig. 36) from the National Archives and Records Administration, dating between the late 1940s and early 1950, features a motherly figure who is immersed

in amending clothing. The caption at the bottom (“Let Us Be Well Prepared for Winter!”) urges viewers to prepare for the upcoming cold. The frugal nature of this slogan is mirrored by her modest traditional dress, which marks her body as enduring hardship akin to that experienced by Kim I]-sung’s mother. Like Gang Ban-seok, the woman in this poster wearing joseonot embodies working-class ethics through the ethnically prescribed dress code, and thereby becomes a state-endorsed antidote to the corrupting markers of the colonial past.

As the state perceived it in the early 1960s, the ideal North Korean

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women’s bodily presentation attired in traditional form was the corrective to the immediate past of Japanese colonial rule, which had disgraced national dignity. The state’s promotion of modified joseonot was predicated on a nationalistic dress code borrowed from traditional sartorial motifs that emphasized modest feminine beauty and virtue. In the following description of joseonot published in 1960, the author attributes distinctive nationalistic qualities to joseonot as essentially different from styles of other nationalities: “People say the Korean women’s dresses with the pleated chima (skirt) and short jeogor7 (jacket) are simple, but they have a charm of elegance and harmony. The jeogori has a white dongjeong (neckpiece), and the beoseon (footwear) is also white. Korean women usually wear white shoes.

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The beauty of their dress is in their graceful lines, not in flashy colors. As a

matter of fact, Korean women prefer delicate or pastel shades for their dresses, as if to symbolize the virtue that they have preserved throughout the long history of Korea.”°’ The essentialist quality emphasized in the dress code recurs throughout the decade, as seen in the anonymous article titled “Characteristics of Korean Women’s Clothing” (““Joseon nyeoseong uisang-ui teukseong”), where the specificities of Korean women’s fashion are grafted onto ethnically marked body types. Korean women’s clothing is designed to suit the special physiological needs of our Korean women. Short jackets and long skirts—this is the basic style that embellishes feminine beauty. Skirts that start above the waistline ending at a length covering the knees make one slim so as to enhance the elegant personality of the wearer. Short jackets that barely cover the armpit make one’s face look simple and dapper while revealing the chaste nature of the wearer. A tightly designed jacket and wide skirt, when worn together, complement each other to create harmony... . Korean women’s clothing is as practical as it is beautiful, for it reflects the frugal spirit of the Korean people. ‘The end of sleeves and neck area of the jacket are always prone to wear and tear, and by using different cloth and color for these areas, one does not have to throw away the whole jacket because it is possible to retain the decent part of the jacket while replacing the old part with new fabric.°*

The explanation first takes the corporeal distinction of Korean women as a primary factor for shaping joseonot into certain design patterns, which in turn reflect the frugal nature of their wearer. The clothing here transcends the material level so as to mark distinctive national traits and become a conduit that connects the ethnically distinctive body types with essentialist national characteristics of Korean women. The modest beauty of joseonot, which was repeatedly emphasized in the quotations previously reviewed, was supposed to bear subtle color schemes well harmonized with the environment. ‘Io North Koreans in the 1970s, the color scheme of joseonot should present the idea of female modesty and chastity, and in this sense, visual media were particularly concerned with how the costumes were chromatically coordinated within themselves as well as with the surrounding environment. The color coordination was not merely an aesthetic concern, but ultimately touched upon the realm of ideology. A 1963 article by theater critic Hwang Guang-hyeon exemplifies this

Acting Like Women in North Korea + 235

point. Hwang touched upon color and clothing in tandem in his review of the children’s musical film Our Flower Garden: “Color on screen plays an important role in enriching ideological themes. Colors affect both the visual and psychological realms and produce various effects in the viewer’s mind. ‘Therefore the various identities of the viewers—race, age, knowledge, sex, and health—bring in various emotional responses to different colors.”°° Far from being a peripheral element, color, according to this passage, is an essential collaborator in determining the emotional responses of certain demographics. Hwang consequently insists that “colors should be organically coordinated with each other, and also with other elements of film, such as music and dance.”°° He goes on to lament that Our Flower Garden used too many colors without appropriate coordination, especially in a scene (see fig. 37) that featured “a motley of flowers, grass, trees, butterflies, which clashed with the colors of the protagonists’ clothing. Inap-

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236 « ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

propriate color coordination distracted viewers from the jolly mood created

by the dance and music and instead distracted the viewer’s attention.”?’ What is not clearly stated in this quotation, but certainly implicated in the criticism, is that the protagonist in question was wearing joseonot, which should reflect the subtle and elegant beauty of the Korean people. In this respect, Hwang’s criticism not only targets the misuse of color, but also the disruption it creates in establishing joseonot’s mission of expressing a modest and subtle nationalistic ethos. Another example from a revolutionary opera illustrates the need to coordinate joseonot with the surrounding environment. The Song of Geumgang Mountain shows chorus girls in dresses rehearsing their song and dance for the performance competition. The girls’ bodies in joseonot in this scene create a seamless harmony with the idealistic national landscape. Geumgang

Mountain for North Koreans is tourist space boasting scenic beauty and idyllic recreation. However, the representation of traditional joseonot in this production did not preclude a socialist ethos and visions of modernity in a revolutionized North Korea. Quite the contrary, the female bodies displaying joseonot become active interlocutors with the dress code of the new socialist state. ‘Tradition, in this particular situation, is not regarded as remnants of the feudal past, but a rich reservoir where nationalism could be reinstated in the service of the new socialist state. In The Song of Geumgang Mountain, the girls wearing joseonot appear as necessary mediators of tradition and revolution, past and future. The female protagonist travels back and forth between the

countryside and Pyongyang, mediating disparate national spaces. In the end, she is reunited with her father, who was separated from the family during the Japanese colonial period. Her traditional dress in this production symbolizes restoration of the family, which can be seen as the restoration of a nation at large. Joseonot acquires a timeless quality embodying essential Korean values as it mediates disparate times and places. In light of joseonot’s ability to articulate different values and sectors of national life, Zoseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women) in 1960 featured a collage

of photos of smiling North Korean women in joseonot. In the background are factory chimneys and a tractor on a farm (see fig. 38). This traditional women’s look, which is usually identified with domestic space, was brought to the front line of industrial and agricultural production—the very heart of socialist reconstruction. The juxtaposition of what seem to be incongruous elements of tradition and modernity marks joseonot as the dress of North Korean women under the new nation. Nevertheless, these well-groomed

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Acting Like Women in North Korea + 237

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tied to the rhetoric of fashion indicating women’s stance within the society. The sartorial discourses often merged with the state’s official stance of glorifying production rather than consumption, although that production was confined to the domestic sphere. ‘The North Korean leadership seemed to have perceived the notion that women’s domestic labor was a foundational aspect of the national economy, but nevertheless subservient to male labor;

this idea was reiterated in the public sphere, most prominently in the speeches by Kim Il-sung: “Women play a very important part in their homes, and their mentality as housewives greatly affects their families. At home even men are influenced by their wives in no small measure, to say nothing of the fact that children are influenced by their mothers. If women with obsolete ideas grumble over food and dress at home, asking their husbands to buy them this or that, even men are obliged to be distracted by these things and gradually become greedy.” In a similar vein, women were also seen as mothers who carry out their duty to groom their children tidily, which, again, is predicated on the question of clothing and bodily representation: “If women would be just a little bit concerned about a neat and orderly life, then everything would be settled. But some mothers do not do what they could well do within their possibilities, nor do they consider anything wrong with that. In some homes they even allow children to go about with their hair uncombed, and they do not feel the need to provide them

Acting Like Women in North Korea + 241

with caps and school knapsacks. . . . Only when children are reared to be tidy at home will they keep everything spick-and-span at school and grow up into men of a new type who will live in a cultured way in the future.”® The national project to foster women as reliable housekeepers, evidenced in this speech by Kim Il-sung, foremost concerned the domestic discipline that involved the bodies of family members, but it also had real repercussions in life, in that there was a concrete need to produce efficient clothing for women for domestic work. Vis-a-vis joseonot (see fig. 40), simple and modern clothing was promoted to meet the needs of women’s labor at home (see fig. 41). Nevertheless, these new clothes for domestic labor retained distinctively feminine traits marked by the preference for skirts in-

stead of genderless garments. The overriding preference for skirts, not trousers, and the way women were groomed for elegance in both joseonot and modern clothing accentuate similarities rather than differences between the two sets. Both paradigms of clothing stamp women’s bodies as being firmly situated within the domestic realm, devoid of any hint that these delicately adorned bodies have any direct participation in national

construction and advancement, although in reality women by this time were almost half the workforce in North Korea. Military Uniforms: A New Code of Revolutionary Virtue

However, the national project to embrace women as useful members of society did not confine the ideal dress code for women within the domestic sphere. Paralleling this notion of women as domestic workers was that they should participate in industrial and military efforts to resist colonial powers and defend the liberated motherland through hard labor and military tactics. Although the idea had existed since the beginning of the North Korean state, starting from the mid-1970s there was a tendency to actively promote women in both the domestic and public realms. In 1974, at the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of

Korea, Kim Il-sung gave a speech titled “On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women,” which emphasized the importance of women’s labor: “The revolutionization and working-classization of women is of great significance not only in revolutionizing and working-classizing

half the population, but also in revolutionizing their homes.”°’ Kim’s speech coincides with the time when women were actually consolidating their position as part of the indispensable workforce within North Korea. As was pointed out by Hunter, by the mid-1970s, women already made up

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Acting Like Women in North Korea + 243

half of the workforce. To extol the values of a female workforce, visual me-

dia promoted the image of working women in all spheres, but most notably, military women were the crux of glorifying female labor force in North Korea. In addition to these social factors, there seems to be an obvious correspondence between promotion of the military uniform and Kim Jong-il’s rise to power: Kim Jong-il as the head of the propaganda bureau produced and promoted revolutionary operas and their filmed versions from 1971 to 1974. Partly in response to model theater works created in China during

the Cultural Revolution that promoted a thorough militarization of women, placing them on a par with their male counterparts, the revolutionary operas wanted to place female citizens within a new dual role that straddled the domestic-public continuum. Women in revolutionary operas were stable guardians of family life, yet, when necessary, they were at the forefront of military battle and revolutionary struggle. On stage and screen, women’s ambidexterity was marked by constant alternation of joseonot and military outfit. Unlike the PRC’s yangbanxi where women’s domestic activities were presented predominantly as feudal practices of the bygone era, in North Korean revolutionary operas women were able to gain access to both realms as mediators. Nevertheless,

their military outfits retained the quintessential feminine marker of the skirt, which distinguished them from their male comrades—quite unlike the case of the PRC of the same time, where female soldiers wore a genderless military uniform just like their male counterparts. Juxtaposing dual values of feminine joseonot and masculine military uniforms positioned at the opposite ends of sartorial spectra, feminized military uniforms were devised in order to mark fluid identity of the North Korean women of the 1970s. Military uniforms mark women’s entry into social and economic structures, but at the same time, their feminine shapes were constant reminders of different positions between men and women in the public sphere; military skirts were adopted to mark women’s auxiliary positions in relation to their male comrades with a purpose of confining the parameters of women’s role (see fig. 42). Women in uniform can be seen frequently on the streets of North Korea as well as on stage. A scene from the Tie Daughter of the Party shows a military nurse who is graciously receiving a new uniform from the Korean Workers’ Party as a reward for her excellent service at the war front (see fig. 43). Her feminine gesture in holding the treasured military uniform marks the endearing relationship between the female body and the military uni-

244 + ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

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Figure 42. A traffic policewoman in Pyongyang wearing a modified military uniform. In the background stands a billboard painting that features a peasant woman in joseonot. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

form. On a surface level, military uniforms on women may create a sense of gender equality or a mark of privilege, but more importantly, they mark a woman's body as state property and an essential part of social routine, both in everyday life and on stage. Uniforms become a visual claim on the body’s political affiliation and determination to go through the discipline that the

state imposes. ‘The fashion code of the North Korean military uniform, therefore, signifies less empowerment than regulation by discipline. Kim Jeong-suk—Kim II-sung’s first wife and Kim Jong-il’s birth mother— appears in the visual media as the quintessential figure marking the transition from joseonot to military uniform. ‘Through various sketches from biographical

episodes, her corporeal presentation gradually marks the transition from joseonot of the domestic realm to the military uniform of revolutionary space. This shifting dress code seems to reflect how North Korean society cast her in dual roles of traditional homemaker and revolutionary fighter: “As soon as she became familiar with revolutionary ideology, she never left Kim Il-sung’s side and assisted him in various capacities, such as seamstress, cook, nurse, and shooter in his anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.”

Acting Like Women in North Korea * 245

If Gang Ban-seok was the Korean mother who epitomized Korean women’s virtue within the domestic realm, Kim Jeong-suk became the archetypical model of the 1970s who mixed domestic activities with the public activities that included military struggle. Such a transition is visibly marked by the sartorial transformation from traditional joseonot to modern uniform. In 1981, an anonymous article was published in a women’s magazine that emphasized women’s need to fulfill binary duties both domestic and public: “Just because our country has issued the Laws of Gender Equality, we cannot forget to think and behave like virtuous women. We should be as resolute as possible when it comes to revolutionary business, but in ordinary life, women should be feminine and use feminine speech.”®’ This article is not an isolated instance of extolling essentialist feminine virtues, but is merely one of the countless similar examples, most of which centered around the legendary figure of Kim Jeong-suk.

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246 +¢ ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

Kim Jong-il was at the center of systematically promoting his mother’s virtues in revolutionary artworks, visually capturing the fluid juxtaposition of joseonot and military uniforms adorning the body of the model woman of the new era, as seen in figures 44 and 45. Figure 44 is a painting published in 1976 under the title Unflinching Fighter of Revolution, Comrade Kim Jeongsuk Studies Fuche and Revolutionary Ideologies of Our Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung. Here Kim Jeong-suk is presented as a girl who manages to find

time to read the revolutionary writings of Kim I]-sung, her future husband, after putting her brothers to bed; her chaste, modest, and diligent nature is expressed through black-and-white dress code of joseonot. Figure 45, however, marks her as an adult in military uniform, as a companion of the revolutionary hero Kim I]-sung. ‘The March 1975 issue of foseon Yesul published the painting titled Comrade Kim Feong-suk Protects Comrade Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader of the Revolution, with Her Life. In this painting, the hagiographic companionship of the couple in a revolutionary setting legitimizes Kim Jong-il’s rise to power in the 1970s. Just as Kim I|-sung’s mother was projected as the producer of dress materials—thus configuring her as the righteous bearer of the future national father of North Korea—Kim Jeongsuk was positioned as the revolutionary fighter whose son would naturally assume the position of the heir. In the same manner that Gang Ban-seok’s sartorial dexterity was em-

phasized, legends about Kim Jeong-suk accentuated her sewing skills, which produced much needed revolutionary fighters’ uniforms. A short story titled “She Produced Military Uniforms during the March” (“Haengeungil-eseo jieusin gunbok”) captures an event that allegedly took place in one bitter winter when Kim II-sung had to retreat from the Japanese: “As the fighters marched through high piles of snow for many days, their uniforms were torn into pieces. So Kim Il-sung acquired cloth materials to make military trousers, but the soldiers had no time to sew them. So Kim Jeong-suk wanted to make new trousers for the soldiers, but not wishing to burden her with such a task, the soldiers did not hand over the cloth. However, the unflinching revolutionary fighter comrade Kim Jeong-suk read the soldiers’ kind hearts and told them that assembling clothes is naturally a woman’s job and took the cloth from them and made uniforms.”’® Just like Gang Ban-seok, Kim Jeong-suk appears as a maker of clothes, but unlike her traditional mother-in-law, she does so on the battlefield. By doing so, Kim Jeong-suk expands the realm of women’s domestic labor to what is traditionally defined as masculine space, but at the same time, she keeps her militant identity from completely taking over women’s bodily representations by performing feminine activity even on the battlefield (see fig. 46).

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Figure 56. Audiences for the 2008 Pyongyang International Film Festival. (Copyright Malte Herwig, 2008.)

Conclusion + 311

PIFF, there were even some spontaneous and uncontrolled moments on site, such as an incident involving a minor failure of the projectionist to exercise instantaneous censorship in the projection room. In most other countries movies like Marcus H. Rosenmiiller’s “Heavyweights,” a lighthearted comedy about a group of Bavarian villagers contending in the 1952 Winter Olympics, would be harmless fun. But not in North Korea, and to prove it there was a man with a piece of cardboard sitting in the projection room to cover the lens in case anything deemed unseemly to Korean eyes was shown. That day, mercifully, the cardboard-wielding censor wasn’t particularly good at his job. His hapless at-

tempts to maintain officially sanctioned decency only added to the amusement of the 2,000 moviegoers in the gigantic Pyongyang International Cinema House, who responded energetically to the sight of a halfdozen outsize German bobsledders baring their bottoms and stuffing themselves with food and beer to gain weight for a competition.’

This amusing detail is primarily an exposé of how censorship works as an improvisational performance by a projectionist, and at the same time, it is an amazing testament to the powerful status of cinema as a social practice in North Korea that has so centrally occupied this book. After all, Kim IIsung’s and Kim Jong-il’s ideas on film as a primary tool to mold nationalistic pride were well founded, as the PIFF brought not only foreign films to curious North Koreans, but also curious foreign journalists and tourists to North Korea, putting it on the map of the global cultural economy and in the art sections of major newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.*

What is at stake here for the North Korean authorities is film’s ability to bridge the cultural differences so fluidly and effortlessly: as much as the North Korean domestic front has been unified by propaganda films for the past sixty years, so too audience members attending the PIFF were able to

build a true rapport between themselves and the outside world through laughter—a prime transnational means to communicate with the unknown “other.” If the humor in Heavyweights could so easily attract North Korean viewers who perhaps saw Bavarians for the first time, then just imagine:

what else could other films, more seductive in technology and narrative structure, potentially achieve? Could, films from the West, especially from Hollywood—where commercial propaganda has reached its pinnacle—sub-

sume homegrown political propaganda in the future? Given the social

312 + ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

significance of film in North Korea and the pervasive infiltration of commercially driven Western media products into the world market, this is the most likely vision of North Korea’s filmic future that we will one day look back on.

Whether it was meant to be an act of subversion or not, spontaneous moments like the aforementioned cardboard box incident provides us with an opportunity to ponder whether we could take this as an indication that North Korea is willing to be more flexible about its cultural boundaries, if not daring to change its political orientation. Another notable episode from the 2008 PIFF includes the screening of a film that featured a depiction of Adolf Hitler hiding in a bunker during the final days of World War II.° What did the North Korean audience think when they saw the defeated image of the notorious Nazi dictator who is so often compared to their own Great Leader outside their country? As celluloid images of the Fiihrer appears on screen for North Korean viewers, just how many make the same frightening analogy so many westerners have drawn, even if only secretly in their own minds? Although culture and politics are two faces of the same coin in North Korea, the cultural front ap-

pears to be much more susceptible to change than the strictly controlled political front, as we witnessed during the historic New York Philharmonic visit to Pyongyang in February 2008.° It is my personal hope that more and more cultural engagement with the outside world, limited though it may be in temporal and spatial settings, like the PIFE, will gradually erode the political front in North Korea.

Nonetheless, these surprising moments are exceptional and rare, and North Korea by and large still remains a mystery to most of us. Foremost, it remains the only hereditary socialist state on earth, with a realistic possibility of Kim Jong-il’s third son, Kim Jeong-un [Gim Jeong-un], succeeding

the father as a third-generation ruler.’ Growing more anachronistic with every day’s passing as the visions of this hereditary socialist kingdom loom large, North Korea is still invested in guarding its principles of ethnic pu-

rity and the supremacy of Kim Jong-il’s leadership. Maintaining such a purist notion of power comes in the form of draconian surveillance, often costing people their lives, including those of non—North Korean civilians. The year 2008 saw a continuous deterioration in the inter-Korean relationship, which became quite pronounced after I Myeong-bak assumed the presidency in South Korea during February of that year. Openly adhering to hawkish policies toward North Korea, the South Korean president attempted to distinguish his approach from the so-called “sunshine policy”®

of his two predecessors, Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and No Mu-hyeon

Conclusion + 313

(2003-8), by reverting to a hard-line approach that characterized much of George W. Bush’s North Korean policies. I’s policies caused antagonistic responses from the North, ranging from shutting down the tourist operation in Geumgang Mountain and the city of Gaeseong to ceasing operation of the inter-Korean railroad, which had begun just a year before.’ In the middle of 2008, the inter-Korean relationship finally imploded. On July 11, 2008, a South Korean civilian was shot to death by a North Korean

soldier near Geumgang Mountain, which appeared to be a benign tourist park featuring pristine nature when I had visited only three years prior to this

incident. According to North Korea’s claim, a South Korean tourist, Park Wang-ja, a housewife in her fifties, stepped out of the designated tourist zone, and when she failed to respond to the North Korean soldier’s warning

to stop, she was promptly shot. The South Korean investigation team claimed otherwise, insisting that she was not given a chance to explain her-

self, which North Korea immediately denied. The Geumgang Mountain tourist project, once seen as a symbolic harbinger of Korean reunification, was preparing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of operations with much fanfare on November 18. Instead, the shooting incident led to the immediate shutdown of the tourist operation, leaving its future uncertain. The Gaeseong tourism project, which introduced a less filtered urban experience to civilian tourists than did Geumgang Mountain, also came to an indefinite halt on November 28, 2008, the same date inter-Korean train

operations, which ignited hopes of reunification just a year earlier, also came to a screeching halt. Gaeseong Industrial Park, where South Koreans set up numerous factories employing North Korean workers, also faced difficulties with the North Korean government, which has ordered a reduction in the number of South Korean workers permanently stationed in the Industrial Park area. The decline in the inter-Korean relationship most symbolically manifested itself during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, where the two Koreas broke the tradition of marching into the stadium as one nation, which had started in 2000 during the Sydney Olympic Games. Invoking the memories of confrontation and standoff during the Cold War era, recents events have dissipated much goodwill, as if the relationship be-

tween the two Koreas had reverted to where it all started, in partition in 1945. In the eyes of concerned observers, every crisis involving North Ko-

rea seems to present itself as a penultimate step leading to the ultimate apocalyptic confrontation, the inevitable clash between North and South, or even the downfall of the North Korean regime. ‘To fuel concern, Kim Jong-il staged a disappearing act from the media as

314 * ILLUSIVE UTOPIA

these crises were playing out. Speculation that the Great Leader was ailing

came to a head in October 2008. Nonetheless, Kim Jong-il once again proved himself to be the consummate master of self-staging in the eyes of the public. Soon after rumors about his health surfaced, the state news agency released photos capturing Kim watching soccer matches and carrying out military examinations.'? Rodong Sinmun, on October 11, 2008, published a photo of Kim standing in the front row with soldiers. ‘Three more rows of soldiers in uniform were behind him under the banner “We Serve the Military for the Dear Supreme Leader, Comrade Kim Jong-il” (see fig. 57).

The need to stage the authoritative image of the commander-in-chief reconfirms the fact that this sixty-year state practice still wields power over political maneuvering. Put on trial vis-a-vis doubting viewers, the images of Kim Jong-il nevertheless carry out their mission to persuade and manipulate just as they have throughout the history of North Korea. ‘These photos are visual revelations testifying to how a national father, seemingly absent in

the thick of domestic and international crises, transformed into a leader who was not only present, but very much in charge. Such disappearing and reemerging acts staged by the father seem to have gained a significant place in the cultural imagination in North Korea. Having cultivated the practice

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64. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 133.

65. Ibid., 137. 66. ‘The anger of the North Korean people toward Americans is not entirely a result of the propagandistic instigation that revolutionary operas created, but has its historical grounds. As Cumings explains, the atrocities committed by both South Korean troops and Americans against the North Korean civilians during the Korean War ts still an understudied topic, systematically silenced by both governments of the United States and South Korea. Cumings, North Korea, 31-42. 67. Foseon Yesul 9 (1956): 79.

68. Interview with Kim Yong, September 14, 2005, Santa Barbara, CA.

69. This point of illustrating South Koreans as the servants of Americans in terms of linguistic practice becomes clear when North Korea’s linguistic policy is taken into consideration. In the north after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Chinese characters were strongly discouraged. According to Schmid, “In 1949, as a part of a broader attempt to purify the language, a policy of writing exclusively in Korean script was adopted. Chinese characters were abolished outright, a policy that has continued to this day” (Korea between Empires, 258). 70. O Byeong-jo, “From the Creative Notes of the Choe Hak-sin Family,” Foseon Yesul 3 (1967): 12.

348 + Notes to Pages 207-10 CHAPTER 5

In writing this chapter, I have benefited from many authors whose work centers on the relationship between gender, nation, and performance. Ayako Kano’s Acting Like a Woman in Modern Fapan, in particular, served as an inspirational source, and therefore | name this chapter in a conscious emulation of Kano’s book. 1. The strict censorship imposed by the Japanese colonial government after the annexation of Korea prohibited radical theater from gaining ground. After Japan was severely criticized by the international community for its harsh suppression of the March rst Movement in 1919, the Japanese colonial government in the same year changed its approach to Korea from the harsh “military policy” (budan seij1) to a “cultural policy” (bunka seiji). Even though cultural policy inaugurated a period of more relaxed measures, it did not mean that Koreans were allowed freedom of expression in media, literature, and performing arts. Most of the Western dramas performed in Korea under colonial rule were apolitical; the majority was either melodramas or comedies of manners. Therefore, it is difficult to trace a sustained social debate on the role of women and the fate of the traditional family in a rapidly changing world. 2. ‘he 1937 Chinese stage production of the original play was simply named Nora after the title character, who was played by Lan Ping (the stage name of the later Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife and one of the architects of the Cultural Revolution). The play stirred up so much debate on women’s role in the disintegrating traditional family life that the year it was performed was remembered by Chinese intellectuals as “the year of Nora.” The popularity of Ibsen’s drama, which came via Japan, testifies to its appeal for the new generation of Chinese who were eager to exit from the traditional past. 3. Choe Chang-ho, Korean Dramas during the Time of National Struggle (Minjok sunangi-ui yeongeuk) (Pyongyang: Pyongyang Publishing House, 2002), 360. 4. North Korean Law of Gender Equality (Bukjoseon namnyeo pyeongdeungegwon-e daehan beomnyeong), in North Korea in the Original Documents (Wonjaryeo-ro bon bukhan), ed. Sindonga (Seoul: Dongailbosa, 1989), 42. 5. Jang Pil-wha, “Gendered Labor in North Korean Society,” in Unification and Women: North Korean Women’s Lives (Seoul: Ewha Womans University, 2001), 81-82. 6. Helen Hunter, Kim I/-song’s North Korea (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 96. 7. Jang, “Gendered Labor,” 80. 8. Hunter, Kz I/-song’s North Korea, 95. 9g. Kim Gui-ok, Kim Seon-im, I Gyeong-ha, and Hwang Eun-ju, How Do North Korean Women Live? (Bukhan yeoseongdeul-eun eotteoke salgo isseulka) (Seoul:

Dangdae, 2000), 36.

to. Ibid. 11. Hunter, Kz L/-song’s North Korea, 96. 12. Ibid. 13. Nevertheless, there is a conspicuous difference in the ways Chinese model

theater works and North Korean revolutionary operas depict their women. Whereas the majority of Chinese women are consistently portrayed as masculinized

Notes to Pages 211-24 + 349

agents of revolution, Korean women’s role and image in revolutionary operas fluctuates evenly between masculine and feminine. 14. The script does not list the performance history; however, the playwright’s name is specifically indicated as Jo Ryeong-cheol, Princess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongju), Foseon Yesul g (1956): 76-90. 5; /D1Gs 677:

16. Ibid., 84. 17. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: SemiofExte, 2OOT),/ 10:

18. Ibid. 19. Ryu Jong-dae, Gye Wol-hyang, Foseon Yesul 12 (1957): 50-66.

20. Ibid., 66. 21. It is not clear whether the libretto has ever been performed. 22. Chen, Acting the Right Part, 110. 23. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 834.

24. Ibid., 835. 25. aking the kinesthetic quality of Isadora Duncan’s dancing as a focal point to dispel the abiding power of the sexualizing gaze, as argued by Janet Wolff and Elizabeth Dempster, Ann Daly notes that “dance was not about the spectator, but it was about the self’s inner impulses made manifest through the rhythmic, dynamic expressions of the whole body.” Quoted in Susan Manning, “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze,” in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 1997), 159. On the other hand, Manning believes that Jane Desmond’s harsh critique of Ruth St. Denis’s performances of the Oriental Other in Radha lacked consideration for the kinesthetic aspect of the dance (162). 26. Manning, “Female Dancer,” 154. 27. Ibid., 162. 28. Ibid., 163. 29. Judy Van Zile, Perspective on Korean Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 7. 30. Kim Je-heung, “IHyangbalmu,” Sseokeulwon 8 (1957): 70. 31. Ibid. 32. Han Seol-ya condemns some circles for “not trying hard to incorporate traditional music themes into dance, or some musicians who have not mastered how to incorporate unique ways to play traditional instruments and play them as if Korean instruments are foreign instruments” (“Proud Current State,” 13).

33. Brecht’s stage play Die Mutter was, in turn, adapted into a film in 1958, which was directed by Harry Bremer and Manfred Weckwerth. 34. Jeong Jun-chae, “The Soviet Influence on Our Cinema,” foseon Yesul 11 (1957): 7-

35. For a detailed account of the parallel case of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, which also attempted to oppress any expressions of sexuality, see Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Berkley Books, 1994). 36. In tacking this question, Chen Xiaomei presents an interesting view on how

350 + Notes to Pages 224-28 the producers of the PRC’s model theater works could unwillingly invite a sexual gaze from the audience. Chen notes that in Azalea Mountain, “to emphasize her [Ke Xiang’s] sacrifice to Mao, constant references are made to her scars, wounds, openings, ruptures, and the captivity of her body—all symbols of enslavement that, when eroticized through objectification and ennoblement, could arouse desire for possession of that body” (Acting the Right Part, 116). Chen’s notion of a sexual element involved in spectatorship may be seen as bordering a broader sense of sadistic pleasure. In depicting the martyrdom of revolutionary heroes, each production of model theater works and revolutionary operas depicts a moment of the protagonists’ physical struggle with the enemy, in which they are bound, tortured, and put on display. However, what is intriguing is that women protagonists, especially younger women, are put on such display more often than other types of heroes. 37. Uhe term yangbanxi refers to the hybrid genre of spoken drama, ballet, symphony music, and jigju (Betjing opera) produced during the Chinese Cultural Revolution for political propaganda. Eight model operas were produced during the Cultural Revolution. For the etymology of yangbanxi, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Yang-pan hsi—New Theatre in China (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1973), 10-24. The so-called eight model theater works (geming

yangbanxi) were officially created during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), but more than eight plays were staged as model theater works during that time. In addition to Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Fun); White Haired Girl (Baimaonu, Beijing opera stage version, 1945, in Yan’an; feature film, 1951; film of ballet production, 1972); Red Lantern (Hongdengji; film of Beijing opera production, 1970); Shajia Bang (modern Beijing Opera, 1974); Sweeping the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi Baihu Tuan, date unknown); Capturing Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhi Qu Wei Hu Shan, Beijing opera and later film, date unknown); The Harbor (Haikou, date unknown), Azalea Mountain (Dujuan Shan, Beying opera, 1973; film, date unknown ), Hymn of Dragon River, Battle on the Plain, and Pan Shi Wan (dates unknown). There is no consensus on which of the plays were selected to be listed among the eight. For example, Chen Xiaomei claims that the first seven and the symphony version of Sha fia Bang comprise eight works (dcting the Right Part, 75-76). 38. Chen, Acting the Right Part, 116. 39. Luse the term fashion, as opposed to neutral clothing and state costume, in order to refer to the socially engineered visions that condition how members of society ought to dress and exhibit politically determined relationships between the production and consumption of clothing. 40. On November 16, 1961, Kim IIl-sung noted to a group of mothers, “Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life.” Kim Il-sung, “The Duty of Mothers in the Education of Children: Speech at

the National Meeting of Mothers, November 16, 1961,” in On the Work of the Women’s Union, 4. His son inherited the same vision and stated that improving livelihood is directly related to matters of clothing: “Clothing is of equal significance to people as food. Without the discussion of clothing, we cannot talk about happy livelihood of the people.” “On Improving the Livelihood of the People: Speech given to the Managerial Workers of the Central Committee of the Korea Worker’s Party on Februray 16th, 1984” (“Inmin saenghwal-eul deouk nopilde daehayeo:

Notes to Pages 228-29 + 351

Joseon Rodongdang Jungang Wiwonhoe Chaegimilkkun hyeobuihoe-eseo han yeonseol. 1984.2.16”), in Selected Works of Kim Fong-il (Kim Fong-il Seonjip), vol. 8 (Pyongyang: Joseon Rodongdang chulpansa, 1998), 13.

41. According to Li Go-song, the) North Korean state did not make visible attempts to restore its light industry, including textile industry, which was completely destroyed during the Korean War. Instead, it focused on rebuilding heavy industry centering on military industry, but starting from the 1980s, North Korea paid particular attention to grooming light industry, at the center of which stood the textile industry: (1) textiles were an easy way to attract foreign investment, (2) the state wanted to earn foreign currency by exporting textiles; (3) the state wanted to vitalize domestic consumption of clothing. 42. The PRC during the Cultural Revolution promoted androgynous military uniforms, in stark contrast to feminized fashion codes in North Korea at the same time. According to Klaus Mehnert, who frequented Chinese theaters in the early 1970s, “Here [the foyer of the theater], too, men and women were scarcely distineuishable; the girls showed not the slightest attempt at elegance and, of course, not a trace of makeup.” China Returns (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 137. Eric Cornell, who served as a chargé d’affaires at the Swedish Embassy in North Korea from 1975 to 1977, traveled to the PRC frequently during his service, and was in a position to compare the state of affairs in the two states. He observes, “Whereas Chinese women ... wore unisex clothes, Korean women put their hair up and wore skirts.

The impressions of the differences were strengthened after each visit, and it felt more and more as though they were deeply ingrained” (North Korea under Communism, 125).

43. According to John Bowlt, in the early days of the Soviet Union, a principal task is undertaken by experimental artists such as Aleksandra Exeter, Nadezda Lamanova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchencko, Vladimir ‘Tatlin, and especially Liubow’ Popova and Varvarar Stepanova, which was “to create just such a new look, a revolutionary dress that was to be simple, cheap, hygienic, easy to wear, and ‘industrial,’” but by the 1920s, the Soviet design had “lost its clarity of purpose and, as in all aspects of design, the result was a curious eclecticism of styles.” See “Constructivism and Early Soviet Fashion Design,” in Gleason, Kenez, and Stites, Bo/shevik Culture, 203 and 218. ‘The systematic promotion of Soviet fashion by these designers resembled the North Korean state-led efforts to cultivate nationalistic fashion. However, the North Korean national fashion, unlike the Soviet style, did not drastically differ from the previous era. 44. lina Mai Chen, “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, GenderFormation in Mao’s China,” Fashion Theory 5 (2003): 367. 45. [he gendered distinction in constructing fashion separately for male and female seems to be ubiquitous phenomenon, pertaining not only to North Korea but to quite different cultures as well. Jane Gaines argues that in Hollywood musicals, “a woman’s dress is a demeanor, much more than a man’s, indexes psychology; of costume represents interiority, it is she who is turned inside out on screen.” “Costume and Narrative: How Dress ‘Tells the Woman’s Story,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London: Routledge, TQQo), 181.

46. Ibid.

352 + Notes to Pages 229-41

47. In illuminating the bipolar bodily representation of women, I share the views of fashion historian ‘Tina Mai Chen, who notes that “examining the bodily performance in conjunction with costumes highlights the way body and clothing accrue meaning to each other within intertwined sociopolitical and aesthetic framework” (“Dressing for the Party,” 363). 48. ‘The 1960s became a turning point, according to Yun Mi-ryang, because Kim I]-sung by then had managed to subdue political dissent and had emerged as unchallenged leader during the Fourth Party Convention in September 1961. Policy toward North Korean Women (Bukhan-ui yeoseong jeongchaek (Seoul: Hanul, 1991), E35;

49. Kim, “Duty of Mothers,” 25. 50. Ibid., 28. 51. Susie Jie Yong Kim, “What (Not) to Wear: Refashioning Print Civilization in Print Media in ‘Turn-of-the-Century Korea,” positions 15 (2007): 621.

52. Peter Carroll, “Refashioning Suzhou: Dress, Commodification, and Modernity,” positions 11 (2003): 446. 53- Ri Jeong-suk, The Life of Korean Women (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 5.

54. Anonymous, “Characteristics of Korean Women’s Clothing” (“Joseon nyeoseong uisang-ul teukseong”), Joseon Yeonghwa 11 (1966): 19.

55. Hwang Gwang-hyeon, “Color as a Creative Element: “he Case of Children’s Masks and the Musical Film Our Flower Garden (““Changjakjeok yoso-roui saek: donghwa gamyeon gamugeuk yeonghwa uri kkotdongsan-eul jungsim-euro”), Foseon Yesul 8 (1963): 46.

56. Ibid., 48. 57. Ibid. 58. Quoted in Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 19. 59. See Yun, Policy toward Women, 131-55. 60. Gang Ban-seok’s Koreanness, expressed through her affilation with joseonot, is emphasized vis-a-vis Lady Francesca, the Austrian wife of the first South Korean president. ‘Che film Magnificent Heart illustrates Francesca as a complete foreigner who aligns herself with greedy Americans who want to partition Korea for their own gain. 61. For a more detailed description of ideological orientation of this book, see Yun, Policy toward Women, 142-47. 62. Anonymous, The Mother of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1978), 36. 63. In the 1980 film Story of Chu-hyang, the female protagonist Chun-hyang, the quintessential paragon of female virtue and beauty, is depicted as weaving and embroidering clothing material in the same manner as Gang Ban-seok. Such a parallel creates a mythical dimension for Gang Ban-seok, who is now equated with the heroine of the folk novel, Chun-hyang, in her weaving skills. 64. Kam, Il-sung, On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women: Speech at the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 4. 65. Kim, “Duty of Mothers,” 25.

66. According to the 1958 report “Plans to Hire More Female Laborers in

Notes to Pages 241-56 + 353

Various Economic Sectors,” North Korea was planning to (1) increase the percentage of female workers in education and health care to 60 percent by 1961; (2) hire women instead of men for jobs women could handle; (3) open more daycare centers to accommodate working mothers’ needs; (4) increase the ratio of female students in higher education (Jang, “Gendered Labor,” 81-82). However, even though women’s enrollment in higher education increased, reading this information as North Korea’s achievement of gender equality in workplaces will be misleading. ‘he regime’s true motivation in encouraging women to join the collective labor force was to fill in the empty places that men had left when they joined the army. For North Korean men, “It is mandatory to serve [in] the army for approximately ten years, which accordingly creates more demand for [a] female workforce” (Ibid., 80). Because marriageable men were serving the state long term, women’s marriage and pregnancy dates were retarded. ‘Vhus, instead of having families of their own, North Korean women were driven out of the domestic sphere to the public, in such a radical manner that Hunter ironically remarks, “It is doubtful that any society has accomplished a more basic change in too short a time” (Kim Il-song’s North Korea, 95). 67. Kim Il-sung, On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women: Speech at the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 3. 68. Yun, Policy toward Women, 151. 69. Quoted in “Valuable Instructions,” Joseon Nyeoseong 7 (1982): 15.

70. “She Produced Military Uniforms during the March” (“Haengegungil-eseo jieusin gunbok”), Foseon Nyeoseong 2 (1986): 22-23.

71. Yun argues that “if Gang Ban-seok was presented as the model women of the 1960s and 7os, then Kim Jeong-suk played the role in the 1980s” (Policy toward Women, 147). However, at least in visual culture, Kim Jeong-suk made an appearance as the paragon of female virtue by the mid-1970s. 72. Kim etal., How Do North Korean Women Live? 152.

73. Ibid. 74. Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany (New York: Berg, 2005), 64. 75. Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui, Far Away from the Skies of Home (Foguk-eun jeohaneul jeomeoli), part 2 (Pacific Palisides, CA: Pacific Artists Corporation, 1988), 85.

76. Ibid., 84. 77. Kim Jong-il never had a military career, yet he currently assumes the position of commander in chief of the military. His lack of military background may contribute to his persistent choice of the disciplinary fashion code that he sees in the Mao jacket. 78. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 115. 79. Ibid., 46-48. 80. Kim et al., How Do North Korean Women Live? 152.

81. Kim Jong-il, “On the Fierce Execution of the Light Industry Revolution: A Letter Sent to the Participants in the National Light Industry Exhibition, June 2, 1990” (“Gyeonggong-eop hyeongmyeong-eul cheoljeohi suhaenghalde daehayeo: Jeon-guk gyeonggong-eopdaehoe chamgajadeul-ege bonaen seohan 1990. 6.20”),

354 + Notes to Pages 256-65 in Selected Works of Kim Fong-il (Kim Fong-il Seonjip), vol. 10 (Pyongyang: Joseon Rodongdang chulpansa, 1997), 116-6o.

82. Ibid. 83. I thank John Feffer for bringing this detail to my attention. 84. Kim Il-sung, “Women Should Be Feminine,” Joseon Nyeoseong 5 (1989): 5. CHAPTER 6

1. Ministry of Unification, Republic of Korea, White Paper on Korean Unification (Seoul: Ministry of Unification, 2005) tog. 2. North Korea’s bureaucratic measures often interfere with tourism. For example, in the summer of 2005, the North Korean state abruptly postponed sales of the much-awaited Gaeseong tourist package for reasons related to the resignation of personnel from Hyundai-Asan Corporation, the South Korean investor and partner in the Geumgang Mountain project. Even though North Korean officials to a deeree abide by the rules of the market economy, some of the fundamental decisions they make seem to be driven by ideological motivations, which constantly interfere with conducting business in a competitive way. 3. Lhe most controversial move the South Korean state has made regarding North Korean human rights violations was to abstain from voting for the United Nations resolution to condemn North Korea’s violation of human rights in 2005. 4. Michel Foucault, Descipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1991), 137. 5. Ibid., 136. 6. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1996), 3.

7. Abid: 6. 8. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), 2.

9. Even though economic hardships in the rggos forced North Korea to seek to cooperate with the outside world, the country’s efforts to join the world market economy predate the rggos. Dallen Timothy gives a comprehensive account North Korea’s invitations to potential foreign partners, which were attempts to revitalize its domestic economy. See Tourism and Political Boundaries (London: Routledge, DOT) 122: 10. There are far too many examples of revolutionary scenery to describe, and it is not an exaggeration to say that revolutionary landscaping has created and determined the spatial hierarchy in North Korea. The holiest site of all is Mansudae, the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung, where tourists visiting the capital city are required to pay their homage to the deceased founding father of North Korea. 11. Report by Korea ‘Irade-Investment Promotion Agency (KO'TRA), Stockholm branch. 12. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, “City as Places to Play,” in The Tourist City, ed. Judd and Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 269. 13. Kate McGeown, “On Holiday in North Korea,” http://www.news.bbc.co -uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific (accessed September 17, 2003). 14. The tourist spaces that North Korea opens up for South Koreans are different from those operated for others, in terms of location and rationale. “lourists

Notes to Pages 266-71 + 355 who visit the Geumgang Mountain area are mostly South Koreans, because they are

not granted access to urban tourist destinations such as Pyongyang or Baekdu Mountain, located at the far northern side of the Sino-Korean border. Thus, for South Koreans, North Korean urban space is a desired destination because of its in-

accessibility. Thus, when it was announced that the city of Gaeseong would be opened to South Korean tourists, the phone lines at the Hyundai-Asan office were besieged with phone calls from South Koreans inquiring about the package. Similarly, the pilot tour package to Pyongyang, which was specially designed to enable South Koreans to attend the North Korean Arirang mass games, the quintessential North Korean performance with a hundred thousand performers coordinating their actions to stage synchronized card sections or seminal events in North Korean history, also attracted more applicants than the tour package could accommodate. ‘he pilot tour of Pyongyang admitted ten delegations, each consisting of 150 tourists who stayed in a four-star hotel in Pyongyang for one night between October 4 and 15, 2005. lourists of other nationalities, however, are granted a limited access to Pyongyang and other tourist destinations. Their travelogues are valuable accounts for learning about conditions in North Korean cities, even though these travelers are constantly under surveillance. 15. The Vladivostok branch of the KOT'RA (September 21, 2004) report cites some Russian tourists from Khavarovsk who did not necessarily want to visit the late Kim Il-sung’s mausoleum to pay homage. 16. South Korean students who tour North Korea on field trips organized and sponsored by their schools are exceptions to this trend. These students do not have much choice in selecting the destination of their trip, and thus are distinguished in their motivation from senior citizens who visit North Korea voluntarily. 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 18. According to Dallen Timothy, “relic boundaries” are those that no longer function as borders but are still visible in the cultural landscape (e.g., parts of the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China). Dallen Timothy, Tourism and Political Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2001), 5. 1g. Jill Dougherty, “North Korea: A Prism to Soviet Era,” CNN.com, September 14, 2005, http://www.cnn/com/too5/world/asiape (accessed June 22, 2007). 20. I conducted interviews with them in August and September 2005 in Seoul and Los Angeles, respectively. 21. Lankov, “North Korea Hungry.” 22. For detailed testimonials on cannibalism in the late 1ggos, see Joeun Beotdeul, We Wish to Live, 65-67.

23. According to the Associated Press (October 2, 2005), North Korea announced its plans to resume full-scale food rationing across the country after ending grain sales. On October 1, 2005, the World Food Program reported that their cereal sales in the markets would cease and that public distribution centers would take over countrywide distribution. 24. Norbert Vollertsen is a German doctor who spent time in North Korea providing medical service from July 1999 to December 2000. He was expelled from North Korea for expressing his opinion on the state’s violation of human rights. He currently works as a human rights activist and is widely known for his provocative strategies for demonstrating against the North Korean state.

25. For example, ‘lim Peters, the director of Helping Hands Korea, a Seoul-

356 + Notes to Pages 271-74 based NGO, operates a bread factory in the Sino-Korean border region to alleviate the food crisis in North Korea. He uses a cellular phone to call his North Korean contacts to ensure that the bread is appropriately distributed among starving people. Tim Peters, personal interview, August 20, 2005, Seoul. 26. The World Food Program, which has fed an average of 6.5 million North Koreans in recent years, withdrew its emergency aid from North Korea at the end of 2005, causing concern that monitoring access would be lost. Hanguk Ilbo, October 9, 2005. 27. Norbert Vollertsen, in an interview with Joseonjournal.com (June 30, 2001), declared that when he joined the NGO Cap Anamur—German Emergency Doctors, he “was not allowed to see behind the curtain of silence in this country. Like all the other foreigners, we were never allowed to look into any prison camp or the like. We were fooled like idiots in regards to the cruel reality of this place. ... Before Cap Anamur came to North Korea, other agencies such as Oxfam and CARE pulled out because they weren’t allowed to distribute aid directly to the people. They had to turn it over to the authorities, who took complete charge of distribution. Monitoring is impossible. Nobody really knows where the aid is going, except that it is not going to the starving citizens.” 28. A North Korean defector, Kim Yong, in an interview told me that he had a friend who worked as a warehouse manager in the city of Hoeryong. ‘The warehouse managed by his friend, which he visited, had piles of aid materials from foreign donors—medical kits, food, clothing—not for distribution to the people who needed them, but mostly for army provision. Interview with Yong Kim, Santa Barbara, CA, September 13, 2005. As another example, a retired official in Pyongyang heard of a donation from the South Korean state including 50,000 pairs of shoes and 5,000 items of clothing, but he has never seen them distributed (Beotdeul, We Wish to Live, 121). 29. Andrei Lankov states that the North Korean state over the years has made efforts to achieve domestic economic stability by relying on free foreign donations: “The aid-maximizing strategy allowed them [North Koreans] to extract some resources from outside donors through diplomatic efforts. Such aid made possible the survival of an economic structure that otherwise would be unviable. For a long time, the role of the overseas donor belonged to the USSR and China, then it was China and South Korea (and some foreign aid agencies), and nowadays it seems that this role has been enthusiastically assumed by Seoul. ‘The overseas aid is probably not sufficient to kick-start economic development, but it is sufficient to keep the economy afloat, prevent a major famine and also allow for a reasonably luxurious life for the country’s few elite—the few dozen families around Kim Jong-il.” Lankov, “North Korea Hungry.” 30. Jonathan Watts, “North Korea ‘Turns Away Western Aid,” 7he Guardian, October 2, 2005, http://www. observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story (accessed June 8, 2007). 31. Kim Yong, interview with the author, September 13, 2005, Santa Barbara. 32. Kim Yong in his interview (September 13, 2005) recollected that soon after he crossed the Sino-Korean border, he met South Korean missionaries who helped him escape to South Korea. But soon after his rescue, the missionaries brought him the Bible and other reading materials on Christianity, which he initially resisted. 33. Jim Butterworth, interview by the UCLA Asia Institute, January 15, 2005.

Notes to Pages 274-80 + 357 http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=19778

34. For a detailed background of how the footage became public, see http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/GD13Degor1.html (accessed March — 30, 2006), and http:/Awww.northkoreanrefugees.com/dvd/statement.htm (accessed March 30, 2006). 35. Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal ‘Theatre: Performance, Punishment and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Fournal 54 (2002): 342. 36. I follow David Hawk’s description of these detention facilities (7he Hidden Gulag, 56).

37. For a more detailed account of Dr. Norbert Vollertsen’s stance on the North Korean human rights issue, see James Brook, interview with Vollertsen, “One German and His North Korean Conscience,” New York ‘Times, March 19, 2002, Ag; Hong Seok-jun, “NK Human Rights Like Nazi Germany,” foseon Ilbo, May 8, 2001, http://www.chosenjournal.com/pierrerigolout (accessed June 8, 2007);

Vollertson “A Prison Country,” Wall Street Journal Opinion, April 17, 2001, http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra (accessed June 8, 2007); Donald Macintyre, “Diary of a Mad Place,” 7ime, January 22, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/asia/ magazine/20o01 (accessed June 8, 2007). 38. Norbert Vollertsen, interview, foseonjournal.com. 39. Anne Applebaum, preface to Hawk, The Hidden Gulag, 8. 40. Foseon Yesul 5 (2003): 6.

41. The Western media’s biased portrayal of North Korea during the 2002 nuclear crisis strikingly resembles North Korean propaganda. For the complicated origins and discursive debates concerning the crisis, see Victor Cha and David Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (New York: Columbia

Unversity Press, 2003). 42. The unfair nature of the Western media’s coverage of the North Korean nuclear crises was most explicit when most reports failed to mention the first such crisis in the mid-1ggos. For a more detailed account of it and President Jimmy Carter’s intervention, see Marion Creekmore, A Moment of Crisis: Jimmy Carter, the Power of a Peacemaker, and North Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 43. Foseon Yesul 6 (2002). 44. Foseon Yesul g (2002): 4. 45. Foseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. 46. fFoseon Yesul g (2005): §1. 47. Foseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. 48. Foseon Yesul 9 (2005): §1.

49. Quoted in Foseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. In a similarly grandiose fashion, an American tourist, William Moore, said that never in his life had he seen such a fantastic scene, and he wished that he had more than two eyes in order to capture the entirety of the show. His compatriot George Robert Auburn had completely lost track of where he was by the time he finished watching chapter 2, part 1 of the performance, which staged sea waves so realistically. When the performance was over, he asked: “Hello, where am I? Am I not by the seaside?” Foseon Yesul g (2005): 51. 50. The performance analysis will be based on Arirang Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance (Daejipdan chejo-wa yesulgong-yeon arirang) (Pyongyang: Mongnan Video, 2005).

358 + Notes to Pages 282-94 51. See Bhabha, Nation and Narration.

52. [here are only few instances where male and female performers act together. The first is family members under the colonial yoke as staged in act 1, and the other is circus performers in act 3. 53- I thank Shigemi Inaga for pointing out a comparable scene from the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening ceremony in which a boy appeared on the stadium field alone, rolling a large ring. The singleness of this boy, in opposition to the multitude of children in the North Korean Arirang Festival, created a focused visual point for

spectators to concentrate on, whereas the North Korean festival allowed for a panoramic view of the entire stadium field as thousands of children were performing gymnastics drills at the same time.

54. Choe Myeong-jin, “New Art Form Combining Gymnastic Movements with Dance,” Foseon Yesul 8 (2004): 19. 55. Park Seol-hwa, “Importance of Rhythm in Dance,” Joseon Yesul 8 (2004): 67.

56. The Arirang tour generated over $3.5 million, but still more could have been made had there been more opportunity for attendance. 57. [he musical’s choreography was a collaborative effort between Kim Yeongseon and the South Korean choreographer O Jae-ik. 58. Before the staging of Yoduk Story in the United States, there were only a few books available in English that disclosed the conditions of the North Korean prison camp system, including Gang and Rigoulot’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang and Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. 59. Added to the musical’s aura of martyrdom is the fact that director Jeong was

pestered by the South Korean secret service, which kept asking questions about the musical’s politics. Jeong noted in an interview: “At first Korean officials tried to block this project because of Seoul’s ‘sunshine policy’ of engagement with Pyongyang.” Nora Boustany, “Prison to Playhouse: Director Hopes to Bring N. Korean Expose to US,” Washington Post, July 19, 2006, At2. According to this policy, initiated by the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, South Korea would actively engage North Korea in dialogue in peaceful coexistence and mutual prosperity instead of continuing the tension and conflict between the two states. 60. In an interview, the director noted: “I wanted to expose the North Korea regime’s violation of human rights in the heart of America. I felt it my mission to tell the entire world that in Korea there still exists death camp such as Auschwitz. . . . This is a message sent to the North Korean government telling them not to kill any more families and friends.” Interview with Segye I/bo, September 21, 2006. 61. ‘The former South Korean government under President No Mu-hyeon did not address North Korea’s human rights violations in order to avoid damaging the inter-Korean relationship. However, during No’s presidency, the opposition party, Hannaradang (Grand National Party), sought to actively address North Korea’s violations in inter-Korean talks. For this reason, when Yoduk Story was premiered in South Korea, most members of Hannaradang in leadership positions attended the performance and referred to the show when addressing North Korea’s human rights violations. 62. The audience for the U.S. tour largely comprised Korean American Christians who were outspoken in their opposition to North Korea. ‘The support of the Korean American Christian community in the Washington, DC, area was crucial for

Notes to Pages 294-97 + 359

the U.S. premiere. Local Korean American Christians hosted forty members of the cast and staff, nearly half the number of the entire visiting troupe. ‘The hosts of the tour were mostly Washington—based NGOs concerned about North Korean human rights abuses. ‘The program for the U.S. tour credits the following NGOs as supporters: Defense Forum Foundation, the Freedom House, US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, National Endowment for Democracy, Korean-Amertican Church Coalition, Liberty in North Korea, Freedom North Korea Broadcast, Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, Exile Committee for North Korean Democracy, Bradley Foundation, and North Korean Freedom Coalition. These organizations capitalized on their political connections to attract influential

policymakers to opening night. In the crowd were high-ranking government officials such as Jay Lewkowicz, a special envoy for North Korean human rights, Alexander Vershbow, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, and Victor Cha, the director of the East Asian Affairs Directorate of the National Security Council. These highprofile politicians attracted a great deal of attention at the premiere; before and after the show, journalists in the lobby attempted to interview them. Most of the journalistic coverage focused on the production’s anti-North Korea stance. See Boustany, “Prison to Playhouse”; Paul Eckert, “N. Korea Gulag Play Draws Standing Ovation,” Washingtonpost.com, October 5, 2006, http://www.nkfreedomhouse.org/wp-

content/uploads/2006/11/Yodeok-story.pdf (accessed October 22, 2006); Jay Solomon, “New Script on North Korea? Groups Hope Stark Prison Play Spurs Pressure on Pyongyang Regime,” Wall Street Fournal, September 30, 2006, AS. 63. The analysis of Yoduk Story in this chapter is based on the U.S. premiere,

which took place at the Music Center at Strathmore in Maryland on October 4, 2006. This premiere was originally scheduled for Washington’s National Theatre in September 2006, but budget constraints prevented the producers from renting the venue, and the opening had to be moved. 64. Both Chinese model theater works and North Korea’s revolutionary operas are similar to U.S. musicals in that they employ multiple means of representation, such as dancing, singing, and speaking. However, unlike their U.S. counterparts, the model theater works and revolutionary operas center on the rigid promotion of revolutionary ideology, as opposed to the lighter fair of most of the more traditional musicals produced in the West. 65. John Feffer, “Anti-Socialist Realism,” www.fpit.org/fpiftxt/3 721 (accessed June 13, 2007). 66. John Feffer has noted the affinities between the musical and revolutionary operas manifest in this opening scene: “Although meant to serve as a contrast to all that follows, the accurate parody of the saccharine nationalism and aggressive simplemindedness of North Korea’s official culture in this opening sequence unintentionally echoes throughout the play” (ibid.). 67. Lhe similarity between West Side Story and Yoduk Story does not go much beyond the title. Although both musicals address seemingly similar issues—such as rejected social groups and forbidden love between the rivals—the ghastly nature and the scope of the human tragedy in Yoduk Story makes it very different from West Side Story.

68. Jinna Park, “Revisiting the Past,” LA Times.com, http://www.latimes.com/ search/la-musical_tursuvnc,o,545 1090.photo (accessed October 30, 2006).

360 «+ Notes to Pages 297-300

6g. Alain Boublil and Claud-Michel Schonberg, Les Misérables (London: Cameron Mackintosh, 1995). 70. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Festus Christ Superstar (Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 2001). 71. M. Cody Poulton, “The Rhetoric of Real,” in Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, ed. David Jortner, Keiko McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 27. 72. David Jortner, “Introduction: Modern Japanese ‘Theatre (Revisited),” in Jortner, McDonald, and Wetmore, Modern Fapanese Theatre and Performance, xi. 73. Lhomas Rimer, Joward a Modern Fapanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 15. 74. Sun Ju Kim (Gim Seon-ju) has commented that the proliferation of Kabuki in Korea in the early twentieth century gave rise to the growing popularity of shimpa in modern Korean theater. “Commercial Theatres Opened in Korea: ‘The Introduction of Entertainment Space and Changing Theatrical Practices, 1900-19 10s,” paper presented to the Association for Asian Studies, March 22, 2007, Boston.

75. Anti-Japanese resistance has been a continuing theme throughout North Korean state theater productions. Io mention just a few examples, Hwang Jeokmo’s Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul), published in 1959, documents the glorious self-sacrifice of a male protagonist fighting the Japanese colonialists in the 1930s. Similar plots are found in Mangyeong Graduate School Circle Members’ The Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle and Kim Tyeong-chuk’s They Fought and Achieved Victory.

76. There is one known instance where a renowned North Korean literary figure criticized North Korea’s tendency to replicate the Japanese acting style. Han Seol-ya was highly critical of some plays featured during the National Arts Festival in 1958 for their staging of Japanese shimpa acting styles (“Proud Current State,” 8-9). 77. Fora brief description of Kawakami’s theatrical career, see Rimer, Joward a Modern Fapanese Theatre, 14-15.

78. Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of ‘lerror,” in States of Violence, ed. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 428. 79. [he events of Oh, Tell the Forest, which premiered onstage in 1972, take place in a small village under Japanese colonial rule. Byeong-hun works as an informant for Kim II-sung’s resistance movement, but as a cover, he pretends to be a lackey of the Japanese policemen who persecute his fellow villagers. Byeong-hun has no choice but to endure the villagers’ hatred so he can continue to carry out his secret mission. Bok-sun, his daughter, is planning to marry a neighbor, but cannot get approval from her future groom’s parents because of her father’s bad reputation. Finally the day comes when Byeong-hun intentionally misleads Japanese soldiers

into the forest to be ambushed by the Korean guerrilla group, which restores Byeong-hun’s reputation. The play ends happily with Bok-sun’s wedding. See chapter 3 for a fuller discussion. 80. Although the production does not explain why this Japanese woman was abducted to North Korea, such stories were familiar to most South Koreans and Japanese by the time the production went onstage. Various investigations launched by

Notes to Pages 30/-/2 + 361 the Japanese government disclosed the fact that the North Korean state abducted Japanese citizens to train their spies how to look and behave like authentic Japanese. For more details, see the recent documentary film by Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, Abduction: The Megumi Yokoda Story (Washington, DC: Safari Media, 2006), which centers on the story of one of the Japanese abductees. 81. Red Detachment of Women was produced as a feature film in 1960; the ballet production premiered in 1969; the film documentation of the ballet took place between 1969 and 1972. 82. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Herley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 182. 83. Yannick Ripa, Women and Madness: The Incarceration of Women in Nineteenth-

Century France, trans. Catherine du Peloux Menagé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 32. 84. Rachel Fensham, “On Not Performing Madness,” Theatre Topics 8.2 (1998): ita oF

85. Wendy S. Hesford, “Staging Terror,” TDR 50.3 (2006): 34. 86. Diana ‘laylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 193. 87. Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, ‘Iranscendence, and ‘lelling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 169. 88. Hesford, “Reading Rape,” 194. 89. Ibid., 195. go. For a detailed account on how theatrical performance is used for instilling political reality, see Kim Suk-Young, “Springtime for Kim I]-sung in Pyongyang: City on Stage, City as Stage,” TDR 51.2 (2007): 24-40. g1. Kim Yeong-hun, “Pro-North Left Wingers Are the Real Adherents to Old Times: Interview with Jeong Seong San, a Movie Director in Making a Musical Titled Yoduk Story,” DailyNK.com, http://www.dailynk.com/korean/read.php?catald= nko61oo&num=14315 (accessed November g, 2005). 92. Solomon, “New Script,” As. 93. Hesford, “Reading Rape,” 196-97. 94. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 60. 95. Ibid., 62-63. 96. Diana ‘Taylor, The Archive, 187-88. CONCLUSION

1. There are alternative translations to this, such as “March of Ordeal,” or “March of Struggle.” 2. Interview with an anonymous traveler to North Korea, November 11, 2008, Santa Barbara, CA. 3. Malte Herwig, “North Korea’s Very Cautious Cinematic Thaw,” New York Times, November, 23, 2008, 16. 4. Barbara Demick, “North Korea Film Festival: Hollywood Need Not Apply,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2008, A6. 5. Interview with an anonymous traveler to North Korea, November 11, 2008,

362 + Notes to Pages 312-14 Santa Barbara. ‘This interviewee could not remember the title of the film, in which Hitler was featured. 6. Although the aforementioned events seem to evidence North Korea’s increasing media collaboration with foreign counterparts, upon a closer look, they also confirm the conventional belief that these events are still very tightly regulated by the state. In the case of the New York Philharmonic, the program committee ensured that the cultural influence traveled both ways. The New York Philharmonic started the evening by playing the North Korean anthem and ended the program with the North Korean symphonic version of Arirang. 7. Kim Jong-il has three officially known sons: the eldest son, Jeong-nam, was born in 1971 to an actress, Seong Hye-rim (1937-2002?), out of acknowledged wedlock. His two other sons, Jeong-cheol and Jeong-un, were born to his third wife, a former dancer, Go Yeong-hui (1953-2004), in 1981 and 1983 respectively. In the summer of 2009, South Korean and foreign media started to announce that Kim Jong-il named his youngest son, Kim Jeong-un, as his successor. See Justin Mc-

Curry, “Kim Jong-il ‘names youngest son’ as North Korea’s next leader,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/o2/north-korea-kim-jong-il/ (accessed June 3, 2009). 8. Kim Dae-jung had been an ardent advocate of the sunshine policy before he assumed the presidency in 1998. He credited the nonhostile approach of the Clinton administration toward North Korea in resolving the 1993 nuclear crisis by inviting North Korea to sign the Non-Proliferation ‘Treaty in Geneva in 1994. During his presidency, Kim Dae-jung consistently committed himself to a nonhostile approach to the Korean conflict, in the process of which he went so far as to send secret funds to Kim Jong-il. The monetary aid presumably facilitated the summit meeting between the leaders in June 2000, but the secrete delivery of the funds to North Korea only became known to the South Korean public when Kim’s tenure ended and a scandal erupted, marring the significant steps taken forward in improving the relationship between two Koreas. The scandal also tarnished Kim Daejung’s receipt of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded for his contribu-

tion to bringing peace to the Korean peninsula. Nevertheless, the succeeding president, No Mu-hyeon, supported the sunshine policy; ten years of implementing the policy brought significant changes to South Korea. g. With the advent of Obama administration, which has promised a policy different from the Bush administration’s and to engage North Korea without preconditions, the North Korean leadership sees the opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the United States, and therefore may feel that it can afford to alienate South Korea. This perhaps is one of the reasons it takes a hostile approach toward South Korea while warming up to the United States. 10. Even so, as if proving that the strongest denial of bad news could mean confirmation that the reports were true, some commentators regarded these photos as evidence of Kim’s unstable condition. The gesture of assurance invited doubts about the authenticity of the photos, rather than convincing the viewers that Kim Jong-il was indeed in charge. See Richard Lloyd Parry, “Kim Jong II: Digital Trick-

ery or an Amazing Recovery from a Stroke?” November 7, 2008, http://www.tiumesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/articlestorgos.ece —_ (accessed

June 24, 2009), and Choe Sang-hun, “More Kim Jong-II Photos Are Released,”

Notes to Pages 316-20 + 363

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/1 1/03/world/asia/o3korea.html, November 2, 2008 (accessed June 24, 2009). 11. Phone interview with the author, November 7, 2008.

12. No matter how draconian the state-imposed regulations on the influx of foreign media might be, the reality is that there have always been ways to smuggle banned media products into North Korea, seemingly on two fronts. On the one hand, North Koreans who have the privilege to travel abroad and trade with foreigners have been bringing in foreign films, most of which were Japanese adult movies, as early as 1970s. Another known source of unsanctioned items is peddlers—both Chinese and North Korean—who bring in all types of foreign media materials, including South Korean TV dramas widely available in China. Although these foreign media materials do not get absorbed into official North Korean media, they certainly complicate the overall media practice in unexpected ways. APPENDIX

1. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 247.

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Index

Note: Page numbers are given in roman type, illustration numbers in italic type.

American Imperial Massacre Remem- Baekdu, Mountain, 74, 77-80, 83, 92,

brance Museum, 198-99 b3, Tio, 151153, Teo noGanrs Amnok, River, 83-84 Baekdu Mountain (Baekdusan, 1980)

An, Geon-ho, 186, 188 (film), 83, 136 An, Jun-bo, 316 “Baekdu Mountain” (Baekdusan, 1992) Anderson, Benedict, 7 (poem), 79-80 Applebaum, Anne, 277 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 119 Arabesque (1929), 26 Bazin, Andre, 44 arduous march, 309, 317 Bentley, Eric, 44, 47, 49

Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun) Berlin Wall, 3

(painting), 76 Bhabha, Homi, 6, 282

Arirang (folk song), 127-28, 151, 277, Bolshevik, 23, 108

287 Bonnell, Victoria E., 110, 339n111

Arirang Festival (Arirang performance), Brecht, Bertolt, 166, 223, 349n33

19, 277-85, 289-93, 355n14, Brezhnev, Aleksandr, 80

357N50, 358n53 Brooks, Mel, 296

Armstrong, Charles, 5, 23, 25, 33, 35; Bulgasari (1985), 39 56, 03; 100, TTT; 135, 167,170; 176, Bush, George W., 15, 313, 362n9

320, 343n5 Butterworth, Jim, 274-75

Arrow, The (Hwalsal, sic), 201 Buzo, Adrian, 194 Art Circle of the Pyongyang Coopera- _byeonsa, 46, 288 tive Factory, 56

Atkins, Peter, 95-96, 334nn37-38 Campbell, Joseph, 73

Auslander, Philip, 43, 47 Carlson, Marvin, 88, 96, 103 377

378 + Index

Caruth, Cathy, 307 175-76; duties, 96; education and, Castro, Fidel, 162 190-91; hagiography, 186, 239; hero, Chatterjee, Partha, 172 136, 188; in film, 197, 201-3; Ko-

Chen, Tina Mai, 228, 352n47 rean, 133-34, 193-94, 335N50; naChen, Xiaomei, 174, 217, 350N37 tion-state, 106, 134, 165, 345n38; cheollima movement, 1og—-1T, 338ng6 North Korean, 11, 328n70, 341n16; China, 3-5, 23, 30, 77, 89-90, 111, 132, Paroys 1k, 535 bss 1 5458 ply 106, 135, 163, 167-71, 207, 228, 243, 273, 190, 222; performing art traditions,

275, 323N3, 324NI10, 324nI9, 295; propaganda, 268, 302; red flag, 332N79, 334nN39-40, 341NT5, 76; revolution, 208; saints, 187-88; 343N4, 344n14, 345n39, 355n18, slogans, 125; social system of, 134;

356n29, 363n12. See also PRC utopia, 134; virtue, 190, 192 Chinese Communist Party, 11, 171 Confucianism, 4, 11, 134, 176, 325n26;

Ching, Leo, 196, 347n59 family, 4, 6, 18, 193, 205; female

Choe, Chang-ho, 207 virtue, 213; ideals, 4, 6, 10, 228; paChoe, Eun-hui, 19-22, 29-32, 34, triarchy, 10, 225; practice, 9; ruler,

38-39, 217, 255-56 82; socialist state, 19; society, 10; sysChoe, Hae-ok, 37, 52 tem, 132, 134, 147; tradition, 4, 119, Choe Hak-sin Family, The (1969), 54, 133-34, 138, 160, 170; virtue, 138,

201-3 217, 226; vision, 138, 330n46

Christianity, 193, 201-2, 298, 302, Conquergood, Dwight, 274

304-6, 308, 356n32 Cornell, Erik, 11, 134, 138, 34238, Chu, Min, 83 351n42 Clark, Katerina, 47, 108 Cuckoo Bird Sings (Ppeokkuksae-ga unda, class: intellectuals, 49, 108, 169-71, 1986), 117, 120, 123, 125 174, 190, 192, 209; peasants(farm- Culbertson, Roberta, 304 ers), 1, 7, 34-35, 39) 51, 53, 55, 83; Cumings, Bruce, 5, 11, 95, 172,

IOQ, ILI-12, 116, 133, 153, 167-74, 347n66 IQO-QI, 209, 223, 231, 258, 343N7;

soldiers, 1, 59, 91-92, I11, 130,132, | Daedong, River, 92, 97, 198, 252 167-69, I71, 173-74, 190, 192, 209, Daly, Ann, 219, 349n25

223, 246, 281, 296-97, 314, 343n7; Davis, racy, 14, 337n81 workers, 1, 7, 25, 51-53, §5, 110-12, Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth, The 116, 120, 130, 167-69, 171-72, 174, (Feotso-ga saekki nanneunnal, 1959),

1QO-QI, 209, 254, 259, 343N5, T13—14 343n7 Desmond, Jane, 219, 349n25

Cohen, Paul, 188 Diamant, Neil, 9

Cold War, 4, 268, 313, 319-20, 345n29 = -Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 207

colonialism, 9, 73, 195, 205; anti, 8; Dongmyeong, King, 69, 71-72, colonialist, 34, 360n75; Japanese, 6, 333N13, 333n16 70, 323Ng, 340N7, 342N55; post, 9 Dougherty, Jill, 270 Communism, Communist, 15, 20, DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic 22-23, 26, 45, 48, 53, 116, 124, 150, of Korea), 83, 95, 109, 130, 278-79, 173, 182, 187, 202; army, 193; an- 320, 334n38, 338n9g7. See also North

them, 296; brotherhood, 180; Chi- Korea nese, 5, II, 133, 135, 168, 171, Duara, Prasenyjit, 8-9, 171, 175, 324nI9g 344n14, 344n22; Confucianism and, = Dulac, Germaine, 26

Index * 379

Duncan, Isadora, 349n25 Fellini, Federico, 106

Duncan, James, 96 Fensham, Rachel, 303 Feuer, Jane, 54 Evergreen Pine Tree (Pureun sonamu, Flower Girl (Kkotpaneun cheonyeo, pre-

1970), 116 miered in 1972), 24, 37, 47; 49, 51-52, QQ—100, 102, 116, 145,

Fainstein, Susan, 264 192-93, 197, 205, 210, 215-16, 221, Fall of Berlin, The (Padenie Berlina, 299-300, 317, 325N30

1949), 34 Foucault, Michel, 212, 260, 267, 302

Fall of the House of Usher, The (1928), 26 France, 20, 53, 272, 315; actor, 53; film,

family, 30, 34-35, 83, 90, 113-14, 120, 26; language, 315; medical practice,

133, 235,230; 143; 145, 140,155; 303; French Revolution, 53 157, 165, 176-77, 179-80, 191, 194, Frazer, James, 73 201, 205, 216-17, 222, 236, 266, 282, Friedland, Paul, 53 285-86, 294, 299, 315-18; biological, From My Hometown, 168-69 177, 315; Confucian, 4-6, 10, 18, From North Korea (1950), 190 138, 193, 205; feudal, 176, 208; ide- Frost, Laura, 12 ologies, 9; imagined, 6-7, 18, 144, 160, 176-78, 193, 206, 222, 318; in Gaeseong, 291, 313, 354N2, 355n14;

nationalistic sentiment, 6; Kim II- Industrial Park, 313 sung and Kim Jong-il’s, 26, 62, 77, Gaines, Jane, 229, 351n45 133, 135-36, 232, 239, 283, 342n38; | Gandhi, Leela, 8-9 nation, 5, 18, 58-59, 135, 142-43, Gang, Ban-seok, 232, 239-40, 245-46, 166-67, 172-74, 176, 181-83, 189, 248, 254, 259, 342n38, 352n60, 192-94, 203, 315; nuclear, 178; patri- 352n63, 353Nn71 arch, 18, 135, 145; politics, 171; so- Gang, Ryeon-hwa, 294, 297, 299-301,

cialist, 142; traditional, 5, 7, 10, 18, 303 135, 137-38, 143-46, 148-49, Gellner, Ernest, 7, 324n15 154-55, 159-60, 168, 173, 175-78, gender, 8-10, 180, 213, 215, 237, 256, 183, 203, 205-8, 210, 213, 215-17, 259, 285, 288, 290, 321; equality, 18, 315, 318, 348nn1—2; women in, 239, 208-10, 244-45; genderless, 229,

241, 243, 248, 348n2 241, 243; hierarchy, 259; in North Family Story, A, 168 Korea, 32, 61, 136, 210, 228, 284-86; fashion, 210, 228-30, 350n39, 351N45; labor and, 217; preference for male, code, 230-31, 239, 244, 250, 255, 167; revolution, 215; revolutionary 258, 351n42; North Korean leader- ideology and, 207; traditional, 119, ship’s interest in, 255-58, 353n77; 226; within family, 206 North Korean women’s, 228-31, Girl from Pyongyang (Pyeongyang-eseo on

234, 250, 252, 255-59; of Soviet cheonyeo), 124, 126 Union, 35143; production andcon- “Girl from Pyongyang and a Veteran sumption of, 254-57; visual media Soldier Groom” (“Pyongyang

and,:290;352;. 350 cheonyeo-wa jedaegunin chonggak”),

Fate of Geum-hui and Eun-hui (Geum- 126 hui-wa Eun-hui-ui unmyeong, 1974), gisaeng (courtesan), 206, 213-14

202 Gluckman, Ron, 51

Feffer, John, 295, 359n66 Goguryeo, 60, 67-71, 95, 337075

Feldman, Allen, 300 Goodbye Lenin (2003), 106

380 + Index

Gorkii, Maksim, 223 hyeongmyeong gageuk. See revolutionGreat Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung ls lm- ary opera mortal (Widaehan suryeong Kim Il- Hyundai-Asan Cooperation, 265-66, sung dongyi-neun yeongsaeng bulmyeol- 268, 354n2, 354n14 hal geosida, 1994), 158, 160-61

Gregory, Steven, 106 I, Gwang-su, 207 Guardian, The, 272 I, Myeong-bak, 312

Guomindang, 135, 344n22 I, Seung-man, 201, 345n32

Gupta, Lanta, 79 I, U-yeong, 23 275 inminban (people’s unit), 105, 325n29,

gwalliso (political penal-labor colonies), — Ibsen, Henrik, 207, 348n2

Gwan-pil (in My Hometown), 34-35 327n50 Gye Wol-hyang (1957), 213

gyohwaso (prison-labor camps), 275 Jager, Sheila Miyoshi, 138

gyoye (circus), 97 Jameson, Fredric, 166 Jang, Se-geon, 113

Han, Hyeong-won, 45-46 Jang, Se-hun, 169 Han, Seol-ya, 46, 49, 56, 168, 349n32, Japan, 20, 38, 49, 63, 65, 84, 146-47,

360n76 I51, 157, 168, 193-97, 201, 203, 232,

Han, Yeong-sun, 126 246, 256, 279; anti-Japanese activi-

Harvey, David, 107 ties, 22, 39, 67-68, 74-75, 83,

Hassig, Ralph C., 104, 159, 336n65 133-34, 136-38, 140-41, 146, 158,

Heo, Gyun, 62, 65, 332n4 174, £82, 100; 105,204,206, 222, heroism, 65, 186, 211, 218, 222, 244; colonial rule, 2, 6, 34-35, 48,

224-25, 345n32 65-66, 70, 72-73, 75, 89, IIT,

History of Three Kingdoms, The, 67 TI5—16, 132-33, 149, 169-70, 175,

Hobsbawm, Eric, 188 183, 194-95, 207-8, 233, 258, 277; Hollywood, 54, 311, 327, 351n45 films, 20, 24, 31; modernization of,

Holm, David, 11-12 132, 195-96; occupation of Korea, 7, Hong, Myeong-hui, 65, 67 146, 167, 206, 231, 236, 239, 282-83;

Hong, Yeong-hui, 51, 102 police, 204, 216

Hong Gil-dong (1986), 61-62, 65, 67, Jeon, Pyeong-chang, 117

40,7 2y S10, 2321s 23207 Jeong, Jun-chae, 34

Horkheimer, Max, 15 Jeong, Seong-san, 293-94, 305-6 Howard, Keith, 111, 330n46 Fesus Christ Superstar (musical),

Howard, Roger, 343n7 297-98

human rights, 13, 15, 19, 262-63, Jo, Gi-cheon, 83 295 i297, 202,.2025 200;,300,-32 1, Johnson, Kay Ann, 173 357N37; abuses, 16, 262; activists, Jong-il Peak Jong-ilbong), 80-81 15, 262-63, 271, 276, 355n24; viola- Joseon Art Film Studio, 33, 329n19 tions, 260, 262-63, 270, 273, 275, Joseon dynasty, 38, 40, 62, 65, 70, 133,

293-95, 306, 354n3, 355n24, 213-14, 217, 238, 333n15

358-sonn60-62 Joseon Film Studio, 51

Hunter, Helen, 209, 241, 352n66 Foseon Ilbo, 65 Hwang, Guang-hyeon, 234-36 Foseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women),

Hwang, Jeok-mo, 195 226.237: 242.366

Hwang, Seok-yeong, 49 Joseonot, 230, 232-34, 236-37, 241,

Index + 381

243-44, 246-48, 250, 252, 287, 290, 135-36, 173, 176, 204, 207, 309, 352n6o; as dress code, 230, 232, 246; 340n8, 340n10, 341N16, 344n24; color of, 234, 255, 280; description ideas on family, 239-41; ideas on

of, 233; modified, 233, 255; tradi- fashion, 231-32, 244, 246, 254-56; Honal,.230; 245.250, 252. 265% ideas on film, 22, 25, 28; ideology of,

women in, 236-37, 244, 258 142, 238, 328n70; images in visual Foseon Yeonghwa (North Korean Film), artifacts, 87, 91, 97, 139, 144-45,

26-27, 235 158, 161-62, 172, 178, 254, 290,

Foseon Yesul (North Korean Art), 26, 34, 334n40, 339n121; in films, plays or 37, 44, 52, 55, 74, 76, 78, 80-82, 98, musicals, 83, 89, 120, 146-49, 102, 137, 139-41, 144-45, 150, 153, 158-60, 223, 305, 339n114, 360N79;

169-70, 172-73, 178-79, 189, 200, influence from Lenin, Stalin and 245, 246-49, 251, 253-54, 257, Nao; 22, 25,25, 135; 164;.320nS; in

278-79, 315 poems, 79-80, 143; in the Arirang

juche (self-reliance), 328n70; as revolu- Performance/Festival, 281-86, tionary project, 161; in culture and 291-92; in slogans, 129; involvement art, 277; ideological foundation of, in film, 34; journey in his youth, 75, 31, 80; ideology of, 2, 182, 237-38; 84-85; Kim Jong-il and, 28, 73, 77, Kim Il-sung and, go, 142, 155, 246 138, 159-60, 163, 228, 318, 341n24;

Judd, Dennis, 264 kings of the feudal past and, 69-72, 332n1, 342n55; Mortification at the

Kabuki, 48, 298, 360n74 Hague Peace Conference, 38; Presiden-

Kano, Ayako, 48, 348 tial Palace, 130; Pyongyang and, 98,

Karlovy Vary International Film Festi- 106-7, 354n10; revolutionary operas

val, 26, 30 and plays, 139, 141, 150-51, 153-57,

Kawakami, Otojiro, 298, 360n77 177, 191, 204, 335n44; Song of, 163;

Kim, Chaek, 183 Soviet Union’s support of, 2; Square, Kim, Dae-jung, 312, 358n59, 362n8 57) 59, 103, 160, 186; University, 54;

Kim, Gu, 89-90, 335n50 view on women, 258, 344n17,

Kim, Gwang-hyeon, 54 350n4o

Kim, Hyeong-chuk, 195 Kim, Je-heung, 220

an sun. 10.105 99, 35.01; Kim, Jeong-suk, 77-78, 138, 183, 65, 59, 74, 75, 76, 77) 78, 78, 84-85, 245-48, 250, 35371 86, 89-90, 92, 96, 98, 103, 115-16, Kim, Jong-il, 1, 13, 17-19, 22, 51, 77; 124, 129, 130, 131, 132-33, 135-36, 77, 109522052525 25 55207527 75 200;

137, 140, 141, 142-44, 144, 158, 312, 332n82, 362n8, 362n10; Arirang 161-62, 173, 183, 186-87, 194, 197, Festival, 278; artistic vision, 41, 44, 214, 230, 238, 252, 267-68, 278, 306; as national hero, 73, 81-82, 82; 335N50, 341n22, 352n48; and his birth of, 78-81; cinemania, 17, family, 62, 77-78, 138, 145, 147, 232, 19-22, 25-26, 28; diplomacy,

239, 240, 244, 246, 342n38; birth- 341n24; documentary film, 163-65; days of, 13, 161, 215; childhood, 74, family, 362n7; fashion codes, 243-44,

137; cult of, 26-27, 69, 71, 142, 246, 255-56, 353n77; heir to Kim II330N31, 342n38; death of, 18, 129, sung, 28, 130, 138, 160, 162-63; 160, 263, 317; funeral of, 160, 162; ideas on film, 311, 32764; in play or heroic act during Japanese colonial film, 125-26, 158-59, 161, 294,

rule, 7, 22, 72-73, 75-76, 83, 296-97, 301, 305, 316-18; instruc-

352 «+ Index

Kim, Jong-il (continued) 164-65; Leninism, 11, 136, 323n3; tion engraved on rocks, 268, 269; in- techniques and ideology in filmmakvolvement in cultural production, 22, ing, 26 25, 28, 36-38, 138; involvement in Lewis, Martin, 4 filmmaking, 315-16; Jong-il Peak, Li, Dazhao, 171 80, 81; on media, 313-14, 314, 315; Lotman, Yuri, 175 parade, 59, 103, 127; private life, Louie, Kam, 196 294; promotion of film, 28-32, 36, Love, Love, My Love (Sarang, sarang, nae

39; reconstruction of Pyongyang, sarang, 1984), 40, 61, 217-18, 222, 336n65; residences, 21; revolutionary 224-26 opera, 61, 116, 141, 243, 325N30; Low, Morris, 196 statue of, 296-97; Sin Sang-ok and

Choe Eun-hui, 39, 326n41; theater MacAloon, John J., 16 construction, 97; The Character and MacCannell, Dean, 263

the Actor, 48, 50 Magnificent Heart (2002), 89, 352n60

Kim, Susie, 231 Manchuguo, 133, 169

Kim, U-jin, 207 Manchuria, 2, 22, 34, 67, 72-77, 82-83,

Kim, Yeong-nam, 160-61 113, 133-34, 141, 173, 176, 183, 195, Kim, Yeongseon, 293, 358n57 207, 232, 309, 340n8, 34o0nI0,

Kim, Yong, 143, 356n28 341n16, 343n4, 344n17

Kkot-bun (in Flower Girl), 24, 37, 47, Mangyeonegdae, 74, 80, 84, 239-40

51-52, 99, 100, 102, 146, 192-93, Mann, Susan, to

210, 215-16, 221, 299 Manning, Susan, 219-20, 223, 349n25 Korean War, 34-35, 91, 103,152, 169, Mao, Zedong, 22, 28, 84, 108, 135, 176, 179, 189, 198, 201-2, 208, 268, £5 031735255, 301s 34107 7.434030;

328n70, 336n63, 339nI12, 341n24, 342n48, 343N7, 344n14, 345nn29—-33, 347n66, 351N41; 344n22, 345n39, 346n52, 348n2, armistice, 97, 198; eradication of Py- 349N36, 353n77, ongyang, 95-96; in True Daughter of | Martin, Bradley, 132 the Party, 152; Kim Il-sung, 340n10; Marxism, Marxist, 11, 15, 171, 323N3; orphans, 143; post war situation, 3, class struggle, 171; education on, 180, 181, 198, 230; PRC, 179-82; 136; gender issue, 210; in North Koprisoner, 203; reconstruction after, 3, rea, 11; 1n Russia, 172, 325n26; Kim 87, 230; South Korea, 193; South [l-sung and, 239; techniques and ideKorean-American alliance, 199; trau- ology in filmmaking, 26 matic memories, 168; United States, |§ May Day Stadium (Pyongyang),

58, 198-99 277-80

Korean Workers Daily. See Rodong Sin- Medlicott, Carol, 76, 337n83

mun Mey Restoration, 132, 195

Korean Workers’ Party, 33, 52, 57,155, Méliés, George, 44 159, 169-70, 186, 243, 255, 278-79, | Melzer, Annabel, 42-43

296, 315, 328n70 Main, Byeong-seon, 180

mise-en-scéne, 43, 45, 64, 85, 105 laudatory actor (gonghun baeu), 36, 51 Misérables, Les, 293, 297

Lefébvre, Henri, 88 model theater works. See yanghanxi Lewkowicz, Bea, 7 Moscow International Film Festival, 30 Lenin, Vladimir, 22, 106-7, 159, Mother (1926), 223

Index + 383

Mother of Korea, The, 239 lishment, 2, 6-7, 22, 134; relationMulvey, Laura, 219, 221, 224 ship with China, 135, 141, 163, Mutter, Die (1932), 223, 349033 168-71, 179-83, 228-29, 276; relaMy Hometown (Nae gohyang), 34-35, 38, tionship with United States, 3, 15,

44, 83, I11-12, 136, 193, 317 198-99, 279, 293, 362n9g; relationMy Pyongyang (Na-ui Pyongyang), 87, ship with Soviet Union, 2, 4, 27,

92-93, 335054 34-35, 58, 104, 108, 141-42, 163-65, 167, 172, 177-78, 182-83, 208; rural

Nae gohyang. See My Hometown culture, 107-8, 110-13, 116-17; state National Defense Committee (DPRK), rituals of, 16-17, 106; tourist indus-

278-79 try, see tourism; women’s fashion, see

nationalism, 5-6, 8-9, I1, ITI, 236, fashion

290, 324n15; of North Korea, 135, North Korean Art. See Foseon Yesul 290, 338n103, 359n66; postcolonial, — North Korean Film. See foseon Yeonghwa

5 North Korean National ‘Tourism Ad36 North Korean Women. See Foseon

National Theater School (Pyongyang), ministration, 264

nation-state, 2, 7, 143-44, 180, 282; Nyeoseong

colonial and semicolonial, 167; Com- = Not Even an Iron Chain Can Stop Us

munist, 134; idea of, 4, 216, 324nI0; (Cheolsoe-ro uri-reul maki mothanda,

modern, 171, 324n10; North Korea, 2002), 203 319

Nazi, 6, 296, 312, 326n36, 341n35 O, Yeong-jin, 33 New Generation (Sinsaedae, 1990), Oh, Kongdan, 104, 159, 336n65

121-23 Ob, ‘Tell the Forest (Milima tyagthara,

News from Ongnyu Riverside (Ongnyu premiered in 1972), 36-37, 52, 146,

gangbyeon-eseo on sosik), 114 I51, 153, 176-77, 204, 300, 325N30,

No Mu-hyeon, 292, 312, 358n61, 360n79

362n8 Our Flower Garden (Uri kkotdongsan), dance), 127 Our New Generation, 55

nong-ak (Korean farmers’ music and 225

North Korea, actors status in, 51-53; capital of, see Pyongyang; Confucian Pacific Asia ‘Travel Association (PATA),

tradition of, 4, 6, 10-11, 138, 160, see 264 also Confucianism; conditions of Park, Hye-ok, 54 women in, 9-10, 206, 208-11, 238, Park, Jeong-hui, 326n4o see also gender; economic policy, Park, Seol-hwa, 289 1og—11; educational institutions of Park, ‘Tae-yeong, 56 arts, 35-38; film production, 20-25, people’s actor (inmin baeu), 37, 51-52 28-34, 39-41, 60-62, 83; leaders of, People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 57,

see Kim I]-sung, Kim Jong- il; 341N24, 345n39 mythification of the state, 83; nuclear PRC (People’s Republic of China), 28,

crisis, I, 3, 163, 278, 357N41; patri- 30, 56, 138-39, 141, 162, 165, arch of, 145-46, 149, 154, 157; pro- 168-69, 171-72; arts, 168; Cultural paganda exercises in, 3, 12, 17, 73, Revolution, 192; cultures of, 141, 170, 172, see also propaganda; publi- 162, 228-29, 302; foundation of, 135; cations on arts, 25-26; regime estab- gender issue, 217-18; land reforms,

384 + Index

PRC (People’s Republic of China) canonizing, 89; capital of Goguryeo,

(continued ) 95; central square in, 1, 3, 59, 103; 172; leadership of, 108; model the- citizens, 158, 161, 309; cityscape of, ater works, 171, 174, 224, 243, 295, 126-27, 186, 252; countryside and,

298, 301; politics of, 169; propa- 236; courtesan, 214; documentaries ganda, 149; friendship with North about, 87; during the Korean War, Korea, 179-83; troupes, 26; worker- 34, 91, 93, 95-96; fashion exhibition peasant-soldier trinity in, 168-69 in, 256; Film Archive in, 20; film in-

Pepper, Suzanne, 167 dustry in, 33, 51, 87; film laboratory Petrov, Leonid, 266 in, 33; film making circles in, 33; Phelan, Peggy, 262 Gangdong district of, 69; in Girl from Postlewait, ‘Thomas, 14, 337n81 Pyongyang, 124-26; in New GeneraPrincess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongji), 61, tion, 121-23; in revolutionary operas,

211-13 89, 91; in stage and screen, 85, 257;

Producers, The (1968), 296 in Urban Girls Come to Get Married,

propaganda, 3, 11-12, 14, 18, 22-23, 123-24; Joseon Film Studio in, 51; 2528-20, 3 y41,°7 75 105510751325 Kim Il-sung and, 103, 106-7, 150, 154, 167, 185, 187, 194, 198, 115-16, 160, 162; Kim Jong-il’s 215. 265,.270,. 291, 203; 300; 311, office in, 19; Mansudae, 86; May Day 315; art, 11, 172; bureau, 46, 109, Stadium in, 277; mural in, 24, 129; 172, 233, 243; communist, 268; New York Philharmonic in, 312; pacounter, 19, 301, 307-8; film, 29-30, rades in, 2, 104; reconstruction of, 35-36, 57, 185, 190, 224, 311; ma- 96-97; Revolutionary Martyrs chine/machinery, 307, 309; North Cemetery in, 184; scenographic renKorean, 12-13, 17-19, 73, 99, 105-6, dering of, 91; Sin Film Studio in, 39; LEE) EIO.T 72,902,200 -2, 012202, Seungho District Riheon Collective 275, 299; Official, 112, 301, 305-7; Farm, 55; theater and film producperformances, 6, 9, II, 12, 15, 18, tion about, 87-88, 91-92; tourism, 99, 105-6, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 266,290,297, 201, 315; tirban; 107, 157, 172-77, 182-83, 185, 188-92, 111; USS Pueblo, 198; view of, 86, 194-97, I9Q, 210-II, 217, 220, 222, 253 224, 302, 306; productions, 142-43, Pyongyang Central ‘I'V Network, 122 148-49, 154, 185, 187, 192, 205,224 Pyongyang Grand Theater, 97, 98, 99, (producers), 238, 295-96; psycholog- 100, IOI, 253 ical, 199; slogan, 60; strategy/strate- Pyongyang High School of ‘Transporta-

gists, 43, 306; techniques, 300; ver- tion, 51 bal, 260; visual, 109, 139, 179 Pyongyang Institute of Art, 35 Propaganda Bureau of the Korean Pyongyang Institute of Cinema (PIC), Workers’ Party Central Committee, 36-37

33 Pyongyang Institute of Music and

Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 223 Dance, 35, 52

Putin, Vladimir, 164, 332n82 Pyongyang Institute of Performing Pyonpyalig, 17,2460, 62,977.05, 37, Arts, 36 88-90, 94-95, 97, 99, 104, 113, 119, | Pyongyang Institute of Theater and 131, 143, 158, 182-83, 201, 244, 265, Cinema (PITC), 36 272, 293; as a showcase, 104—5; as Pyongyang International Cinema

the socialist utopia, 87, 90, 96, 252; House, 311

Index + 385 Pyongyang International Film Festival | Samyji, Lake, 77-78, 82, 84

(PIFF), 309, 310 Schechner, Richard, 16

Pyongyang Railroad Department, 51 Schmid, Andre, 132, 347n69 Pyongyang Rises (Pyongyang-eun ire- School Girls Diary, The, 315-17

oseonda), 87 Sea of Blood (Pibada, premiered in 1971),

Pyongyang under Reconstruction (Bokgu- 24, 36-37, 99, 101-2, 116, 146, 150,

doeneun Pyongyang-si), 87 190, 204-5, 210, 215-16, 221-23, 200; 317, 225130, 326n33

Ra, Seong-deok, 121 Secret Envoy Who Never Returned

Ranger, lerence, 188 (1983), 51

Reconstruction of Pyongyang (painting), Seong Chun-hyang (1961), 217

97,98 Seoul, 35521 9,201,320, 325031,

Red Agitator (Bulgeun seondongja, 1970), 335N49, 355N20, 355n25, 356n29,

Fc. FEO 358n59; Olympics, 358n53; premier

Red Army, 33, 35, 173, 208, 343n7 of Yoduk Story in, 293 Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Ni- Seoul ‘Train (2004), 274-75

angzi Fun), 301, 350N37, 361n81 shimpa, 48-49, 295, 298-300, 360n74,

Renmun ribao (People’s Daily), 179, 360n76

341n24 shingeki, 48

Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetry Sin, Go-seong, 82 (hyeongmyeong yeolsareung), 183, 184, Sin, Sang-ok, 19-22, 28-32, 34-35,

185, 189 38-40, 51, 56, 217-18, 226, 255

revolutionary opera (Ayeongmyeong sinyeoseong (New Women), 231

gageuk), 13-14, 28, 36-38, 42, 47, Sleeth, Lisa, 275 51-52, 61, 87-91, 99, 102, 116, 134, Smith, Michelle Mills, 33 141-42, 145, 148-50, 153, 155, 157, Snow Is Falling (Nun-i naerinda), 249,

168-71, 173-74, 176, 181, 185-86, 250; DST 189-90, 197-99, 205, 209-10, 215-17, Snow Peak Mountain (Seolbongsan), 168 221-24, 236, 243, 245, 295, 297-301 socialism, socialists, 4, 6, 9, 117, 169,

Ri, Jeong-u, 124, 126 205, 208, 252, 265; clothing norms

Ri, Sang-tae, 139 for, 232; in slogans, 127; in the play

Ri, Sin-ja, 55 or film, 125, 151; modernization

Rim, Chun-yeong (actor), 36, 51-52 through, 323n9; nationalistic, 215; of Rim Kkeok-jeong (1993), 61, 67, 70, 316, North Korea, 4, 6, 11

s29n7 Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Strug89, 155, 314 naseotda, 1959), 195, 360N75

Rodong Sinmun (Korean Workers Daily), gle, The (Adeul-do tujaeng-ui gil-e Runaway (Talchulgi) (film), 39, 328n71 Song of Geumgang Mountain, The

Russia, Russian, 11, 80, 133, 162-s, (Geumgangsanui norae, premiered in 167, 172, 266, 279, 323N3, 329n25, 1973), 52, 87, 90, 148, 150-51, 153,

332n82, 335nI5 156-57, 236, 325n30

Ryu, Chi-jin, 207 Son of Earth, The, 55

Ryu, Gwan-sun, 206 Sontag, Susan, 42, 326n34

Ryu, Jong-dae, 213 POUCH KOres, 263.6, 2 1 25507. 120, 131, 154, 167, 169, 175, 199, 202-3,

Said, Edward, 8-9 228, 260, 264, 266-68, 276-77, Salt (Sogeum), 30 291-94, 298, 303, 312, 324NIO,

386 «+ Index

South Korea (continued) They Fought and Achieved Victory 326n40, 335N50, 356n29, 356n32, (Geudeul-eun ssawo seungnibaetda, 358n59, 358-Sgnn61-62, 362nn8-9; 1959), 195, 360N75

government, 276, 292, 34532, Three Members, One Party (revolution-

34.7n66 ary play), 38

South Korean film industry, 29 Timerman, Daniel, 106 Soviet Union, 2-4, 20, 23, 50, 78, 110, tourism, 19, 261-65, 270, 275, 277, 171, 178, 223, 228, 266; relationships 282, 292, 321, 354n2; industry, 321; with China, 3; collapse of, 3-4, 203; project, 309, 313; state- sponsored,

de-Stalinization campaign in, 27-28; 263; urban, 264 film, 33-34; Kim Il-sung and, 2,135, Traces of Life (1989), 120-21, 123,

164; influences on North Korea, 2, 4, 125 58, 141-42, 172, 177-78, 182-83, Trip to the Moon (1903), 44

208; Stalinist regime, 11, 104 True Daughter of the Party (Dang-ui Special Envoy Who Never Returned (Do- chamdoen ttal, premiered in 1971), 87, raoji anneun milsa, 1984), 30, 333015 QT, 93, 103, 152-53, 155, 174-75,

Springer, Chris, 59, 183 185, 189, I9I—-92, 197, 199, 201, 210, Springtime for Hitler, 296, 307 216,221; 243; 245, 250;25 5.325030, Sseokeulwon, 111-12, 178, 180 326n33, 335n44, 33gnI12

Stacey, Judith, 4-5 Turner, Victor, 105-6 Stalin, Joseph: death of, 111; de-Stalin-

ization, 27-28, 329n8; dictum, 51; U, Rim-ho, 113 idolization of, 34, 329n8; Politburo, United Nations (UN), 95, 345n32, 277; Stalinism, 135; Stalinist build- 354n3 ing, 1; Stalinist film, 266; Stalinist Urban Girls Come to Get Married (Dosi political art, 338n101; Stalinist So- cheonyeo sijibwayo, 1993), 123-24,

viet Union, 104, 337n8o; Stalinist 257 theme park, 265; Stalinist vintage, 11 U.S. (United States), 15, 24, 198,

Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 46 293-94, 297, 317, 319-21, 335N49; Star of Foseon (1980-87), 29-30 army, 58; government, 104, 320; Ko-

Stockholm syndrome, 307 rean War, 198, 347n66; musicals, Story of Chun-hyang, The (Chun-hyang- 359n64; premier and tour of Yoduk

jeon, 1980), 61, 218, 225 Story 1n, 293-95, 297, 306, 358n58, Story of On-dal, The (1993), 60-61, 358—59nn62-63; relationship with

68—72 North Korea, 3, 279, 293, 362n9

Suh, Dae-Sook, 133-34, 182, 341n16, USSR, 35, 112, 341n15, 356n29. See

34.4n24 also Soviet Union

Sun Festival, The, 150, 161, 163, 215, utopia/utopian, 67, 72, 89, 149, 168,

221 193, 216, 295; agricultural and gas-

Szalontai, Balazs, rog, 338n97, tronomic, 127; antithesis of, 19;

338nn102-3 communist, 134; formula, 120; future/vision, 18, 47-49, 71, 87, 91, 93,

Taxton, Ralph, 173 277, 286, 288; ideals, 108, 112; illuTaylor, Diana, 304, 308 sion, 14; image, 18; imagination, Ten Years (10 nyeon), 168 88-89; in stage and screen, 14, 17,

theatricality, 14, 16, 277, 337n81; in 19, 260; nation, 221, 323ng; political,

North Korea, 14-16, 289, 321 50; rural, 126; socialist, go, 107, 143,

Index + 387

228, 250, 252, 283, 301; society, 59, Wigen, Karen, 4 64; urban, 92, 106, 123; version of, Williams, Raymond, tog

14, 88, 91 Wolves (Seungnyang-1), 198 World War II, 1-2, 6-7, 178, 194, 312, Van Zile, Judy, 220 330n28, 335n49 Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul), 195,

36075 Xinmin wanbao, 181

vaarod movement, 167

Volkan, Vamik, 194 yangbanxi (model theater works), 224, Vollertsen, Norbert, 271, 276, 355n24, 243, 350N37

356n27, 357N37 Yeon-ok (in True Daughter of the Party), 1525175185, 100, 191, 210,210; Walt Disney, 316 2a “Wang Pyeong and Mother” (“Wang Yoduk Story (Yodeok seutori), 19,

Pyeong-iwa eomeoni’), 180 293-302, 304-8, 358n58, 358n61, Water of Life Flows, The (Saengmyeongsu- 359n63, 359n67

neun beureunda, 1958), 113-14 Yun, Mi-ryang, 238, 352n48 Weber, Andrew Lloyd, 295

West Side Story, 297, 359n67 Van Zile, Judy, 220