Korean kitsch
A revolutionary look at the role of the propaganda film
BY COLIN DABKOWSKI
News Arts Writer
Updated: 05/09/08 6:33 AM
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- “The Juche Idea,” a riveting, faux-documentary look into modern North Korean propaganda films, is the latest project from Hallwalls’ artist-in-residence Jim Finn.
Communist propaganda films, to those of us viewing them from afar, can often appear comically harmless. Shots of farmers harvesting wheat in Stalinist Russia while singing about the fatherland don’t hold the same kind of frightening connotations they might have 50 years ago.
But in Jim Finn’s “The Juche Idea,” a riveting, faux-documentary look into modern North Korean propaganda films, the spine-tingling absurdism of socialist dogma is alive and well.
Previous projects by Finn, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center’s artist in residence, include a science-fiction feature film about a fictional East German space program (“Interkosmos” from 2006) and 2007’s “La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo.” He has been focusing his talents on the “revolutionary art” movements of socialist-leaning countries and how they relate to the way we make art at home.
“The Juche Idea” takes its name from the guiding philosophy of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il, himself a film director and theoretician who wrote a series of frightening tenets on the task of art in a socialist, isolationist country like his own. Under the philosophy of juche (CHOO-CHAY), all art is intended for the promotion of the peculiar brand of outmoded Marxist-Stalinist philosophy that North Korea alone still embraces. It is, in other words, propaganda in the truest sense.
Finn’s film relies heavily on quotes from the North Korean dictator, which in themselves reveal a kind of twisted logic that would be impossible to fabricate. Take this chestnut, for instance: “To effectively embody the hateful enemy, the actor requires an ardent love of his class and people and a burning hostility toward the enemy. If he cannot gaze into the enemy’s eyes with a feeling of burning hatred, he will not feel their brutality in his bones, and will forget their crimes.”
The film consists of interviews with a fictional filmmaker named Yoon Jung Lee, who is creating elaborate propaganda films while working on a North Korean farm. The films she creates (which Finn himself has actually spliced together using footage from actual North Korean films he bought on eBay) glorify the North Korean dictator, whom citizens refer to as their “Dear Leader.” They also waste no time launching insults and accusations at American-style capitalism, which is described variously and hilariously as a “wet slug to be suffocated in eggshells and beer” and a group of “blind monkeys in a pond.”
These are scattered among a series of instructional English lessons called “English as a Socialist Language,” meant to get at the idea of North Korea’s international ambitions, and an excerpt of two North Korean films that embody Kim’s absurd list of requirements for proper character development.
In a particularly revealing scene, a Bulgarian filmmaker, also working on the fictional art residency with Yoon, critiques Yoon’s films as too grandiose and tongue-in-cheek. To that, Yoon responds: “Artists in capitalist countries . . . speak to a tiny elite who are open to artistic impulses. But in this country, you have to speak to the worker.”
Finn, careful not to step too far into the realm of parody, has created an incisive video collage that ends up being self-critical as much as satirical. And that’s reason enough to get out to Hallwalls and spend an hour in a vastly different world.•
REVIEW
WHAT: “The Juche Idea” WHEN: Screens at 8 p. m. Thursday
WHERE: Hallwalls
Contemporary Arts Center, 341 Delaware Ave. TICKETS: $4 to $7 INFO: 854-1694 or www.hallwalls.org
