It was easy to imagine Kim Jong Il, the brutal despot who fancied himself the Martin Scorsese of the East, holed up in a private screening room, perhaps perched on a telephone book, decked out in shades, giggling manically at “Airplane” or “The Naked Gun.”
By the time he died on Dec. 17, in the country he had built into the world’s largest stage set, Kim had established his reputation as the most easily lampooned filmgoer this side of Pee-wee Herman. His favorites were said to include “Godzilla,” “Rambo,” the James Bond series and porn, which he watched, according to the South Korean Yonhap News Agency, “to learn about the realities of capitalist states.”
Kim, perhaps best known to American movie audiences as the supervillain in 2004’s puppet movie “Team America,” carried out real-life, bizarre cinematic exploits, such as kidnapping an actress to star in a film he produced. Experts say his movie career hinted at an abiding inferiority complex — after all, this was the narcissistic dictator who insisted on going by the honorific Dear Leader.
“Who knows if he imagined himself to be Bruce Willis when he was giving instructions to his generals?” Michael Breen, author of “Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader,” told The Daily. “As for crafting his image for the North Korean audience, he knew he couldn’t gain the same place in public affection as his father, and so he tended to keep out of the limelight.”
Instead, Kim spoke through film. The broad outlines of his scholarship are well-documented, at least by the standards of his enigmatic life. After graduating in 1964 from the university named for his father, he started his career as an official in the Korean Workers’ Party Propaganda Department. He signed his name to voluminous works of criticism — including the definitive guide to communist filmmaking, 1973’s “On the Art of the Cinema” — and he put his studies to use.
“There is considerable overlap between the skill set required for the film business and the skill set required to rule North Korea,” said Andrew Scobell, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. “North Korea is really one giant Potemkin village.”
Kim’s productions were smash hits from the get-go, or at least they were according to reviews in the state-controlled North Korean media, such as one 1992 editorial called “Let Us Effectively Conduct Indoctrination Work to Have the People Learn Deeply the Greatness of the Leader.”
On the set, Kim enforced surreal standards of reverence, according to Suk- Young Kim, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has extensively studied his film career. Producing an epic series on his family history, for example, Kim made sure that actors portraying members of the ruling dynasty were treated like royalty.
Even the hot-tempered director Ang Il Sung “would always address these actors playing their leaders as ‘Dear Leader, would you please take a rest for a moment,’ ” Suk-Young Kim said in a lecture at the Library of Congress.
In his most notorious move as a film producer — kidnapping a South Korean actress in 1978, when his dad was dictator — Kim Jong Il secured his reputation for startling audacity. But the actress, Choi Eun-hee, told a different story, according to analysts.
“He used this line worthy of a Peter Lorre character: ‘Well, Madam Choi, what do you think of my physique?’ ” according to Jerrold Post, a former CIA profiler who teaches political psychology at George Washington University. “He’s always been concerned about his physique, which in some ways makes all the more interesting his fascination with these strong macho figures in the movies.”
The actress herself documented fascinating evidence of the dictator’s mindset, sneaking a tape recorder in her handbag, according to Suk-Young Kim.
By her account, the Dear Leader told his enslaved actress, “You know, 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 else, since they are all enemy states.”
He concluded, “I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.”
By the time he died on Dec. 17, in the country he had built into the world’s largest stage set, Kim had established his reputation as the most easily lampooned filmgoer this side of Pee-wee Herman. His favorites were said to include “Godzilla,” “Rambo,” the James Bond series and porn, which he watched, according to the South Korean Yonhap News Agency, “to learn about the realities of capitalist states.”
Kim, perhaps best known to American movie audiences as the supervillain in 2004’s puppet movie “Team America,” carried out real-life, bizarre cinematic exploits, such as kidnapping an actress to star in a film he produced. Experts say his movie career hinted at an abiding inferiority complex — after all, this was the narcissistic dictator who insisted on going by the honorific Dear Leader.
“Who knows if he imagined himself to be Bruce Willis when he was giving instructions to his generals?” Michael Breen, author of “Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader,” told The Daily. “As for crafting his image for the North Korean audience, he knew he couldn’t gain the same place in public affection as his father, and so he tended to keep out of the limelight.”
Instead, Kim spoke through film. The broad outlines of his scholarship are well-documented, at least by the standards of his enigmatic life. After graduating in 1964 from the university named for his father, he started his career as an official in the Korean Workers’ Party Propaganda Department. He signed his name to voluminous works of criticism — including the definitive guide to communist filmmaking, 1973’s “On the Art of the Cinema” — and he put his studies to use.
“There is considerable overlap between the skill set required for the film business and the skill set required to rule North Korea,” said Andrew Scobell, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. “North Korea is really one giant Potemkin village.”
Kim’s productions were smash hits from the get-go, or at least they were according to reviews in the state-controlled North Korean media, such as one 1992 editorial called “Let Us Effectively Conduct Indoctrination Work to Have the People Learn Deeply the Greatness of the Leader.”
On the set, Kim enforced surreal standards of reverence, according to Suk- Young Kim, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has extensively studied his film career. Producing an epic series on his family history, for example, Kim made sure that actors portraying members of the ruling dynasty were treated like royalty.
Even the hot-tempered director Ang Il Sung “would always address these actors playing their leaders as ‘Dear Leader, would you please take a rest for a moment,’ ” Suk-Young Kim said in a lecture at the Library of Congress.
In his most notorious move as a film producer — kidnapping a South Korean actress in 1978, when his dad was dictator — Kim Jong Il secured his reputation for startling audacity. But the actress, Choi Eun-hee, told a different story, according to analysts.
“He used this line worthy of a Peter Lorre character: ‘Well, Madam Choi, what do you think of my physique?’ ” according to Jerrold Post, a former CIA profiler who teaches political psychology at George Washington University. “He’s always been concerned about his physique, which in some ways makes all the more interesting his fascination with these strong macho figures in the movies.”
The actress herself documented fascinating evidence of the dictator’s mindset, sneaking a tape recorder in her handbag, according to Suk-Young Kim.
By her account, the Dear Leader told his enslaved actress, “You know, 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 else, since they are all enemy states.”
He concluded, “I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.”
