North Koreans at the movies: cinema of fits and starts and the rise of chameleon spectatorship

ABSTRACT

North Koreans are often assumed to be compliant recipients of all official propaganda produced by the state. Calling this assumption into question, the article examines two co-existing models of film spectatorship which began to develop in the DPRK in the wake of the Korean War (1950–1953) by historicizing North Korean audiences and their experiences at the movies during the 1950s and early 1960s. Although with Soviet help Pyongyang was able to rebuild its national film industry destroyed in large part by US aerial bombings during the war, the industry continued to struggle for another decade before it could fully resume its viability. At the same time, the government stepped up its efforts to educate the proletarian masses through the medium of cinema not only in the workers’ spare time, but also while at work. However, if workplace film programs were rarely a source of much trouble, the opposite was true of their neighborhood counterparts. The country’s dysfunctional postwar movie theaters emerged as the main sites of social mischief and mayhem practiced by unruly North Korean moviegoing publics. By looking closely at the material conditions of film production, distribution and exhibition in the early history of North Korea we can understand both the origins of social nonconformism in this society and the limits of efficacy we attribute to state propaganda on the public at large.

KEYWORDS:

• North Korean cinema
• film reception and audience studies
• social nonconformism
• audio-visual propaganda
• everyday history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dima Mironenko is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received his PhD in Modern Korean History with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University in 2014. His research encompasses modern Korean history, film and visual studies, and the study of gender and sexuality.

Notes

1 Full information, especially on earlier North Korean productions, including directors’ names and film release dates, is not always available from official North Korean sources. Wherever possible, I have included all the identifying information I was able to access while doing archival research for this project.

2 For more on the development of widescreen processes in the USA, see: Belton (1992).

3 Notably, while North Korean sources contain a report on the Romanian congress, no mention of such a meeting is found in the main Soviet film journal Iskusstvo Kino (‘The art of film’).

4 Miriam Hansen produced a seminal study on early American film spectatorship, in which she traces the origins of an alternative public sphere to the transformations in US film exhibition practices and the emergence of audiences as an active participant of the cinematic process within the context of the urban movie theater. For more parallels between Hansen’s study and the North Korean case, see the first three chapters (21–125) of her book: Hansen (1991).

5 I would like to thank Chad Norris for drawing my attention to this and stimulating me to further consider the implications of workplace film-viewing.

6 Although haesŏlja represents a discrete category from what film historians have referred to as a ‘film lecturer,’ there is also a good deal of overlap between these two roles, as well as their functions within the film exhibition process. While film lecturers are historically associated with an earlier period and, in a way, epitomize the heyday of silent cinema before the advent of talkies to the silver screen, North Korean film explainers, by contrast, arise out of a very different postwar need to patch up what sound technology has failed to deliver and in a manner which, in turn, imitates the very same technology gone AWOL. Unlike the historic lecturer, however, the North Korean explainer is extremely limited (at least, on paper) in what he or she can say and has always to work from a script (at least, in theory). The practice of employing film lecturers, however, was not completely discontinued even after the introduction of sound, and many places around the world – in particular, countries that imported most of its films, such as North Korea during the 1950s – carried on this tradition adapting it to their new needs. For more on film lecturers and their afterlife, see: Lacasse (2006). For the Korean counterpart of the silent period film lecturer – the byeonsa – prior to 1945, see: Maliangkay (2005).