292 Book Reviews

Paul Fischer A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power. (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015). 367 pp. $17.99 paper. $27.99 cloth.

North Korea is known for many things that we are not supposed to know. It runs a dangerous military program that can jeopardize the balance of power in East Asia. The bulk of its citizens suffer from extreme poverty. The govern- ment tortures and kills dissenters in prison camps. And the list does not come close to ending there. Yet in this age of Facebook, Google Earth, and advanced gps technology, much of the “real” North Korea, for most of us, still remains a mystery. In news programs, movies, and video games, the “fatherly state” has been the subject of endless caricature and ridicule. Interested observers remain ignorant of the complex state of affairs that exists above the demili- tarized zone. A Kim Jong-Il Production is one of the newest attempts to demystify North Korean behavior. To understand the state’s attempts at propaganda and cultur- al indoctrination, it turns to the famous kidnapping of actress Choi Eun-Hee and director Shin Sang-Ok. Relying on scholarly accounts, journalistic reports, personal memoirs, and oral interviews, Paul Fischer explores the fascinating life story of the filmmaking duo from their prime years in to the decade they were forced to spend under Kim Jong-Il between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s. Readers learn a lot about North Korea itself as a “theater state” (p. 311) under the micromanagement of an image-obsessed leader. Fischer shows that the lives of the book’s three protagonists—Choi, Shin, and Kim—converged in unexpected ways. Choi, who became a leading actress in South Korea when cinema was peaking at its “golden age,” experienced a difficult early life. She ran away from home at age seventeen, married a violent man before divorcing him, and was raped by a South Korean soldier during the Korean War. Shin, by contrast, was raised in a comfortably affluent family and studied art in Tokyo until the end of World War ii. The two met shortly after Shin started his filmmaking career, and then quickly fell in love. Shin went on to direct a handful of films that starred Choi, such as A College Woman’s Con- fession and The Tale of Chunhyang. As the two filmmakers rose in the ranks of the industry, they became the “most glamorous couple” (p. 28) in South Korea. The success of Shin and Choi drew the attention of Kim Jong-Il. An “erratic and undisciplined” man with “rich tastes and unreasonable appetites” (p. 47), the son of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung took the lead in developing cultur- al propaganda for the North Korean state. Movies mesmerized him and his ob- sessions with them led by 1968 to Kim’s taking complete control of the nation’s

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Book Reviews 293 filmmaking apparatus. He elucidated his philosophy on filmmaking in On the Art of the Cinema, a tract based on speeches he delivered to directors and crew members. Determined to elevate the quality and international profile of North Korean cinema, Kim commenced with the abduction of Choi and Shin in 1978. Fischer makes it clear that the fate of Choi and Shin, during their early years in North Korea, was a tale of two cities. As a captive, Choi received shockingly generous treatment. Kim “invited” her to lavish parties, gave personal tours of his film studio, and offered expensive gifts. She even became, according to the author, “the only person to whom Kim Jong-Il would genuinely listen” (p. 119). By contrast, Shin, perhaps because he was a rebellious man, did not gain the “honor” of meeting Kim. He suffered torture and punishment after repeated attempts at escape. Yet once the couple reunited, Shin impressed the North Korean leader with his direction of such films as Emissary of No Return, Salt, and Pulgasari: The Iron-Eater. Just when Kim appeared to relax his control a bit, Choi and Shin defected to the West in 1986. The years that followed witnessed a continuation of North Korean filmmaking, but its momentum would decline, together with nation’s economy, infrastructure, and Kim’s health. Much of what one reads in A Kim Jong-Il Production is dramatic, unpredict- able, and outright bizarre. Dealing with a case study that may well have been an episode straight out of a movie, Fischer, a filmmaker himself, builds the drama effectively and tells the story in highly readable form. In recent years, books such as Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010), B. R. Meyers’s The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Them- selves (2012), and Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (2013) have usefully probed into the politics, culture, and ­psychology of the self-isolated state. A Kim Jong-Il Production is a welcome ad- dition to this growing literature, as it not only imparts insight on North Korean cinema and propaganda, but also draws attention to Pyongyang’s abduction of foreigners—an international problem receiving little attention outside East Asia. Yet there is something unfulfilling about the book. Part of the problem stems from Fischer’s tendency to turn to “Asian” clichés (pp. 264, 278). The author also claims that the Japanese government made it a “policy goal” (p. 70) to support cinema after World War ii to improve the standing of the nation, even though the state’s efforts to boost filmmaking in Japan have been disap- pointingly small. A bigger issue concerns sources. Even though Fischer clear- ly has conducted an abundance of research, A Kim Jong-Il Production, in the absence of official North Korean documents, does not elucidate convincingly the agendas and perspectives of the self-isolated state. Its brief endnotes may contribute to the book’s accessibility to a wider audience, but will keep many journal of american-east asian relations 23 (2016) 283-294