KIM, Jong Il. The Cinema and Directing. Pyongyang, Korea: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Printed in Korea.. 1987. Thin 8vo. First export edition. Brown faux leather lettered in gilt to the front board. A fine copy. The gilt a trifle rubbed, with very minor marks to top edge only. Faint Korean chop to rear pastedown, else fine throughout.
A scarce physical example of this short treatise on cinema by the dictator and cinephile so-called. It perhaps shows us more about the Workers’ Party of Korea Kim Jong Il came to serve as General Secretary of, as opposed to offering up revolutionary nuances of the cinema industry, which is not necessarily a criticism, nor is surprising. Indeed, like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the rhetoric here is strictly centred on repetition—seemingly the most effective form of indoctrination—in which chapters and sentences and words are repeated again and again, slightly reworked but with the same principles and aims, monotonously so—don’t tell the State or the translator gets it, eh? This volume precedes the fuller On the Art of Cinema published in English two years later. Kim Jong Il’s apparent obsession with cinema—which includes many Western movies including James Bond films and Rambo—and the subsequent publications regarding it remain rare gateways into this secret land. Less than a decade prior to publication here, the country had, under the orders of Kim Jong Il, kidnapped South Korean film director Shun Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee and forced them to build a North Korean film industry. They were held captive for eight years before they escaped, having made several films under the ‘guidance’ of Kim Jong Il. Scarce.
KIM, Jong Il. The Cinema and Directing. Pyongyang, Korea: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Printed in Korea.. 1987. Thin 8vo. First export edition. Brown faux leather lettered in gilt to the front board. A fine copy. The gilt a trifle rubbed, with very minor marks to top edge only. Faint Korean chop to rear pastedown, else fine throughout.
A scarce physical example of this short treatise on cinema by the dictator and cinephile so-called. It perhaps shows us more about the Workers’ Party of Korea Kim Jong Il came to serve as General Secretary of, as opposed to offering up revolutionary nuances of the cinema industry, which is not necessarily a criticism, nor is surprising. Indeed, like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the rhetoric here is strictly centred on repetition—seemingly the most effective form of indoctrination—in which chapters and sentences and words are repeated again and again, slightly reworked but with the same principles and aims, monotonously so—don’t tell the State or the translator gets it, eh? This volume precedes the fuller On the Art of Cinema published in English two years later. Kim Jong Il’s apparent obsession with cinema—which includes many Western movies including James Bond films and Rambo—and the subsequent publications regarding it remain rare gateways into this secret land. Less than a decade prior to publication here, the country had, under the orders of Kim Jong Il, kidnapped South Korean film director Shun Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee and forced them to build a North Korean film industry. They were held captive for eight years before they escaped, having made several films under the ‘guidance’ of Kim Jong Il. Scarce.
