Jong II's keen interest in cinema is being revisited following his death, as a Vienna cinema offered a special screening of a monster film that the dictator produced, and a British producer plans to tell the adventurous story of how it was made. On Thursday, the Gartenbau cinema showed the horror film Pulgasari, a 1985 North Korean propaganda production modelled on Godzilla, made by the man who ended up ruling his country with an iron fist.
"The whole story of how it was made sounds like a movie script," said Norman Shetler, manager of the Gartenbau. Jeremy Thomas, the British producer of Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor, is working on a silver-screen adaptation of the tale - which includes a kidnapping, a prison camp and a spectacular escape - his production firm announced. Long before Kim Jong II took over from his father Kim II Sung in 1994, he tried his hand at filmmaking.
Owning a collection of more than 15,000 movies, he was especially interested in Hollywood divas like Elizabeth Taylor, in James Bond adventures and in the horror genre. He also had ambitious plans to develop his country's film industry, but he found native North Korean directors lacking in innovation. Therefore, he ordered the abduction of successful South Korean director Shin Sang Ok and his ex-wife, the actress Choi Eun Hee, in the late 1970s. It took several years, which Shin partly spent in prison in the North, until the dictator's son ordered the couple to work on productions.
Seven films were made. Pulgasari, a metaphorical tale of revolution, was one of them, and was supposed to establish North Korea on the international cinematic landscape. However, these plans were cut short when the South Korean artists used a trip to Budapest in 1986 to drive to neighbouring Austria and seek the protection of the US embassy in Vienna, as they told reporters after their flight.
The couple's importance for the young Kim can be measured by a press release issued by the North Korean embassy at the time, urging Shin and Choi to meet Pyongyang's diplomats one more time to settle money issues. Following this incident, the Stalinist regime did not promote Pulgasari. However, it was shown in Japan in the late 1990s and was released on video, becoming a curiosity item among cineasts.
Cinema operator Shetler said his screening of Pulgasari was not intended to honour Kim. "For me, this is an unusual, bizarre footnote of film history," he said. "Someone sat in his ivory tower and was so removed from reality that he thought he could change something with this film."
"It has its qualities as a trash film, but parts of it are also terribly boring," he said. From today's perspective, Pulgasari's plot sounds less like revolutionary propaganda than an eery symbol of North Korea's focus on military armament and its lack of food.
Based on a Korean folk legend, it tells the tale of farmers who rebel against a cruel king, who orders that all tools be forged into weapons. The rebellious village smith lands in prison, where he makes Pulgasari, a little figure formed from rice which comes alive.
Pulgasari turns into a giant monster that fights alongside the farmers but ends up turning against them. "It was a spectacle for commercial use abroad," said Roland Domenig, a specialist in East Asian films at Vienna University. He said the production pointed to North Korea's partial opening to the outside world in the mid-1980's. The man playing Pulgasari was the same Japanese actor who had embodied Godzilla. "They bought Japanese know-how to achieve international success," Domenig said.
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