The Juche Idea

Review of the film, The Juche Idea directed by Jim Finn

As we all know Kim Jong-Il recently died and like many dictators and strong men of the past he used cinema to create a false truth. The film, The Juche Idea, directed by Jim Finn explores this concept of creating a false reality through the use of film. As Finn explains in graphics (appropriately using a red background) that are injected throughout this documentary, Juche is an ideology developed by North Korea’s first Communist leader Kim Il-sung, and later embraced by Kim Jong-Il that promotes a cult of personality. It uses the concept of self-reliance as a centerpiece for a doctrine that ironically demands total homage of the populace to the will of their leader. Juche thought stressed political independence, economic self-support and military self-reliance. This doctrine was also extended and applied to film theory and claimed that cinema should reflect the idea of self-reliance in a communist-way.

The film centers around a South Korean artist named Lee Jung Yoon who the director hints was kidnapped to make films to promote Kim and the Communist party using Juche cinematic theory. While she works at a Juche farm as an artist in residency, Yoon is interviewed by a Russian journalist, named Daniela Kostova, who tries to steer Yoon’s work to make it more in line with Juche thought as Yoon struggles to update Juche cinema. As I mentioned before within the film, we consistently see excerpts of Kim’s writings strewn throughout the film to remind us what is Juche thought and it is hilarious when it is place alongside clips of 1950’s North Korean films like On The Railway and Urban Girl Comes to Get Married. Finn also includes newsreel footage of Kim overseeing his people in parades and well-choreographed dance sequences that are reminiscent of propaganda films made for Hitler’s regimes. There is also an audio from a Voice of America biography of Ronald Reagan as cheesy and embellished as their North Korean counterparts. My favorite clips are the ones with a Russian visitor named Oleg Mavromatti who is in North Korea learning about how remarkable North Korea is under Kim Jong-Il from a North Korean man named Kim Sung. These segments are so awkwardly bad they are good. The final segment is a parody of a sci-fi movie where there is a struggle between East and West, between Marxist-Leninist ideology (embodied by Yoon) and Imperialism/Capitalism ideology (embodied by Finn, the director) that carries a Communist message. In the sci-fi film the female character saves the day by taking a poison, which she argues is intended to be used against her people. It ends with a cartoonish view of the universe and a song that celebrates the triumph of North Korea. In the song, Juche ideas are like an exploding star, the communist party is like dark matter binding the people together and Kim Jong-Il is likened to Mars, which in a night sky looks like a red star.

This film is not easy to watch and the viewer must be on his/her toes throughout the film. It is in constant flux with shifting points of view. It takes time to make sense of what is going and what it is ultimately trying to say. The film puts the viewer in a state of uncertainty and manipulates him/her just like a good propaganda piece would normally do. The director pokes fun at his audience, at Kim Jong-Il, at the idea of propaganda and the pretensions that artist have in promoting whatever ideology they believe in.
edited by mcovarrubias on 12/24/2011
edited by mcovarrubias on 12/24/2011