“He who says something is impossible is not speaking Korean”
—Kim Jong Il

Throughout the twentieth century, certain filmmakers explored the relationship between visuality and language. One such person was North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who elaborated his father’s theories of communist governance and society, known as Juche, to literature and cinema.

Jim Finn inserts excerpts from Juche writings (“Let Us Create More Revolutionary Films Based on Socialist Life” and such) into a droll mockumentary about a South Korean artist living on a commune in North Korea, teaching ESL (“English as a Socialist Language”) and making her own cinema according to Juche precepts. Finn’s film is a delightful analogism and a micro-museum of ‘Kimilsungisms’ aptly titled The Juche Idea.

From Finn’s synopsis: In the late 1960’s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and  authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st century. Inspired by the real-life story of the South Korean director kidnapped in the 70’s to invigorate the North Korean film industry, the film follows Yoon Jung Lee, a young video artist invited to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm. The story is told through the films she made at the residency as well as interviews with a Bulgarian filmmaker and even a brief sci-fi movie.

[Update: Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a theatrical run of Juche Idea May 27-June 2, 2010, along with a retrospective of Finn's work. Juche Idea is also discussed in this New York Times feature on Kim Il Sung as cinema mogul.]

An effect of weaving the mockumentary and excerpts from North Korean film and television is that some of the archival footage appears more absurd than the fictional doc scenes. Was the structure of the film originally intended to be like that? Was it improvised during production? Or was it a mad political science experiment in post?

Originally, I was going to create my own Juche-style film made in a fictional Juche art colony in the US. That artist colony got transferred to North Korea. Another thought was the sci-fi film and that got folded into the narrative of the art colony-Juche studio. I have always modeled my films on a studio model. I started out making experimental short films in my kitchen and bathroom with my pets among other things. I had so much found footage from North Korea and I really wanted to use it, so I came up with the idea of a political artist allowed in to their archives and allowed to re-edit and punch up the propaganda a bit.

The English as a Socialist Language part was natural since I taught English as a second language and citizenship classes for years in the Mexican  neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. I just wanted to radicalize it since so many lessons are based on becoming part of the American system.

I know the basic structure going in. The trick in post-production is tightening it up, cutting scenes, moving them around and going back and adding scenes. The dialogue scene in the editing room, for example, I wrote but never filmed. And when we looked at the rough cut, we realized that something was missing, which was that Yoon Jung was never established as a video artist. So we shot that scene in one weekend frantically before a festival deadline.

In many scenes, the screen is split between subtitled old Juche film excerpts or text from Juche books. It was challenging to focus on everything on the screen at once. This reminds me that the matching of text with corresponding images was not always a formalized convention. Ideally, how would one ‘read’ these scenes?

Well, I wanted to give a Juche film lesson in the film. I wrote a monologue sketching out an explication of Juche film using Kim Jong Il’s theories. Which are really an adaptation of socialist realism for Korea in the 1960’s.

But then parts of the film were so talky, and I realized that there were direct quotes from his book On the Art of the Cinema that had obviously been read and applied to the films. This is why he gets credit for directing and producing so many movies. He’s in there somewhere all the time.

I think first-time viewers mostly ignore the text on the left since the film clips are pretty engaging and the 16mm titles are kind of hard to read, but some of it sinks in, and I think it adds weight to what could be a light film.

The Juche Idea (clip) from jimfinn on Vimeo.

So the film was not only informed by the Juche ideology but also to an extent, intended to be a Juche film itself. I know that film language was an important part of the Juche theory. Subjects in your film have their hysterical encounters with language, and the film itself experiments with conventional forms of presentation. Were you making an intentional semiotic investigation of filmmaking?

I think all of the three feature films I’ve made are to one degree or another about the process of art making, as well as ideological studies. Though, studies is really too dry a word. I am making these experimental comedies to a certain degree. One of the things that really appealed to me about Juche film was that they make really cheap films very fast with pretty good acting and with a correct ideological understanding. I feel that that’s what I’m doing. My idea of correct politics might not fit exactly with theirs but I can relate to their chollima speed campaign.

Do you feel that films are necessarily a political endeavor, whether conscious or not? People tend to characterize your work as being political satire. How do you feel about that?

I wanted to create an art movement that would point back at our political system, as well. I also think there is a real nostalgia for something that never really existed, which is an open political system that supported leftist artists. It existed in moments, maybe in Mexico or Russia right after the revolutions, but they were always used to prop up some internal political system as well.

I understand that I am not making work in a vacuum. My work is not easily classifiable, so people try to fit it into a category so they can program it or persuade people to see it. It’s part of our capitalist system. There is such a strong tradition of irony and satire in literature and film and I’m happy to be part of that. Mark Twain is from my home state. And Jonathan Swift was Irish, like part of me. As far as film being political, hell yes. It is so complicated and expensive and time-consuming to make movies that people often make deals with the devil to get the thing done.

How did you get your hands on so much archival footage?

I found a North Korean bookstore online. I ordered DVD’s and books and comics. So much stuff! I had a grant from the Hallwalls Artist in Residency Project in Buffalo, so I could afford to get what I wanted. And I just read tons of stuff. I used the library to get a lot of political background on North Korea as well.

Did you get hooked up to go to North Korea as well? The information is presented with an incredible authenticity, and anyone who has lived in a socialist country who has seen the film has been delighted by it.

I did look into going to North Korea. The problem is that even if you get in, everyone goes to the same areas. I haven’t ever been to a communist country, though I did have members of the Shining Path come to all my screenings of my movie about their group in Buenos Aires. And I had lunch with them. It was pretty intense.

They said the things I got wrong were not “errors” but “limitations” of being a low-budget filmmaker far away from Peru. They felt that I was a filmmaker of the left making my own interpretation. I’m not sure I’d get such a generous thought from the North Koreans. But I think that it is reductive to think that I am merely satirizing the North Korean system. The irony points right back at us.

I read your article on film festivals. What role do film fests play in your personal and professional life?

I have mixed feelings on them. I think they can be exploitative of filmmakers by charging fees and not paying for films. But the good ones that are able to put together strong and diverse programs that are smart and take chances are really great. For films like mine, good festivals are opportunities for me to get exposure and reach an audience that would be hard to reach with a small venue or a film tour, which I’ve gone on. Because I’ve made three back-to-back-to-back feature films, I feel like I’ve been on the festival circuit on and off for three years now.

With smaller festivals, there is no chance of making money so they have to push for quality and taking chances. The bigger festivals can be taken over by these horrible people trolling around like the National Review cruise ship visiting the Alaska governor a couple years ago.

Wait, one more question…gerbils! Why?! They seem to be a preferred motif in your other features as well. Cheeky metonymy for Social Darwinism? Or just cheekiness?

I made a film in 2002 called Wüstenspringmaus, which is a short history of the gerbil and capitalism. Then the guinea pig showed up in Interkosmos (71 min, 2006) as the international youth symbol of communism due to its gentle peaceful nature and its tendency to move in groups. I like to radicalize animals and sports and all these seemingly innocuous apolitical things in the world. They’re already loaded up with ideas of, as you say, Social Darwinism, or healthy competition. Plus, I really miss the Olympics from the ’70s and ’80s where the most badass luge team was East Germany.