Though winter encroaches, our hearts are warmed by an eternal spring!

[imomus]

Although wintry cold has begun chilling our bodies here in Berlin, our hearts are warm this week thanks to... well, thanks to the eternally-blossoming pink flowers and ever-smiling women's faces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea!



The Asian Women's Film Festival opens in Berlin tomorrow, and Hisae and I will be interleaving its offerings at the Arsenal cinema -- which include a whole section dedicated to classic North Korean films -- with the Tokio-Shibuya season going on at the HAU theatres in Kreuzberg. On several evenings in the course of the next week we'll be shuttling from one to the other, braving lashing wind and rain, but warmed in our hearts by films like The Flower Girl, based on an opera written by Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, himself.

Here's a song from the film:

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As I mentioned in my 7 lies about North Korea piece a couple of years back (a discussion of Christian Kracht and Eva Munz's "coffee table book" of photographs of the DPRK), Germany and Korea -- and specifically the former East Germany and North Korea -- have quite a bit in common. They share an immoderate love for flowers, for standardized folk costumes, and for tightly-choreographed, stirring, collectively-voiced, totally non-funky songs filmed on spectacular mountainsides.



The curator of the Asian Women's Film Festival, Sun-ju Choi, has also helped put together an exhibition currently showing at NGBK in Kreuzberg (and my favourite Berlin art gallery, as it happens, partly because it's an artists' collective). Shared.Divided.United points out more similarities between Germany and Korea: "The two countries were both front-line states in the Cold War – and are at the same time both marked by a history of division. The manifold migration routes between Korea and Germany were characterized by complex inter-relationships and trans-border, frontier-extending activities, which are here for the first time studied against the backdrop of the Cold War. Koreans went as guest workers from South Korea to West Germany (FRG), and as students and orphans from North Korea to East Germany (GDR); East Germans went to North Korea in the overall framework of ‘developmental aid solidarity’; South Koreans in West Germany went in turn to North Korea, and North Koreans in East Germany fled to West Germany."



Works by contemporary artists like Suntag Noh (responsible for the reappropriated North Korean crowd scenes seen here) are displayed alongside historical material at NGBK. There are lots of other Asian nations -- and women directors -- represented at the Asian Women's Film Festival (the film which kicks it off is actually Malaysian), but it's the North Korean films which I expect to enjoy the most, for their otherness, their beyond-the-paleness, their beauty and resolute positivity.

A Bellflower, for instance, hymns the importance of "loyalty, solidarity and commitment to the country" and contains "exhortations to put the common good above personal ambition... a recurrent theme of North Korean society guided by the “Juche” principle of self-reliance."

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Let's end with Let's Defend Socialism, a song "from the early 90s about the Korean people's resolve to defend socialism". According to YouTube user DPRKradio, "this song was released shortly after the betrayal of socialism in the former Soviet Union by the traitor Gorbachev."

Like the music, the comments beneath it are harmonious; refreshingly free of the usual OMFG WTF LOL kneejerk Web 2.0 cynicism, this video has inspired YouTube users the world over (but all on the same day) to lift their voices as one and proclaim: "The Democratic People´s Republic of Korea is raising the banner of socialism to new heights in the 21st century under the Songun leadership of KIM JONG IL" and "long live ALL OF THE PEOPLE OF DPRK, HER LEADER KIM JONG II, AND THE BEAUTIFUL VALUES, TRADITIONS  AND CELEBRATION OF LIFE, OF HER PEOPLE"!

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I would add that a hallmark of the double standard I am criticizing here is a focus on things that might happen, even while passing over things that objectively have happened. And so the OMG WTF Web 2.0 style is to ignore the fact that the US has invaded two nations this decade while the DPRK has invaded none, and to talk about the possibility that it might at some point shoot missiles at Japan. This possibility is to be entertained with the same urgency as the possibility that Europe might at some point be overrun by muslims. OMG WTF!

[(Anonymous)]

America invading Iraq is like a dog licking its balls. It does it because it can. What country could North Korea invade without condemning itself to instant annihilation? What the regime can do is brutalise its own people, with a proportion of its population in gulags that to all accounts are among the grimmest in history. You always seem to associate a regime with its people as one indivisible whole; your relativism doesn't seem to account for situations in which people are brutalised within what you identify as one ethnic space.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I can guarantee you that the OMG WTFuckers who profess such sympathy with the people of North Korea are not sending care packages, nor are they advocating the normalization of economic relations with the DPRK, which is probably the thing that would help its people the most. Rather, they want a unilateral politicization of all discussion of the DPRK. I am not against this politicization, but I would stress that it must be bilateral. In other words, fine, make it a requirement to bring politics into a discussion of a North Korean film program as long as you accept the reciprocal requirement: no discussion of Michael Jackson without references to slavery, Hiroshima, the genocide of the Native Americans, and the Vietnam War.

Once that's established as a principle, though, it becomes a sort of nuclear button on discussions of art. Genocide is an emotive topic, and films or records pale into insignificance beside it. At a certain point the stomach turns, and Adorno's "no poetry after Auschwitz" applies. It's a slippery slope.

might vs. have

[(Anonymous)]

things like people disappearing from their workplaces and homes ROUTINELY happen in these kind of repressive, totalitarian regimes.

incidently, who cares if you "log" anon IP addresses? (it's very n.korean, though, i must say.)