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

[(Anonymous)]

lemme guess. the rest of your entries until you shiver away and die are goign to be about young asian chicks. oh momus you're ever so predicable.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Please learn to read and spell, decadent running-dog lackey of the Web 2.0 sarco-capitalist imperial system! This entry is not about "young asian chicks" but about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, its people, their hope, and the blossoming of worldwide socialism, a light in the darkest winter!

[(Anonymous)]

You're right, Momus. I had failed to correctly address or assess my deep immersion in the rotten porno-sarco web 2.0 imperium. From this moment on I will raise my voice and joyously mingle it with the swelling tide of the blossom-eyed masses! We shall praise collective farming, dams, tractors, factories, ship-building and the film director Kim Jong Il, looking out over a sea of the upturned, pink-glowing faces of our youth as they engage in synchronised gymnastics in stadia of massive symmetry!

Down with OMG and WTF, SONGUN and JUCHE forever!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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someone's drank the kool-aid

[(Anonymous)]

how about those inside the dprk who dare to speak out against the oppressive regime there? what do you think of them and their being hauled off never to be heard of again? or the millions living in hunger and poverty? don't you care about them?

HTMhelL

[(Anonymous)]

about to find out if i've just lost my embedding virginity:



nathan

Re: someone's drank the kool-aid

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, dissidents and victims and millions living in hunger and poverty. These are the very reasons that communism had to be invented. It is certainly not perfect yet, but it is young.

Re: HTMhelL

[(Anonymous)]

hahaha... nope!

so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNCujB5tJnQ

Re: HTMhelL

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[lj-template name="video"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNCujB5tJnQ[/lj-template]

...but with pointy html brackets instead of square ones.

So:

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Re: HTMhelL

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But that's South Korea, right? Horrible tinny pop music instead of the gorgeous North Korean stuff like this:

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[(Anonymous)]

What a wonderful, interesting entry! It's too bad I'll be in Berlin only next week, and precisely after the 20th, so I will definitely miss the Asian Women's Film festival. That's not too bad, though, since I already scribbled down (well, I took screenshots) of the movies they mention on their website. Good pointers for a few weeks rich in pirated movies.

Curiously, the first thing that sprung to mind (right after being amazed a long-time president/dictator would write operas) was that the singsang in the embedded Youtube video reminded me a lot of old DEFA movies, especially fairy tales. The classic singing in a lot of old DDR films has a striking similarity to what Kim Jong Il wrote. Perhaps not by accidence.

The Flower Video

[(Anonymous)]

I find that flower video rather disturbing given the context in which it was made. A substrate of shit out of which innocent youth is exploited and nature's beauty flaunted. There are bodies buried beneath those flowers.

Re: someone's drank the kool-aid

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Young, yes. Stillborn, too.

Kim Jong II: the new Kahimi muse?

[(Anonymous)]

How about a duet CD with Kim Jong II, which might pave the way for a unified Korea!

You could strum a Bipa, while "Dear Father" croons his favorite song "Not Motherhood Without You" or teach him "I Am A Kitten" while riding in his armored train, watching pretty girls make pretty things.

[(Anonymous)]

so gentle, but funny as well .

shy

[milky-eyes.livejournal.com]

so I'm going to try an bust my html virginity as well tonight...

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[amore-di-libri.livejournal.com]

I was visiting family in Seoul, and we decided to skip over to Beijing to try out a North Korean restaurant there. It is with great pride in the Korean people that I can report that all of our (female) servers had truly servile mannerisms and the limpid grace of wilting pear blossoms. Also, no one had any pores. Literally, no pores. I believe the generals who generally like to engage the lascivious services of the lovely ladies of the DPRK had pores banned a few years back.

We can only hope that the next glorious leader (who was undoubtedly born on a gleaming mountaintop, from a beauteous virgin, raised by chipmunks, and taught to lead by the great Holanghee in the Sky) will also understand how important it is to preserve the true Korean culture at the expense of, well, providing physical sustenance for one's Korean brethren. Truly, "glory for the beautiful values, traditions and celebrations of life, of her people." At the expense of her people.

Momus, is that you?

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

In all your shiny, happy, flowers-in-bloom-kissing, strictly-enforced-communal-ways-loving glory?:

http://www.bertisevil.tv/pages/bert029.htm

Re: someone's drank the kool-aid

[(Anonymous)]

the reasons it was invented? it's the results of it in places like china. i know you read the papers...THEY COME AND GET YOU IN YOUR HOME IF YOU CRITICIZE THE GOVT. what part of that don't you get???

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Delightful, let us frolic in Kim ll Sung's bounteous talents as a writer, ideologue, composer, flower-arranger and genocidal murderer.
ALL HAIL THE GREAT LEADER.

Re: shy

[(Anonymous)]

now i know what hitchens means when he refers to heaven as a "celestial north korea."

the piety is hilariously pitiful.

hmmm

[(Anonymous)]

i wonder what momus will think if and when that fat slob lobs one of his substitute penises (missles) into a city full of people in japan. all this schmaltz wouldn't be so cute then, now would it...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have been called upon to make a statement regarding the DPRK's problems and even to answer allegations of "genocide" leveled against the nation's leader, Kim Jong Il.

My statement is this. Certainly my entry is propaganda. But the OMG WTF Web 2.0 requirement to cast the DPRK, every time you mention it, as part of an "empire of evil" is also propaganda. It's rather like harassing people reviewing American films into making clear their views on Hiroshima, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the percentage of black Americans in prison. It inculcates the idea that an American film or record could not be reviewed responsibly without mention of these things.

In my Book of Scotlands I include a text parodying this idea. It's a review of a New Age folk album by a band called Sonic Flower Groove. The reviewer docks a star from his review because the band fails to make clear its position, in the course of the record, on the widespread Scottish practice of genital cutting.

[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.