Dear Leader: Fashion & Film in North Korea

Map It:  Capitol South 

IN HER CAPACITY as an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Suk-Young Kim teaches theater history and Asian studies. But those disciplines hardly begin to touch the range of Kim's academic interests, from gender and nationalism to Russian literature, Slavic folklore and Korean cultural studies. She brings many of these specialties to bear on two noontime lectures this week at the Library of Congress, where Kim is a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center.

Tuesday's talk, "Kim Jong-il and North Korean Film," explains the origins and ramifications of the Dear Leader's fascination for the silver screen, while Wednesday's "For the Eyes of the Dear Leader: Fashion and Body Politics in North Korean Visual Arts" exposes the cut and drape of the hermit country's approach to femininity, clothing and art.

Her lectures will perform a bigger-picture service as well, giving a reasoned glimpse into a country Kim calls complicated and misunderstood. "I think that my job is to bring in a balanced view on the country, and culture is one good way to achieve that. It's easy to just dismiss all this as cultural garbage, but I think it's really interesting how, if you look at cultural productions, you can see why the country works the way it works."

» EXPRESS: How do you research the culture of the most enigmatic country on earth?
» KIM: The easy way is to read everything that's published in North Korea, and that includes most Korean magazines, newspapers, government statements. These things can be researched at the Library of Congress or in some archives in South Korea.

» EXPRESS: But the information in these is tightly controlled.
» KIM: Yes, the problem with that method would be you only get one side of the story. ... I decided to look for North Korean defectors who had left the country. By interviewing them, you learn the other side of the story — how they actually process these cultural productions on a daily level. That can also be problematic, because these are people who left, risking their lives, and they have negative views of their country. ... So I'm trying to reconstruct somewhere in the middle.

» EXPRESS: How is the government able to control so much of the populace's culture and lifestyle?
» KIM: It's a small country; it's not like the Soviet Union or communist China, where you have these vast territories, so there are limits to what the government can do and control. One reason they have maintained such a high degree of control is they use very traditional ideals, such as Confucian patriarchy or hierarchical family structures, and apply those to maintaining a modern society.

» EXPRESS: North Korea hosts an international film festival, is that right?
» KIM: Yes, it started in 1987. Kim Jong-il is obsessed with film. We tend to think that it his personal proclivity — that he's crazy about film as an individual — but I think it was a very savvy choice on his part of a medium that could control and influence the populace. He understood the power of film as a propaganda tool. The vast majority of North Koreans were rural at the time Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il-sung, established the North Korean state, and it was particularly important for them to unify the minds of the North Koreans as soon as possible. So in order to speak to peasants who don't necessarily read all these revolutionary novels or newspapers, film was very effective.

» EXPRESS: By controlling their dress, what message is the Dear Leader conveying about women?
» KIM: One conspicuous aspect of North Korean women's fashion is that it is extremely traditional. It's a huge difference when we compare this style to communist China and the Soviet Union.

» EXPRESS: None of that sexless, marching together, shoulder-to-shoulder stuff.
» KIM: The reason is that even though North Korean women wanted to revolutionize their society, they had to adhere to traditional values in order to satisfy the male workers. There is no sense of women's liberation as there was in communist China. I also think fashion ties into the mobilization of labor, and also the fact that the North Korean state did not value female labor as much as it did male labor.

» EXPRESS: Does fashion evolve without designers and tenders to guide it?
» KIM: Very often, Kim Jong-il will go abroad, and when he comes back, he issues fashion statements to the people. So, for example, one time he went to Eastern Europe in mid-1980s. He used to prefer those Mao jackets, but when he came back from this trip, he said, "Why don't we wear suits and ties and hats to work?" Not everyone had these things, but it was an instruction from the leader, so they had to do it. Suddenly some women started wearing children's hats on top of their traditional Korean dresses; someone who doesn't have a dress shirt ended up wearing a tie on top of their regular round-necked shirt — things like that.

» EXPRESS: Would you go to North Korea if you had a chance?
» KIM: I went there once as a tourist; South Koreans can go to designated tourist areas. And now, North Korea is interested in attracting as many tourists as possible. It holds the annual Arirang Festival in a huge sports arena in Pyongyang. There are about 100,000 performers, doing dance, gymnastics, acrobatics, circus acts, music. It's like a halftime show, "Triumph of the Will" and a dance performance at the Olympics opening ceremony.

» EXPRESS: What can we take away from all this?
» KIM: I think North Korea is a much more complicated country than we think, and by and large misunderstood. I admit that the North Korean state can be extremely brutal — human rights are being violated — but we might have to live with it for another 20 or 30 years. I think we will live in a better place when we have an understanding of North Korea than to simply label it as an "enemy country." I think it would do us a lot of good if we try to understand them.

» Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE; Tue. & Wed., noon, free, seating limited; 202-707-2905. (Capitol South)

Kim Jong-il photo by KCNA/AFP/Getty Images
"Team America" still by Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures