Shin Sang-Ok
Apr 27th 2006
From
The Economist print edition
Shin Sang-Ok, film director and
abductee, died on April 11th, aged 79
VIEWERS of the movie “Team America:
World Police” will have gathered that North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, is a
mixed-up fellow. He may be brutal?he is depicted feeding Hans Blix, the former
UN weapons inspector, to a shark?but he is also a
sensitive, artistic soul. After murdering Mr Blix, he sings a sad song about how
lonely it is being a psychotic despot. This was supposed to be outrageous
satire. But, as Shin Sang-Ok could have told the directors, no fictionalised
“Dear Leader” could be weirder, or nastier, than the real one.
Mr Shin was a South Korean movie
director. In 1978, Mr Kim, a movie buff, had him kidnapped and whisked to the
hermit kingdom to make its revolutionary film industry less awful.
Before then, Mr Shin was best known
for giving South Korean audiences their first on-screen kiss. During the 1950s
and 1960s he made dozens of films, several of which depicted Korean women's
struggles against patriarchal convention. His favourite leading lady was his
wife, the dazzling Choi Eun-Hee. In the 1970s Mr Shin's career waned, and it
came to an abrupt halt when he upset South Korea's military government by
complaining about censorship. His movie company was swiftly shut
down.
Mr Kim, then the unacknowledged
heir apparent to the world's first hereditary communist monarchy, saw his
opportunity. First, he had Ms Choi lured to Hong Kong, kidnapped and shipped to
a North Korean port. Ever the gentleman, he turned up at the dock to greet her.
“Thank you for coming, Madame Choi,” he said, as if she were stepping off a
cruise ship.
Although they had
recently divorced, Mr Shin was naturally alarmed at his ex-wife's disappearance.
He followed her trail to Hong Kong, where he too was abducted. In North Korea,
he was put up in a comfortable guest house, but insisted on trying to escape.
one day he borrowed a car, drove to a railway station, hid among crates of
explosives and crept aboard a freight train. He was caught the next day, and
soon found himself in a hellish prison camp.
Even there, however, he was
protected from afar. When he tried to starve himself to death, officials
force-fed him through a funnel. A guard told Mr Shin that he was the first
attempted suicide he'd ever seen saved?so he must be very important.
After four years, Mr Shin won his
release through a series of abjectly apologetic letters to Kim Jong Il and his
father, President Kim Il Sung. He was brought to a dinner party in Pyongyang,
the capital, and face-to-face with his ex-wife, who had not known until that
moment that he was in North Korea. “Well, go ahead and hug each other. Why are
you just standing there?” said the Dear Leader, who then suggested that they
re-marry. They did as they were told.
At last, Mr Shin's talents could be
put to good use. Mr Kim was worried that films produced in decadent, capitalist
South Korea were better than those produced in the North. Perceptively, he
explained to Mr Shin that this was because North Korean film workers knew the
state would feed them regardless of the quality of their output. In the South,
by contrast, actors and directors had to sweat to make films the public would
pay to see. Mr Kim wasn't saying that there was anything wrong with socialism,
of course, but he gave Mr Shin millions of dollars, a fancy marble-lined office
and more artistic freedom than any North Korean director had ever enjoyed
before.
Films fit for Cannes
Mr Kim did not want Mr Shin to make
crude propaganda. Oh no. He wanted films that would win awards at international
festivals. And although the tubby tyrant had previously argued, in his book “On
the Art of Cinema”, that good movies should glorify the party, the system, his
father and himself, he realised that this was not a fail-safe formula for wowing
the judges at Cannes.
So he let Mr Shin shoot some
watchable films, including “Pulgasari”, a Godzilla-inspired affair about a
metal-eating monster who helped 14th-century peasants overthrow their feudal
lords. The director and his wife were obliged to give a press conference
explaining that they had willingly defected to North Korea, but otherwise they
were treated far better than most of the Kim dynasty's hapless subjects. Mr Kim
must have thought that was good enough to keep them loyal, for he allowed them
to travel. As soon as they saw a chance to dodge their bodyguards, during a
promotional trip to Vienna in 1986, they fled to the American embassy and sought
asylum.
Mr Shin was at first reluctant to
go home, for fear that South Korea's security police might disbelieve his
fantastic tale and suspect him of communist sympathies. Fortunately, he and his
wife had made, at mortal risk, clandestine tape recordings of conversations with
Mr Kim. These, and the couple's memoirs, are among the most useful accounts we
have of the secretive (and now probably nuclear-armed) Dear Leader's
personality: charming, shrewd, quirky, malevolent.
Mr Shin continued to make films
until shortly before he died. His last years were frail; he had a liver
transplant in 2004. Ms Choi survived him, and his last film, about an old man
with Alzheimer's, is yet to be released.
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