Posts Tagged ‘1980s’

SOVIET PUNKS AND PUSSY RIOTS 1980-2012

Posted: August 18, 2012 in History, Music
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Willie and his comrades. Andrew Sweeney, Girl, Lonely, Willie and friends shooting the movie “Without a uniform.” Volgograd, 1988. From the archive of Villi.

With anti-establishment act Pussy Riot now performing from a cage, it’s interesting to see how their own antics have carried on one particular Soviet tradition. And despite Putin’s best attempts to muscle in on the music scene – witness his moving rendition of Blueberry Hill – the KGB crooner might have his work cut out for him.

Since its underground rumblings in the 1980s, Russia’s punk subculture has had a fair bit of practice in bringing it to the people. The Soviet Union’s first punk band, Civil Defence – or Гражданская Оборона – or GrOb (ГрОб, Coffin) for short – had to duck and weave both censors and KGB. And they still found time to release illegal recordings; apparently known as “Bones” – homemade bootlegs often made from discarded medical x-rays.

In the 1970s and 1980s a growing surge of blackmarket fashion and underground music – openly challenging the Soviet-grey old-guard – delivered a dawning sense of freedom. By the mid-80s a tide of avant-garde artists, punks, rockers and psycho billies were roaming the streets, often meeting with spontaneous public performances – and the occasional police crackdown. Fashion shows could easily devolve into raucous rock gigs; catwalks and gigs colliding in places as diverse as Sergey Kuryokhin’s Popular Mechanics Group, the Sovincenter Hall, squats, concert halls and busy city streets.

As the Russian subculture site Kompost declares: “The subcultural people, who established their own market of attributes, had already formed their ideas about the standards of appearance”.

Soviet punk, 1980 – the beginning of the aesthetic war between “Soviet couture” and black market fashion.

‘Mrachnyĭ’ makeup. A common trend of the 80s. Leningrad, 1985 From the archive of Tania Gangrene.

‘Robot’ with ‘Nightingale’. ‘Nightingale’ was the Russian name given to the breed of Leningrad drinker who would stay up all night drinking and singing. 1983. Photo by Alexander Boyko, from the archive of Ruslan Ziggelya.

‘Buster and Dill’ just before the storming of the Nigerian Embassy, Moscow, 1987. Photo from the archives of Yaroslav Maeva Misha Bastera.

Sasha Surgeon, Moscow, 1989. Photo by Petra Gall.

Igor Gans at the entrance to the hall, “Tyazheloĭ athletics” in Izmaĭlovo, performances 1987. From the archive of Dima Sabbath.

Doing the twist – or tvistuny. Subculture, Leningrad, 1984. Photos from the archives of Tanya Aleksandrovoy.

 

Russian Mod with tapedeck, Chelyabinsk, 1985. From the archive of Gosha Shaposhnikov.

“Teddy Boys”. Beer on the Fontanka, Leningrad. In 1984. Photo by Alexander Boyko, from the archive of Ruslan Ziggelya.

Two rockabillys from St. Petersburg, members of the band Swindlers, 1989.

Psycho Billys, 1986, Leningrad – now St. Petersburg.

Moscow, 1980s. The new wave of fashion not drafted by State; includes flares, leopardskins, 50s quiffs and denim.

The new generation of street punk, Moscow, 1992.

Quasi-Western Rambo style. A punk and a ‘Ljuber’ in a photo studio in Moscow, 1988. The so-called Ljuberi were a youth group from the Moscow district satellite Lyubertsy

Punk performer Buster Misha, 1988 – around the time the Govt sent him to work in a dairy for violating some Soviet rules. Misha Buster was just 13 when he dipped into the scene. He took his name from Buster Keaton.

Every subculture needs a motorcycle gang. Russia’s ‘Night Wolves’, 1990 Moscow.

Rebels at the Kremlin. Russian rocker Andrei Melkijy, Dima Sabbath and Sasha Lebed Sabbath demonstrate the dress code in 1987, Red Square.

Moscow’s ‘street punks’, 1988. Soviet uniformity being subverted – courtesy of black market retailers.

Three Russian metalheads scare an old lady. Misha Buster commented: “fear and laughter – that was our trademark.”

A photo of aimless rage, vandalism, and the urge to destroy everything they get their hands on. 1990′s somewhere, Russia.

“The music and lyrics of punk rock provoke among the young fits of aimless rage, vandalism, and the urge to destroy everything they get their hands on. No matter how carefully they try to clean it up, it will remain the most reactionary offspring of the bourgeoisie mass culture.” (Pravda, official newspaper and mouthpiece of the USSR)

On May 9th 1991, 24-year-old poet and singer Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva (Яна Станиславовна Дягилева,) known as Yanka (Янка) left her Novosibirsk country home, never to be seen again. Yanka was Russia’s own Patti Smith, her delivery thoughtful and message sharp. On May 17th her body was found in the Inya River. Her death officially remains a mystery – although there was apparently no water in her lungs and a fractured skull. The fact that she was married to the singer from Yegor Letov may not have helped. Her record sales have grown since her death.

J.M.K.E. was one band whose name made it beyond the Iron Curtain. Civil Defence also survived into the post-communist years, releasing a number of albums and gathering a large following. Unfortunately lead singer Yegor Letov (Его́р Ле́тов) reportedly died in his sleep two years ago.

Yanka (Янка), Russia’s Patti Smith.

My sources are a bit unclear on this one, but I believe it is a photo of Yanka being escorted to an old fashioned correctional gig. Anyone know for sure?

Andrew Kisanov, Gustav Guryanov and Viktor Tsoi in the music video “We saw the night.” Leningrad, 1986. Photo by Harry Assy

Old and new, Moscow 1980s.

State prosecutors yesterday demanded three years each for the Pussy Riot members in a corrective labour facility, after their public anti-Putin performance protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They each received two years – on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. In response to that, it’s worth reading Tolokonnikova’s closing statement before her sentencing (and there’s nothing wrong with Socrates):

“Socrates was accused of corrupting youth through his philosophical discourses and of not recognizing the gods of Athens. Socrates had a connection to a divine inner voice. What did that matter, however, when he had angered the city with his critical, dialectical and unprejudiced thinking? Socrates was sentenced to death and, refusing to run away, although he was given that option, he drank down a cup of poison in cold blood, hemlock”.

“And I hope everyone remembers what the Jews said to Jesus: “We’re stoning you not for any good work, but for blasphemy.” And finally it would be well worth remembering this description of Christ: “He is possessed of a demon and out of his mind.”

Pussy Riot Images via English Russia.

“We were looking for authentic genuineness and simplicity and we found them in our punk performances” (closing court statements, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot, 8 August 2012)

The motley collection of videos below include:

1.  Civil Defence’s ‘I Don’t Believe in Anarchy’,

2. “Yanka” Dyagileva

3. Viktor Tsoi “Change” that concluded the 2011 protest anti-Putin Twitter/Youtube protest.

4.  J.M.K.E

5. Propeller – Punker.

GREAT DESKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY | CHAOS AND CALM IN THE WRITER’S ANCHORAGE

Posted: May 18, 2012 in Books, Film, History, Music, Photography, Uncategorized, Writing
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Nick Cave cocoons himself in purpose – and various accessories – while writing ‘And The Ass Saw the Angel’, Berlin 1986.

Geoff Stanton

Every desk tells a story. Take a look at your own. It may be the only place you can keep ordered; a solitary cove where you can wind life back, expand the surface and skim like a stone. I prefer to sink into mine. For this I recommend two empty bottles of red, a deck of beer coasters, maps, plots, coins, scrolling notebooks and a cup of loose pens. Pitch them headlong into the task. And turn off the computer. Ditch the facebook, the email, the blog, all the crap.

I was recently inspired by Jonathan Raban’s ode to writing aboard his sea-faring crib in Journey to Juneau: “With the floor sashaying underfoot, the chain rumbling on the sea bottom, and the view from the boat’s window’s revolving slowly on the tide, I found the equilibrium I was prone to lose on the unstable land. On winter mornings I’d fire up the heater, light the lamps and work with an intense single mindedness that evaded me at home. The creaks and groans, the smells of parrafin and diesel, were conducive to thinking and remembering”.

But whether it’s via a hatch, a cup of tea, a bottle of whiskey, a pool of blood, four walls of chaos and a nap -  the desk is a great helm.  Here’s a classical tour of some of the big guys; their desks, methods, modes for writing the masterpiece that will keep the ghost lingering.

Dalton Trumbo gets down to work, Mitzi Trumbo/AP Images

Hollywood heavyweight and screenwriting legend Dalton Trumbo. He did most of his writing sitting in the tub, working on a tray suspended over suds. According to his wife, he’d spend days in the bathroom, writing, soaking and smoking – Kirk Douglas remarked that Trumbo sometimes smoked up to six packs of cigarettes a day.

The picture comfort is instructive; next time you’re wasting time in a bath, remember it was here Trumbo wrote films such as The Sandpiper (1965) for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, The Horsemen (1971) for director John Frankenheimer and his last film, Papillon (1973). And all that after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 – during which time he focused his skills on letter writing. Although he did posthumously win an Academy Award for secretly writing Roman Holiday (1953).

Truman Capote and his big ideas, 1977, Arnold Newman.

Inspiration. A glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. “I am a completely horizontal author” Truman Capote told the Paris Review in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”

Ernest Hemingway at the Standing Desk on the Balcony of Bill Davis’s home near Malaga, Life/Time Images.

Hemingway wrote 500 words a day – mostly in the mornings to avoid the heat. A prolific writer, he also knew when to stop. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, he wrote, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

Hemingway discovered the standing desk method from his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, after an injury prevented him from spending prolonged amounts of time sitting down. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly everyone used a standing desk. AE Hotchner recalls Hemingway’s home set-up in Havana, in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir:

“In Ernest’s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores’ teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, wart hog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.”

“I hate writing. I love having written.” Dorothy Parker, Life/Time images.

“Ducking for apples” said Dorothy Parker. “Change one letter and it’s the story of my life.” Dorothy Parker; American poet, short story writer, critic, satirist – and yet another blacklisted name during the 1950s.  In her day she was known as a ‘wisecracker‘ – a label that may have been applied to Oscar Wilde had he been born in New Jersey – but one Parker despised. Yet her literary output and reputation for sharp wit has endured.

Dorothy Parker in the midst of writer’s block. She sent this telegram to her editor, Pascal Covici, as she couldn’t bring herself to look him “in the voice.”

Asked by a journalist during an interview, “Where’s the best place to write?” Parker replied, “In your head.” And her head was clocked in constantly, from speakeasies through three marriages (two to the same man – “I put all my eggs in one bastard”), the heavy drinking and smoking and some unhappiness. But her style and wit continue to entertain readers. “I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”

Nearly finished? Lost in spools. The draft of Jack Kerouac’s Beat-defining phenomenon ‘On the Road’ appeared to the world in April 1951 as a single 36 metre (120-foot) role of paper.

Fueled by the same fever as his characters, Jack Kerouac racked a word-count to help him set course for a complete novel. “That’s not writing” Capote famously remarked,”that’s typing”. But when the whiskey and malt loosened its grip, habits at the Kerouac table-top were disciplined. From the time of first novel The Town and the City Kerouac kept a log; between 1,000 to 5,000 words a night.He also created a formula to mimic the ‘batting average’. The goal was a .400 batting average – on par with Ted Williams.

Kerouac’s fierce verbal also invoked a set of commandments, tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before Ginsberg published Howl.

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. Submissive to everything, open, listening. Try never get drunk outside yr own house. Be in love with yr life. Accept loss forever. Believe in the holy contour of life. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better”

After hours. Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsber, 1959. Image John Cohen/Hulton Archive

Alfred Hitchcock with his 1930′s Black Underwood typewriter – and cocktail bar. “More work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time” said collaborator Charles Bennett. Life/Time images.

“In the morning, I used to get up and pick up Hitch in Cromwell Road, where he lived, at ten o’clock exactly” says screenwriter Charles Bennett, who collaborated with Hitchcock from his earliest ‘talkies’ – including The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 – establishing the innovative wit, freshness and originality Hitchcock subsequently demanded of his writers. “He would be sitting on the curb waiting for me. And then we would go to the studio where we would discuss the script and what I was doing with it”.

“Then at about one o’clock, everything would stop, and we’d go to lunch, always at the Mayfair Hotel, and have a wonderful lunch. Then come back and at that point, Hitch would usually go to sleep in the office, and I would do a little work, and possibly doze off too slightly. At about five o’clock, we would go back to Hitchcock’s flat where we would start having nice cocktails for the evening, and talk more and more and more about the script. And I think more work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time.”

Tennessee Williams faces a terrible question, Life/Time images

“I write as soon as I get up in the morning – facing that terrible question as soon as possible. Some mornings I get up and what I’ve been working on is repugnant to me. So then I shift to some other thing I’ve been working on. I find it absolutely necessary to have two things going on at once, then I can shift back and forth” (Tennessee Williams interview with John Gruen, 1965)

William Faulkner, 1943. “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. Life/ Time images.

“I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman” said Patricia Highsmith, Tom Ripley creator, and bringer of many other thrillers – including Hitchcock’s ‘Stranger’s on a Train’.”I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.”

Roald Dahl in his writing hut.

Roald Dahl created space the same way his mind burrowed out a giant peach; fantastically. He believed a writing space should be highly personal. His writing hut was closed to everyone, including family. A wing-back chair hollowed out to comfort a bad back, a writing board made from wood and green baize fitted across the arms. An electric heater hung directly overhead.

The hut was also decked with curios and artifacts; a piece of his own hip bone, his own preserved spinal shavings, fossils, magazines, fan letters, old photos, family totems, bookmarks drawn specially for him by friend and illustrator Quentin Blake (he only ever seen the interior once) and an enormous ball of wrapper foil slow-built from years of lunching on Cadbury’s chocolate.

Now that the great writing chair is empty you can take an interactive tour of the hut.

“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.”, Hunter S Thompson.

Hunter S. Thompson is best known for writing in a spin of campaign trails, Hell’s Angels, Holiday Inns, Wild Turkey, mescalin and an occasional lawyer. But while attending Columbia University School of General Studies and taking creative writing, he also worked at Time for $51 a week as a copy boy.  During this stint he would sneak off into a room with a typewriter and rewrite his favorite author’s books, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gastby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, before moving on.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you. (Thompson’s Cover letter to Vancouver Sun, looking for a job, 1957)

Henry Miller in his office

Euchrid’s Crib, Nick Cave in Yorkestrasse, West Berlin, 1985, Image by Bleddyn Butcher.

Human song-sheaf Nick Cave has replaced harmful addictions with work since the eighties, and implies as much himself: “Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life”. When he bunked down in Berlin to write the And the Ass Saw The Angel, it seemed his method was not so different from songwriting – or taking drugs. “I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can’t really find a way to change those things.”

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

“More Things to Remember…”, Nick Cave, Melbourne Arts Centre


									

			

						

				

					
MONSTER MOVIES FROM HELL | KIM JONG-IL BECOMES A PRODUCER 1985

					
						Posted: January 2, 2012 in Film						

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Geoff Stanton


North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il may long remain an enigma wrapped in a zip-suit. But there was one blaring passion on the khaki sleeve. He loved films. A fan of Hong Kong action, horror, James Bond, Elizabeth Taylor – he also authored On the Art of the Cinema and, in the late seventies, became a producer.


In fact, he fast-tracked his career quicker than most Hollywood hotshots – by kidnapping famous South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, movie star Choi Eun-hee, keeping them under lock and key until they helped him make movies. Most notably Pulgasari, a socialist remake of Godzilla.




Relationships got off to a rocky start. Shin says that shortly after arriving in Pyongyang he made several attempts to escape, only to end up with four years at Prison No 6. “Tasting bile all the time,” he wrote. “I experienced the limits of human beings.”


Shin endured four years in the all-male prison – wondering whether his ex-wife was dead – while being fed a diet of grass, salt, rice and Party dogma. When he was finally released in 1983 Kim apologised for the unfriendly welcome, blaming a misunderstandings by officials. He also made a personal apology for taking so long to get back to them, explaining it had been busy at the office.


In the 70s Kim had created the Mount Paeku Creative Group studio – designed to illuminate global cinema aisles with the light of the Korea Workers’ Party. But, possibly under the threat of exile or death, Kim’s creative team faced a communal creative block.


“The North’s film-makers are just doing perfunctory work” he later confided. “They don’t have any new ideas. Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.”


By 1978 Kim Jong-il was firmly disenchanted. But a solution soon presented itself.


Kim Jong-il on set as Producer. Appreciating the power of film, Kim wrote in book On the Art of Cinema that “A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.”


South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, widely regarded as the Orson Welles of the peninsula, had modernised movies when people needed them most. In the wake of the Korean war he make at least 60 movies in 20 years. He and his wife, the well-known actress Choi Eun-hee, were well placed amongst Seoul’s celebrity set.


But in 1978 Shin clashed with the repressive government of General Park Chung Hee. His studio was closed. Kim grabbed the opportunity and lured the two to Repulse Bay in Hong Kong on a bogus business trip. Choi was the first to disappear after heading over to discuss an acting job. Concerned, Shin followed her trail – only to be wrapped in plastic, with a chloroform-soaked sack over the head on his way home from dinner.


And now, having now recruited the best film talent available for the venture, it was time to get down to work. Kim and his expanded company were going to workshop some ideas. “Kim Jong-il was like any ordinary young man.” Shin San-Ok told the BBC in 2003.  ”He liked action movies, sex movies, horror movies”. When it came to casting around for subject matter, Shin says there were “fewer restrictions than is commonly believed”.


Choi Eun-hee in Shin’s Flower from Hell. From 1955 to 1985, Choi appeared in eighty-one films. She received the award for best actress at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1985, for her part in the film Sogum




“He listened to me because we were from South Korea,” Shin also told The Guardian in 2003. “Even though we criticised some things, he wanted us to be honest. Others would have been killed for speaking so honestly”.


But all ideas had to be approved by Kim Jong-il as facets of his ideology. In his book On the Art of Cinema Kim compares actors and directors to generals who must master their craft. Kim’s book also suggests that film-makers avoid unrealistic movies about “the colourful lives of flamboyant characters. In the final analysis, a director who pins his hopes on finding a ‘suitable actor’ is taking a gamble in his creative work. And no director who relies on luck in creative work has ever achieved real success.”


Shin soon saw his career resurrected in a way he had never imagined.




Leaving the grass and water behind, Shin was soon promoted with an annual pay cheque of $3m for personal or professional use. He was also mixing in cognac with the higher ranks of the North Korea’s social set.


“Shall we make Mr Shin one of our regular guests?” Kim suggested at a birthday party for one of his generals. Military men meanwhile fawned over the despot-to-be and young women screamed: “Long live the great leader!”. In an exceptionally rare moment of candour, Kim said: “Mr Shin, all that is bogus. It’s just pretense.”


Shin was trusted enough to fly to east Berlin for location shots – shadowed by escorts. He rejected his wife’s suggestion of doing a runner, telling her an escape required planning. Meanwhile, to his own surprise, he found was busy planning the course of his new career.


Kim Jong-il in a former life as a hassled looking Film Producer, 1984 AFP/Getty Images.


Within the new creative parameters, Shin’s work began to flourish. In 1984 he was able to produce what he regarded as his finest film, Runaway – the story of a wandering Korean family of 1920s Manchuria dealing with Japanese oppression.


But this story is more known for spawning Pulgasari; Kim Jong-il’s C grade monster-movie masterpiece. Based on a legend of the 14th-century Koryo monarchy, Pulgasari probably owes most to Godzilla. Shin invited some monster-movie veterans from Japan’s legendary Toho Studio to his own – which now held 700 employees – to help with the movie after Kim guaranteed their safety. The troupe included Kenpachiro Satsuma, the second actor to wear the Godzilla suit; now rubber-bound as the lumbering Pulgasari.


Kenpachiro Satsuma (left) as Godzilla. He was the man behind the rubber from 1984-1995.


Satsuma as the the mighty Pulgasari, North Korea 1985.


Starting out as a dot of rice, Pulgasari becomes a monster of the people. While farmers starve under the king’s rule, the hapless creature comes to life, eats iron, grows, rolls through the countryside unfurling his wrath – past endless scenic shots of the people’s folk dances (as decreed in the guidelines of On the Art of the Cinema) and on to explosive ruin. Pulgasari has since taken a seat on the high right-hand of awful suitified monster movies.


But Kim liked it. In fact, he saw it as a victory. He ordered truckloads of pheasant, deer, wild geese for the movie crew to feast on. Plans were made for a joint venture with a company in Austria to distribute the film. Kim trusted the director to travel to western Europe for a business meeting.


He shouldn’t have.


Shin and his wife decided to strike the iron while it was hot. Ducking into a US embassy, Shin pulled stumps on his NK production company for good. “To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony,” he wrote. It was a shame. The next project was inspired by John Wayne’s appearance as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Both Shin and Kim had long wanted to make an ‘authentic’ version – they both shared enthusiasm on the subject of invading hordes.


The Kim Jong-il Summer Collection. North Korea’s Uriminzokkiri site reported that the dictator’s trademark zip-up suit had become a worldwide fashion craze. The piece quoted an unidentified French fashion expert as saying: “Kim Jong-Il mode, which is now spreading expeditiously worldwide, is something unprecedented in the world’s history.”


After the embarrassing escape of his star colleagues, Kim Jong-il shelved Pulgasari along with every other Shin film, humbly retiring into the role of despot. He never again appeared on a movie credit as Producer.


Shin’s work with Kim yielded seven films. He even introduced the first kiss to North Korean cinema. Pulgasari meanwhile was not seen outside the country until 1998 – during a short and cautiously optimistic moment of openness in the North. The film bombed.


In 2001 Shin Sang-ok planned to screen his favourite work, Runaway, at the Pusan International film festival. Seoul halted the showing, banning any screening that could benefit the North. But, happily, there was one successful instance of reunification. During their stay in Pyongyang Shin and Choi re-married – at Kim Jong-il’s recommendation.


Kim Jong-il’s Pyongyang Picture Show. Seat number presumably stamped on ticket. Image Copyright Malte Herwig, 2008.