A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer

Author:Paul Fischer [Fischer, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asia, Film & Video, History, Korea, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9781250054289
Google: yC2dBAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

19

The Hunger Strike

In Prison Number 6, Shin passed the time in remaking all his films.

“In the torture position, which I had to assume immediately after breakfast,” Shin wrote, “I had to look straight ahead with my hands on my knees.… I calculated that every day, out of the seventeen hours from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, I spent about sixteen hours in this position. In this position, all I did was think.” He reflected on his past and found the usual mistakes: “I had the opportunity to think endlessly about my life, my mistakes, how I could have spent more time with my children.” But mostly, “I still lived with films,” Shin said simply. He found that the only way he could endure was to disappear into the world of film, into creation—to let his mind roam back to a place and time when he was still a film director. In his mind’s eye he rewrote, reshot, and reedited all of his old films, “over and over again,” listing their flaws and picturing how he would fix them if he could. In South Korea he had constantly been hustling, constantly keeping up with costs, bills, and the 250 employees who needed to be kept busy and on salary. Here, for the first time, this most ambitious, restless of men was forced to stop. In the unbearable conditions of the prison, when he sometimes thought he was losing his sanity, this imaginary career was his only comfort. He found an unexpected satisfaction in it. Before being kidnapped he had struggled with the plot for his Sleeping Beauty project, but now “I was able to figure it out so easily,” he said. “I was delighted.”

In Seoul, wealthy, famous, and free, he had been proud of his films, almost arrogantly so. In the desolation of the prison he found them shallow and insubstantial. “I thought about my movies and decided they had to contain more social responsibility,” he reflected. “The greatest weakness in my films, as I [saw] it, is that they lack the thick scent of life and a vivid reality. This is my frank confession. I became famous unexpectedly at a young age, and since then I’ve been so deeply into film that I haven’t had a moment to look anywhere else. As a result I haven’t had the luxury of having a diverse range of experience and sensing and thinking about the depth of life.” Silently he reclassified all his films into three groups: the satisfactory films, “the ones that needed to be partly remade, and another group of films that should be trashed entirely.” When he was done going through them there wasn’t a single film that satisfied him. He was disappointed by the results—“I had thought my movies depicted real life. Now I knew otherwise”—and embarrassed by how he had dismissed peers with a social consciousness and how glib he’d been, in interviews, about the social outlook of his own work. “I had been very proud of myself,” he said.

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