The Juchee Idea: Film as Conceptual Art, Perhaps

What was director Jim Finn's intent when he was making The Juchee Idea? Was it to make a sly documentary about filmmaker Lee Jung Yoon's time as a visiting artist at a commie communal farm well outside Pyongyang? Was it to illustrate the theoretical ideas outlined in dictator Kim Jong-il's On the Art of the Cinema? Was it to satirize the North Korean view of Western culture by way of a series of stiffly executed dialogues representing capitalist and socialist "uses" of the English language? Maybe the answer is yes to all of the above. I'm not sure. What I do know is that the various pieces neither stick together nor comment on each other so much as they all seem to coexist independently. In a way, The Juchee Idea feels like a cut-up. Finn definitely has some cool archival footage, an odd performance art sensibility, and access to what look to be entertaining North Korean films. What he's missing is a narrative through line. Maybe he never intended to have one.

By far the most fascinating parts of Finn's amalgamated movie are those sections which split-screen footage from a handful of North Korean propaganda films (such as hard-to-find titles like An Urban Girls Gets Married and Girls From My Hometown) with quotes from Kim's very intriguing film theory book. But the documentary footage of Lee being interviewed by interdisciplinary artist Daniela Kostova is shot in a way that has left me unsure of how seriously or satirically to take it. Same for the brief scenes of the "indicative conversations" — featuring an especially affected performance from Oleg Mavromatti. It's not quite funny so much as bizarre. The film kindly clocks in at sixty minutes so you're unlikely to get bored as Finn switches genres, tones, and storylines. But you're unlikely to get enlightened into the actual Juchee idea — which is North Korea's philosophy of self-reliance spiked with Marxism.

Korean Grindhouse has a page devoted exclusively to North Korean movies — both documentaries about the country and films that were created there. Check it out!