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--></style><title>Fwd: [KS] Film screening: "The Schoolgirl's
Diary" (Ha</title></head><body>
<div>Dear colleagues,</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Leonid, as you may remember, I attended--with much gratitude for
your efforts--the screening you arranged at the Seoul Foreign
Correspondents Club last year. I don't think we had a chance to
discuss the film in detail afterwards, but I found it disappointing
for two reasons. First, I'd been hoping for more evidence of an
improvement in production values from the DPRK given the publicity the
film had received (too much to hope for, perhaps?). More importantly,
however, I actually didn't see much that was terribly new about the
film or its themes. The narrative pattern follows closely that of the
pieces of fiction I analyze in my article "North Korean Short
Stories on the Cusp of the New Millennium" (in Acta Koreana 5),
where I treat a selection of stories from Chos<font size="+1"
color="#000000">ô</font>n Munhak that appeared in 1998 and
1999.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Basically, what the film does (as many DPRK stories do) is
encourage us to empathise with the schoolgirl and her
disappointments/disillusionment but then at the end allow us to see
why she/we are misguided. It is a strategy that seems designed
precisely to address the conflict between "selfishness and
self-sacrifice" that you refer to and to re-educate the
viewer/reader towards self-sacrifice (but inevitably and implicitly
acknowledges that the viewer/listener's natural tendency is towards
selfishness).</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>It will probably be easiest if I quote some passages from my
article for more:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000">"I proceed now to a pair of
recent stories that, in sharing narrative strategies and
themes....imply that the single most important problem confronting
North Korea is precisely how to keep up popular morale in an era of
great hardship.<i> Pot'ongnal ûi haru</i> (An Ordinary Day) and<i>
P'urûn such'ôp</i> (Blue Notebook) are representative of a
set of tales whose protagonists show less than ideal enthusiasm for
the work required of them, yet in each case are reformed by another's
moral example....</font></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000">"These two stories
illustrate a regular pattern in North Korean fiction that deserves
comment: virtually every text presents a character who acts as a model
of virtuous behavior to be emulated; in keeping with the professed
didactic intent of the DPRK's literature, this is hardly surprising.
Far more noteworthy is the frequent use by stories of a first person
narrator or third person protagonist as, if not a negative exemplum
per se, a character who experiences some form of socialist
enlightenment. A related pattern that occurs with equal
frequency draws our attention to exemplary figures whose ardor for
labor is misunderstood or incurs resentment, until the story's
protagonist realizes that such determination represents not a
valuation of work over human emotions, but rather deep love for the
nation and its people in the aggregate. The wife at the center of Kim
Hûng-ik's<i> Sup'e tûllyôtta kashira</i> ("Please Visit the
Forest and Be on Your Way"), for example, comes to
recognize that her husband's devotion to his work is in no way a
rejection of her, but rather stems from this more all-encompassing
form of love for the nation. Even more striking is Ri
Chun-ho's<i> Ryulli</i> ("Ethics"), which delineates
such conflicts in a particularly compelling way. In this story,
a surgeon sends his wife off with their seriously ill daughter to the
county hospital while he continues to work with an even more
critically ill patient who can not be moved from the clinic in their
own small mining town. The wife initially finds her husband
lacking in basic human feeling, but grows to understand that the
motives for his actions are based on an admirable social
commitment....</font></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000">"What the various stories I
have been describing share is an expectation, and indeed a desire,
that the reader identify not with the story's idealized figures but
the characters from whose narrative point of view the tale is
related. In no case among recent short stories (with the
possible exception of the story I will treat in a moment) do we find a
first person narrator who is the most obviously admirable character.
The protagonists engage the reader's empathy but fall short of others
so that events can bring about a subjective realization in which the
reader may participate. North Korean fiction thus presents
an ongoing concern with process; readers are reminded not merely of
their inadequacies, but inevitably, if subtly, of their
dissatisfactions, precisely so they can then re-enact and reaffirm
their commitment to revolutionary zeal and selfless devotion to the
nation.</font>....</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font size="+1" color="#000000">"What, in conclusion, is the
overall literary and emotional effect created by recent short stories
for their implied readers? Perhaps the most salient feature of
North Korean literature in contrast to its southern counterpart is its
eternal optimism. In reawakening consciousness of difficulties
in daily life, but by ultimately effacing them through the
manipulations permitted in a fictive world, contemporary North Korean
literature promises psychological comfort: its conventions allow
readers the opportunity to yield temporarily to darker fears with the
reassurance that a utopian redemption awaits at story's end.
Regardless of moral failure on the part of the protagonist, as in<i>
Pot'ongnal ûi haru</i>, or details that point overwhelmingly towards
hardship as in<i> Tubôntche sangbong</i>, all stories promise a
better tomorrow, even at the expense of raising contradictions between
a text's details and its final message. One might be tempted to
apply the term "willing suspension of disbelief" to the
fiction of the DPRK, but that phrase, which requires the acceptance of
things we know not to be so (an essential element of such genres as
science fiction), is perhaps not appropriate to the DPRK's literature:
rather, the texts rely on the reader's "willing acquiescence in
belief" and eagerness to suppress cognitive dissonance in favor
of the interpretation the texts themselves wish to dictate. The
reader's role in the implicit contract established with the state and
author, then, is to allow his or her faith in the system to be
reaffirmed. Nonetheless, North Korean fiction on the cusp of the
new millennium also provides ample scope for its audience to become
"resisting readers" and to rebel against the perspective
imposed by the texts' conclusions; I have attempted to show how points
of indeterminacy within these texts allow one to approach them not as
a closed conversation but as an open dialogue (cf. Fetterley 1978:
xxiii). Of course, my analysis invites one crucial query: how do
real North Korean readers choose to understand their fiction within
the privacy of their own thoughts? That, I fear, is a question
whose answer may be several years in coming.</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Cheers, Stephen</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 03:25:48 +1100<br>
From: "Leonid Petrov"
<petrov@coombs.anu.edu.au></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>To: "Korean Studies Discussion List"
<koreanstudies@koreaweb.ws></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>"The Schoolgirl's Diary" (2006)
is, indeed, the most interesting piece of work recently produced by
Pyongyang filmmakers. It looks like an attempt to depict the growing
conflict between selfishness and self-sacrifice in North Korea.
Echoing the Russian film<i> Courier</i> [Kurier] (1986), which hit the
records of popularity in the Perestroika-stricken Soviet Union, this
film employs the convenient method of viewing the grim reality of life
through the eyes of a teenager. If something in the film is
politically unpalatable, it is the immaturity of the main character
that has to be blamed - not the film director (Jang In-hak or Kim
Jong-il himself?).<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The main character, Suryeon, gets
increasingly frustrated with her poor and naïve parents who
"foolishly" devoted themselves to the country and the
people. Her protest may look unsophisticated but small details reveal
political overtones. In one scene, where Suryeon is arguing with her
younger sister over the quality of food in their lunchboxes, her
blouse and skirt also show aggressive colours - namely stars and
stripes (just like on the US flag). Is this a new vogue in modern
Pyongyang? Or maybe the director's tongue-in-cheek? Some people still
argue that it were blue jeans and rock music that destroyed socialism
in the USSR.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>It looks like this film is trying to
address the issues vital to North Korea's survival. In the DPRK it was
viewed by some 8 million people just in the first six months. Pretty
Pictures bought the screening rights to show it in Europe last year.
Who knows, maybe this film will open a new dimension of the
"Hallyu" phenomenon? It would be interesting to hear the
opinion of those who have seen it already.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Leonid Petrov<br>
--<br>
Division of Pacific and Asian History</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Australian National
University</blockquote>
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