Today's lesson on film is from Kim Jong Il

With all the news about North Korea and its test firing of a nuclear weapon, I got sucked into reading about Kim Jong Il and eventually stumbled upon his writing about film. There's a lot of stuff--you can even buy one of his books at Amazon. Fortunately, for those of us who don't have the $27, one of Kim Jong Il's books is available in pdf format for free at http://www.korea-dpr.com/library/209.pdf

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting; my limited knowledge of Kim has been shaped largely by watching Team America: World Police three or four times. Some writing in the book aims to describe a non-capitalist theory of film based on the juche North Korean philosophy. But the vast majority of the book is a Borders-worthy text on common-sense filmmaking craft. A sample:

The director should pay attention to editing even when filming. Whilst the filming is being done he should already be creating the speed and rhythm at which the shots that are arranged in the director's script flow and should also provide the occasions for the switch from one shot to the next, taking into account that they have to be connected. The director should pay particular attention to the editing that must be done within individual scenes by directing the movement of the camera, because this must be determined during the filming itself.

One of the films Kim produced, Flower Girl, is supposed to be a real tear jerker. Then there's Pulgasari, the Godzilla clone Kim produced using kidnapped South Korean director Sang Ok Shin. Interestingly an escaped Shin eventually went on to direct the American kid's film Three Ninjas.