그로테스크로 바라본 극장국가 북한연구 - <태양 아래, 2016>를 중심으로 -

Abstract

The study defines Russian director Vitaly Mansky’s documentary film “Under the Sun, 2016” as a totalitarian North Korean theater country and analyzes the reality of grotesque. The direct background of writing the paper was that grotesque had various implications, but there were not many specific studies that applied it to North Korean films. Under the Sun, 2016, which is the main ingredient of the study, is a documentary film that exposed the madness of North Korean totalitarianism during a year with an 8-year-old girl named Li Jin-mi living in Pyongyang. What’s important about the film is that despite the nature of documentaries having to record facts accurately, North Korean authorities have been involved and directed in everything, including scenarios and actors. Because of this situation, everyone in the movie looks awkward, and the set scenes feel too beautiful and clean. In addition to this fact, the director emphasized the scene by including off-camera instructions from Communist Party officials with their cast members. In conclusion, the analysis of North Korea’s <Under the Sun, 2016> as a grotesque by Bachin reveals that North Koreans are dwarfed and oppressed under the rule of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, who are at the center of North Korea’s tyrannical politics. In the last scene, the guide cries while answering Lee Jin-mi how she feels about joining the boys’ group. You can read Lee Jin-mi’s inner thoughts in this scene. The guide thinks and talks about good things, but Jin-mi answers that she doesn’t know much. Through the pure words of delicacies, which do not know what a good thing is like, the “best country in the world” that the North Korean society wanted is not seen. Among the characteristics of Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque, laughter plays an important role in overcoming the suppressed fear, and Li Jin-mi (representative of North Koreans) is crying over Kim Jong-un’s suppressed fear. The North Korean government is ironically telling us through ‘Under the Sun, 2016’. North Korea is a happy country where its people have nothing to laugh about but freedom to cry alone, and North Korea itself explains it as a grotesque country. The video, disguised as a happy image that North Korea is trying to show, implies a depth of fear that is hard to fathom in the spirit of North Koreans.