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Kim Jong-Un is the new leader of North Korea. He is to be:
"the great successor to the revolution" and "the eminent leader of the military and the people." [Source: cbc.ca]Here is an excerpt from unpublished article I wrote on the Chinese Olympics and the "giant" perspectives of the Chinese designers:
While discussing his experience working with Western actors, Yimou says: “[They] were so troublesome [because] in the middle of rehearsals they take two coffee breaks…[T]here can’t be any discomfort, because of human rights…[T]hey have all kinds [of] organizations and labor union structures. We’re not like that. We work hard; we tolerate bitter exertion.”[1] Like the suffering his heroines endure, Yimou confesses that he sees nothing wrong with exerting pressure and discipline on his performers to have them conform to his giant designs.Individuals are swallowed by the giant collective. So it is not surprising that giant portraits and statues dominate in communist countries, where the individual has to understand from the cultural environment around him that he is part of "the mastery of synchronized masses." As I wrote in the article:
Throughout China’s history, there seems to have been an overpowering preference for the individual’s submergence into the collective. Confucius lays out the ground rules for this coexistence, and Communism was the harshest, most inhumane, example of that history. Yimou is simply recording this cultural reality. He further demonstrates this with his direction of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. The spectacular ceremony consisted of thousands (15,000 in total) of Chinese performers shifting in huge carpets of precise and united movement.But as I've show in a previous post, this mastery of the masses is executed by an elite (and self-proclaimed) few, and North Korea is no different.
The world of Chinese human coordination is brought to light when Yimou compares Chinese performers to those of North Korea. He says: “Other than North Koreans, there’s not one other country in the world that can achieve such a high quality of performance.” Yimou didn’t compare his 15,000 synchronized human bodies to American or European artistry, but to an enclosed, isolated extreme dictatorial state like North Korea...
Olympics which took place in Westernized countries - the US, Australia and Greece to name a few - emphasized more individualized performances and content-rich opening ceremonies, rather than the mastery of synchronized masses.
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Here is an interesting bit of information in the CBC article cited above, on the modern North Korean dynasty by a Japanese chef who wrote his memoirs on his life as a sushi chef for Kim Jong-Il. Although I will take this with a grain of salt, I still find what he says about Kim Jong-Un interesting:
According to the memoir of a man who says he spent 11 years as the Kim family's sushi chef, Jong-Un possesses his father's toughness and ambition.---------------------------------------------------------------------
The chef, who goes by the pen name Kenji Fujimoto, described Jong-Un as a competitive, even ruthless, child.
Dressed in a military outfit, the young Jong-Un "glared at me with a menacing look when we shook hands" the first time they met, Fujimoto wrote in Kim Jong-Il's Chef. "I can never forget the look in his eyes which seemed to be saying, 'This one is a despicable Japanese.'"
Reference:
1. “Zhang Yimou’s 20,000-Word Interview Reveals Secrets of Opening Ceremony,” Nanfang Zhoumou (Guangzhou), August 14, 2008