Pulgasari [DPRK 1985]

불가사리
Director: S. Shin
Cinematographer: M. Cho

Yes, it is a giant monster film from the DPRK. According to the director, from the ROK, it was made under duress after he was kidnapped for the purpose of making films. One might expect this film to be nothing more than a curiosity, but it is interesting to watch.

Some have accused Pulgasari of being a Godzilla rip-off, but it seems clear that it is not. Unlike Godzilla, Pulgasari is a benevolent monster brought to life by the dreams and blood of peasants who seek redress against their feudal landlords. This is really a film not about a monster, but about a peasant uprising assisted by a monster. It features several shots of peasant marches that resemble stylised images of the Long March, and it is clear that the peasant army progresses from being a small band of guerrillas to a large, regularised army. Like Growing Up in Battle, it depicts the suffering of the peasants and how they are forced into violence. So it is really a film about peasant revolution against feudalism.

Because it was made with the help of many Japanese staff who had experience with Japanese monster films, the style is reminiscent of that genre. Emphasis was obviously put on special effects and the highly stylised depiction of villains, peasants, and the monster. One also gets the sense occasionally that the film is laughing at itself, even stylistically, which would seem unimaginable in some other films from the DPRK.

What is really interesting is the symbolism attached to Pulgasari. He is a giant, invincible creature who accompanies the peasants into battle, helps them in their labour, and gives them hope to crush the aristocracy. But toward the end of the film he undergoes a curious dialectical inversion: having helped them defeat the aristocracy, his unquenchable hunger for iron leads him to start eating the tools and pots of the peasants themselves. Having liberated them, he becomes their enemy, and they must destroy him to stop his hunger driving the world to interminable war.

This seems too much like a metaphor to not be one, and there are two obvious ways of reading it. The first, which seems the most likely, is that Pulgasari is a metaphor for capitalism. That is, like the capitalist mode of production, he represents a great liberating influence over the peasants, leading them to a better life without feudalism. Like capital, it is his very hunger for growth that gives him the strength to defeat feudalism. But, like capital, his hunger for growth eventually becomes destructive, and turns on the very people he once liberated. So for the good of the people, capital must then be destroyed, because it cannot be restrained.

A second possible reading is that there is something more critical here, perhaps a sly suggestion by the director; Pulgasari could then represent not capital, but the Communist bureaucracy itself. Thus, the Communists aided the people in their liberation from Japan and from feudal rule; but, a critic might argue, they have become corrupt and a burden upon the people. However, obvious considerations militate against this interpretation. First, the film was apparently produced with direct bureaucratic approval. And second, given the socialist realist nature of many films from the DPRK, it is possible that audiences there would not have caught onto such a double metaphor anyway.

In any case, there is certainly a moral here about the people being the true protagonists in their own liberation. That is to say, it is most definitely not a cult of personality film. It fits with the observation made by one ethnographer that, in spite of any possible Confucian psychological holdovers, the Korean revolution imbued people with an idea that it was genuinely the people who made their own history. The film can also be read as an allegory about collective action; while Pulgasari is undoubtedly a great help to the people, possibly his main purpose is to inspire and unite them--in the end, it might be said, it was really the people who were responsible. And it also plays out the idea that a kind of cosmic justice will eventually come to the oppressed in return for their dreams; for Pulgasari himself is a gift of the gods--though again, this gift may actually read as the gift of hope. In any case, the metaphor is loose enough that it can be read in several ways, not just as some sort of metaphor for capitalism for pedagogical purposes.

There is also a fairly explicit depiction of torture and brutality under feudalism, as we also see in e.g. Growing Up in Battle or Michael the Brave. The peasants are not apparently fighting for any particular social order; they just want to be able to do their work, and they are being stopped from doing so by the landlords, who want to confiscate their tools to make them into weapons. So, rather than an idealistic vision being counterposed to feudalism, it seems the peasants, who are possibly inherently good and value work, are simply trying to release themselves from the fetters of those who would restrain them from acting on that value.

Basically this film is not anything hugely sophisticated, but it is refreshing compared to many other films from the DPRK, because it has a slightly more light-hearted and loose tone. It might have been an interesting experience for a child in the DPRK to have seen this after being raised on slightly duller fare.