Comic: “Mme Choi and the Monsters” by Sheree Domingo and Patrick Spät – Kultur

A monster tale pitting cinema and politics against each other, and a grotesque, about a fan who becomes truly fanatical. Two monsters are involved, one mythical, the other political.

It begins in a shabby basement in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. With wild impatience, a burglar pulls tin cans from the shelves – all rolls of film. It’s 1976, pre-stream time, then film only existed in physical form, on celluloid, ninety minutes on about five reels, not easy to transport. Freed from their cans by the burglar in a hurry, the film strips meander very animatedly across the floor… “Behind the green door”, the porn classic with Marilyn Chambers, the man throws behind him in disgust, he has a James Bond rather casually put in his sack, because his real job – he comes from the very top – is to snag “Bulgasari”, the (South) Korean horror cult film from 1962. A last casual glance is given to the current worldwide hit “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. , then the man pulls away with his loot, through a tunnel it goes to the north of the divided country, to its capital Pyongyang. His client, Comrade Kim Jong-il, the beloved leader, “Sun of our Fatherland” awaits him there. And: the country’s top cinephile, he only has eyes for the women on screen and he’s really hot for “Bulgasari”. He embodies the voracious screen, he is the one monster of this book.

The other is the monster in this very film “Bulgasari”, iron-eating and therefore growing fast and wild, fantasy based on Korean myths – what is told about it in this book is a free vision of the Berlin artists Sheree Domingo and Patrick Spät: “A long time ago , when the tigers still smoked tobacco pipes …” The film is considered lost – did Kim have the original negatives stolen at the time? In 1985, at his behest, a remake was shot in North Korea, “Pulgasari”, the monster here is more like the Japanese Godzilla, it is voracious and unpredictable, but in a subversive way quite useful in the fight against tyranny.

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The tyrant Kim acts and resides in a glamorously absurd world of illusion, which is supposed to be reminiscent of the European royal courts, he governs with mean arbitrariness against his people, is purposeful only when it comes to the cinema – the book makes this eerie dialectic of the 20th century visible, in of power and cinema obsessions intertwine, the manipulation of masses in real life and those in front of the screen. Like any obsession, cinephilia is totalitarian, and the fanatical cinephilia of dictators is notorious: Hitler, Stalin, Kim. Dictatorship implies the disposal of all means, i.e. absolute artistic freedom. I have 15,000 movies, Kim claims, and I’ve seen every one of them. His favorite hero is Rambo. Finally, he practices the ultimate “Me Too” assault, has the screen woman he admires kidnapped.

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Choi Eun-hee is that star, together with her husband, the director Shin Sang-ok, she has delivered terrific box office hits – the dream couple of South Korean cinema. On January 22, 1978, she was kidnapped in Hong Kong and taken to Kim Jong-il’s empire, as was her husband a few weeks later. The two were slowly but relentlessly put under pressure to work for North Korea’s film industry, and for propaganda purposes, ostensibly of their own free will will. World conquest through cinema.

The insane story actually happened during the Cold War, and the book tells it with fascinating attention to detail, thanks to the tireless efforts of consultant Choo Young-Rong. The artist Sheree Domingo creates the spooky atmosphere with thick strokes and dingy forms, with bold, monochrome colors true crime in a fake world, that of cinema and totalitarian ideology. In the end, the glamor couple, sent to Vienna under the strictest control, risk a high-risk escape attempt… The ending is quite depressing in terms of cinema and cinephilia. From now on, the beloved leader has to be content with silly video games, in which he tends to lose out: Cursed monster!