Book Review: Aim High in Creation!

[osprey_archer]

I really want to be able to recommend Anna Broinowski's Aim High in Creation, because once Broinowski actually gets to North Korea and starts interviewing people involved with the film industry there, it's actually quite engrossing. She connects with them on a personal level, as fellow artists (Broinowski herself is a documentary filmmaker), which gives a view of North Koreans (and North Koreans who still live in North Korea, not defectors) as human beings, which we in the West don't often see.

However, I can't recommend it, because it takes nearly half the book to get to North Korea, and the first half is not very interesting. There's a lot of stuff about Broinowski trying to make travel arrangements, Broinowski musing on her failed marriage - it feels mean to say "I don't care about her failed marriage," but really. I'm reading this book because I'm interested in North Korea.

I've become very wary of books that try to mix personal memoir with investigative reporting. Some authors can pull it off - with Bill Bryson or Sarah Vowell, the travelogue is always just as interesting as their purported topic - but usually I end up getting impatient with the memoir part. No, dude, your not-very-insightful navel gazing about your own personal problems is not nearly as interesting as North Korea or the Stasi archives in former East Germany or that book thief this book is purportedly about.

There's a general human tendency to find our own problems fascinating, and not to realize that outsiders will not necessarily share that fascination - that in fact if you want to take pages and pages of a book that's technically about something else to talk about your problems, you'd better make damn sure that you've got something entertaining and insightful to say.

And in fact Vowell and Bryson, it occurs to me, don't write about their problems; they're telling stories about fun things that happened to them on their research trips, which requires less emotional investment from the reader.

In this case Broinowski's forays into memoir are especially frustrating because I suspect it's there at least in part to pad out the book to an appropriate length, and Broinowksi had another and much more interesting possibility for that padding at her very fingertips. She could have gone into much, much more detail about the North Korean films that she loves so much that she made her own North Korean style filmlet to protest the building of a natural gas well in her neighborhood. (This is in fact her reason for going to North Korea: she wanted advice on how to make a North Korean style movie from the horse's mouth, as it were. I suspect that this is why she got such interesting interviews from the North Koreans: who doesn't love to be asked about their expertise?)

But instead we don't get much detail about North Korean movies at all, certainly no in-depth reviews, and with a couple of exceptions she doesn't actually seem to like the movies that much in the first place. Such a disappointment! I love movie reviews, all movie reviews, even (especially?) of movies I haven't seen, and I would have loved to get some thoughtful gushing about North Korean movies.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm fascinated by the notion of wanting to make a North Korean-style movie. What was it about North Korean movies that made her want to make a protest movie in that style? I haven't got enough sense of film to know about different styles of protest film!

(And yeah, I am not at all a fan of authors musing about their personal problems in a book that's supposed to be about something else.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have a possibly-unfair suspicion that the whole North Korean style protest documentary thing was a ruse to get her an in with the North Korean film industry, but if that's so then she really committed to this ruse: she made the protest film and everything, as part of a larger documentary about North Korean film-making and gas pipelines in Sydney.

Part of me wants to watch it, just to see how this mixture of topics work out, but I'm also not sure I care enough.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

But I mean, what makes a North Korean protest documentary different from a French one or an American one?.... Also, since North Korea is a dictatorship, we're presumably talking about state-sanctioned protest documentaries about... what, the United States? Or South Korea?

I'm just boggling over this. Yeah, it may well have been a ruse--how could a state-sponsored protest film be something to emulate?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think I didn't explain very well; she's making a protest documentary with a segment based on North Korean propaganda films (which I guess means North Korean films in general). It's still a barmy idea, but it is at least based on a genre that North Korea actually has.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

No--I think it was just me being dense. I get it now!

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I think it's ok not to care about a writer's failed marriage if you are reading a book about North Korean film, or if the writer has otherwise failed to make you care about her failed marriage. Failed marriage sympathy has to be earned! at least when it comes to putting things in books. I'm not wary of the mix, but maybe that's just because I haven't read enough nonfiction to have an opinion.

I'm disappointed to hear that there isn't more about North Korean filmmaking!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

There's another book that may have some stuff about North Korean films, A Kim Jong Il Production, so I may read that one next. This book whetted my appetite and totally failed to satisfy it!

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the trick of a good travelog-cum-memoir writer is to know where a small amount of personal detail adds a dimension of interest, and to know how much to put in there. It's like spicing food - none and it's bland, too much and it's inedible.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The good ones make it look so effortless, but it's clearly much harder than it looks. I think a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between things that they think are interesting because it happened to them, and things that other people will find interesting too.