Footage from Pyongyang has emerged swiftly and is remarkable for its variety, showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un smiling and shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and giving a tour of the capital of one of the world’s most inaccessible countries in near real time.
The Putin-Kim summit provided an unusually rapid glimpse into the situation in North Korea.
For those who follow the Kim family’s three-generation rule, coverage of the Kim-Putin meeting this week, with footage released only by the two governments’ respective propaganda agencies, represents an extraordinary concentration of attention on a country where footage that hasn’t been tiresomely scrutinized and edited and feels even the slightest bit improvised is rare.
They marched down the red carpet at Kim Il-sung Square, named for the current leader’s grandfather and founding father. They gazed upon throngs of children holding balloons. They inspected a military parade and gazed upon crowds waving pom-poms. They also saw groups of North Koreans but were not shown interacting with them. Judging by past examples, they were likely closely vetted before approaching the site.
The images were vivid and abundant, but they represented the expected output of an experienced propaganda apparatus.
Far more striking were the glimpses in between, which were also carefully orchestrated but revealed a little more about North Korea and its leader than most of the images, which varied widely from stills and videos produced by Russian and North Korean state media.
Here, Kim Jong Un shows Putin a bust of the Russian leader as a gift; here, the two leaders embrace, admire horses and Korean Pungsan dogs, lean together for casual conversation and laugh at a “gala concert”; and here, cuts to backdrops of the state dinner, including camera dollies, an entrance room for the leaders, and outtake-style shots not often seen in North Korean domestically produced footage.
One of the most striking scenes was a Kremlin pool video taken just before Putin’s arrival in Pyongyang. Silhouetted against the airport gate and holding a bright red welcome sign behind him, Kim Jong Un was shown pacing the tarmac with his hands behind his back, waiting for Putin to arrive. For a moment, it was only natural that Kim Jong Un seemed less like the veneered leader of an autocratic regime and more like a weary man waiting for a flight after dark.
Perhaps most remarkable is the sense that all of this is being communicated to the world in near real time, primarily through Russian pooled imagery. North Korea’s own images typically portray its leader and country as awkward, stiff and slightly out of sync, with photographs only emerging long after the events occurred.
It also comes at a cost: images from North Korea’s main propaganda agency, the Korean Central News Agency, are sometimes digitally altered before being sent out and are subject to rigorous review before being used.
One reason this week’s photos were so fascinating is the occasional glimpse of spontaneity. The vast majority of photos coming out of North Korea feel staged, because so many of them are. Kim Jong Un is typically surrounded by people who are awkward and submissive, just like his father and grandfather were. And Kim Jong Un himself often looks awkward.
But these frames and footage sometimes seemed to lack that sense of set-piece amid the week’s fast-paced events, and rather than reinforcing the image of North Korea as a hermit state, it ended up looking more like any other place.
Photos and videos can distance us. They can bring us closer. They can humanize us. They can show many places that only a few have seen. And sometimes, together, photos and videos can offer small revelations about a place, its people, or even its leaders.
Photos and videos from Pyongyang this week can tell us a little more about what’s going on in North Korea, even if that wasn’t the primary intent of the propagandists who produced them.
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, served as The Associated Press’ Asia Pacific news director from 2014 to 2018 and made multiple visits to North Korea in that role. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/anthonyted.
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