“The story of Kim Kum-sun has haunted me since 1958. Narrating it in Le Lièvre de Patagonie in 2009 probably reactivated my desire to make a movie about it, readers of the book told me about it, and François Margolin, the producer, whose son was mine's best friend (Felix, who died of cancer on January 13, 2017, at the age of 23) convinced me to try the adventure, to go back there, but this time to shoot Claude there.” Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare.
Long inhabited by a fiction project that he planned to entrust to the director of Steven Spielberg, Lanzmann finally decided to return to the tracks of his North Korean idyll to tell his story, in front of the camera. In Napalm, the traditional Lanzmann method is reversed, the director presents himself as the testifying subject, unlike his other films, where he appears as an interviewer.
“Das is das Platz.” Yes, this is the place.” Citing Simon Srebnik, the first protagonist of Shoah, Lanzmann recalls, on a bridge that has remained unchanged, his appointment with Kim Kun Sun, a North Korean nurse, whom he met in 1958.
1958 - five years after the devastating Korean War, Kim Il Sun, North Korean head of state, invites Western public figures on an official visit. Among them, Armand Gatti, Jean-Claude Bonnardot, Pascal Clark, Francis Lemarque, Claude Lanzmann...
From his numerous visits across the country, Lanzmann remains marked by an unprecedented encounter: the nurse Kim Kun Sun. However, the young woman and the French delegate had only one word in common, which each of them understood:
“Napalm”
“And she quickly discovered a breast that was as beautiful as a pear, which was heavy. We wanted to touch it. And under the breast, a big black bar of burnt flesh. And she said only one word: napalm.” Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare.
“Napalm”, American bombings then dumped 3.2 million liters of napalm on the North Korean peninsula causing 4 million victims. Lanzmann shows us archive images of the bombings and its victims. Images that directly echo those of today's North Korea, “the last bastion of Stalinism in the world”, which seems frozen in time, on July 27, 1953, the date when the war ended.
“It is a very harsh criticism of this totally anti-democratic dictatorship. But I did not want us to forget the savage bombings of the Americans [...]. Because if we ignore them, we understand nothing about today's situation, about relationships with Americans. It's also a bit complex movie because it shows the end of time.”
Claude Lanzmann shot the film without permission to film in North Korea, a country that remains one of the most closed in the world. The only permission obtained was to shoot a movie about taekwondo. Some of these images are visible in the movie. Each other plan represents a victory over the permanent control of the regime's political police.
Finally, what gives the movie Napalm its uniqueness is that it is the only film by Claude Lanzmann that does not touch on the history of the Jewish people, which was the main subject of his life as a filmmaker with Why Israel, Shoah, Tsahal, and all the movies that come out of it.
