Kim Hong-il (general)
Kim Hong-il (23 September 1898 – 8 August 1980) was a Korean independence activist and a general of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Korean War, who later became a diplomat and politician in South Korea. Born in North Pyongan, he did his early schooling in China and Korea, and had a brief career as a teacher before his connections with the nascent Korean independence movement led to his imprisonment. He fled into exile in China in 1918, and served in the Kuomintang's National Revolutionary Army from 1926 to 1948, following which he moved to the newly-independent South Korea to join the Republic of Korea Army. He commanded South Korea's I Corps during the first year of the Korean War, and was then sent to Taipei as South Korea's ambassador to the Republic of China, which by then had retreated to Taiwan. His assignment there ultimately lasted nine years. He returned to South Korea in 1960 following the April Revolution which ended the rule of Syngman Rhee, and served briefly as Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Park Chung-hee junta. He ran for the National Assembly, first unsuccessfully in 1960 and 1963, and was then elected in 1967 and became a major figure in the opposition New Democratic Party.
On the Art of the Cinema
After graduating from Kim Il-sung University in 1964, Kim Jong-il devoted himself to cultural, ideological and propaganda work at the Department of Organization and Guidance of the Central Committee of the party. Although Kim is known to have been privately interested in Hollywood films, he forbade discussion on foreign film concepts at the Aesthetic Review Meeting, an important annual film conference. After he had ordered the entire conference archive to be destroyed, Kim urged participants to be exclusively concerned with the teachings of Kim Il-sung and the party in creative work. Since then, Kim Jong-il's influence in film and literary administration grew, and he resisted liberal artistic influence from the de-Stalinizing Soviet Union. From 1968, Kim began to work on film adaptations of guerilla plays originating from the 1930s. Kim had personally guided the production of films, such as "Sea of Blood", (parts one and two, 1969), "The Fate of a Self-Defence Corps Man" (, 1970) and "The Flower Girl" (1972). Afterwards, Kim Jong-il began producing revolutionary operas. Kim had worked in the government arts administration for almost ten years by this time. He then wrote a series of essays based on speeches he had given to directors and screenwriters over the preceding five years, and published it as "On the Art of the Cinema" on April 11, 1973. It was his first major work. Through the rest of the 1970s, Kim continued to oversee cultural activities.