Enter Pyongyang

Many videos and photo projects promise a glimpse of life inside North Korea “as you’ve never seen it”, but I believe this video by JT Singh and Rob Whitworth actually delivers the goods. It’s one of those 3-minute time lapse portraits of a city that are in vogue, with the North Korean capital Pyongyang as its subject.

Time lapse videos are interesting because they show movement over long periods of time. The Western conception of North Korea is of a place frozen in time, so the time lapse view is highly instructive. (thx, jeff)

Update: Sam Potts, who travelled to Pyongyang and North Korea in 2012 and took these photos, finds this “deeply fake as filmmaking”. From his Twitter acct:

Re the time lapse of Pyongyang video, it feels deeply fake as filmmaking, to me. Thus I mistrust it as a document of what real PY is like. You don’t see any of the details to that reveal, even in PY, how very poor a country it is. Some of those buses didn’t have tail lights. They had blocks of wood painted red to look like tail lights. And the library computers are incredibly poor quality.

Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker also noted the propaganda-ish nature of the video. At the very least, the video is a dual reminder of the limitations of time lapse video in showing the whole story and of how manipulative attractively packaged media can be.

• JT Singh
• North Korea
• Rob Whitworth
• time lapse
• video