Filming Ideologies

Abstract

As a young man growing up in Shandong province in the 1980s and 1990s, Chao Ren witnessed great changes in China as it transformed from a communist empire to the world's second largest economy. As a filmmaker in China for more than 12 years, five years spent as a lecturer in directing at the Beijing Film Academy, he began to research the decades of his father's generation, the decades from post WW II through to 1966, and the ideological reconstructions that led to these enormous changes. Through the subtext of ideological struggle within mainstream cinema, Ren is seeking to explicate the nature of competing ideologies by revealing how this struggle impacted on cinema practices, techniques and content. Titled 'The Terminator of China: Between Light and Dark' (2013), interviews with scholars are intercut with sequences from eight carefully selected, highly successful mainstream films to illustrate key moments in the struggle.