Chen Bo'er

Chen in 1935.

Chen, née Chen Shunhua (Chinese: 陳舜華), was born in the small town of Anbu, Chaozhou County, Guangdong Province. Though Chen's grave marks her birth year as 1910, her biographer Wang Yongfang uses the year 1907 based on Chen's personal archives.[1] She was born to a wealthy family, and was deeply loved by both her father and concubine mother, but greatly disliked by her grandmother and father's first wife. Nonetheless, her elite status allowed her to go – as was customary for children of wealthy families – to a larger city for high school.

Leaving behind Anbu, Chen studied in Nanjing and Shanghai, where she learned to speak English on top of her native Cantonese and middle school Mandarin. Despite being a good student, excelling especially in the arts and essay writing, Chen was expelled in 1927 for protesting against the Shanghai Massacre.[1]

Chen was encouraged by leftist ex-cadet friends, Mei Gongyi and Ren Posheng, to go back to school, and in 1928 Chen returned to Shanghai where she joined the Shanghai Arts College. It was here that Chen became a member of the Communist-organized and leftist Shanghai Art Drama Troupe (SADT).[1] She graduated from Shanghai Art University in 1929.

In 1937, Chen joined the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Chen would go on to play central roles in China's early socialist film sphere.

Before becoming an integral part of Shanghai, Yan'an, and the Northeast's revolutionary film worlds, Chen made her living writing essays which expressed her beliefs in feminism and socialism through the late-1920s and early-30s. Chen wrote for the well-read newspaper, the Shanghai Daily (The Shenbao), on her patriotic and feminist positions, as well as other magazines.

Zheng Wang notes that one of Chen's more famous works, "The Female-Centered Film and the Male-Centered Society,"[3] seems to almost anticipate the work of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey by decades.[1] In this 1936 essay published in Women's Life magazine, Chen parses and explores the complex psychological consequences on female audiences watching imbalanced gendered power dynamics. She is thus quoted (as Zheng Wang translates):

In a male-centered society, politics, the economy, and all the ruling powers are in men's hands. Thus all the laws, morality, customs, and norms are shaped by men's biased positions. Aesthetic views are no exception...Women in such a society have unconsciously conformed to its demands. For instance, using makeup was not originally in women's nature, but in order to cater to the preferences of a male-centered society it has become female nature. This explains why female audiences have similar views toward female stars as that of male audiences. The difference is that the male audience's view expresses the direct preference out of a dominator's psychology, while the female audience's view arises from the psychology of the dominated to unconsciously cater to the preferences of the dominator.[1][3]

Here, Chen discusses the effects of the male gaze in cinema long before the term had been officially coined by Mulvey in 1975.[4] This gaze would be something that Chen, as a filmmaker, would strive to fight against. She would go on in her own films, and those to which she contributed, to show strong female heroines, and be a key figure in Chinese feminist film development. Chen ends this essay with a provocative revolutionary conclusion:

"Women's pursuit of freedom and equality requires the efforts of all walks of life. If film cannot shoulder the responsibility of guidance but is mistaken as an ideal haven and leads people to escape from reality, we would rather have no film!"[1]

Zheng Wang notes that this ending is meant to be ironic, although it nonetheless makes clear the intensity and earnestness of Chen's feminist and leftist beliefs.

Still from Babai zhuangshi [800 Heroes] (1938)

Though Chen was initially hesitant to work in film due to the sexist treatment of female actresses by the media, she nonetheless felt that film had great potential for feminist activism and leftist revolution. She believed that her participation in the film world could create an affirmative change in the popular media image of Chinese women.[2] Her work engendered a shift in this image, from victim and sexual object to strong heroines and leading protagonists. Chen achieved her first film successes in 1934 and would continue to work in film for the rest of her short life.

In 1938, Chen left Shanghai and settled in Yan'an where she would establish her lasting cultural influence.[9] Her time here was one of the most important moments of her career, and certainly much of today's literature which engages with Chen's life and work places an emphasis on Yan'an. Because her life was cut short by illness, a majority of it was spent here.

In 1946, Chen managed to convince the Communist government to establish a film studio in the Communist base of Yan'an.[9] Here, she was part of what was known as the Yan'an Film Troupe.[10]

Scriptwriting and directing

Here, Chen was an incredibly successful female director and screenwriter. Much of Chen's work in Yan'an was in leadership positions, as well as scriptwriting. In 1945, Chen wrote and directed Comrade, You've Taken the Wrong Road.[11] Chen was the scriptwriter for Light Spreads Everywhere, filmed in 1948; earlier, she had written Labour Hero of the Border Area (Communist occupied zone), but this was never filmed.[12]

Chen on the cover of Star Bi-Monthly Magazine (1930s)

Chen's directorial debut was Working Hero in the Communist Base (1946), though she was unable to complete the film because of the Civil War.[9]

In 1931, Chen and Ren Posheng were married in Hong Kong.[1]

Together Chen and Ren had two sons, though one of her children died suddenly and tragically. In his biography of Chen, Wang Yongfang explains that the one year-old died of a sudden illness. However, in an interview with professor Zheng Wang – who writes on Chen Bo'er extensively in her thorough chapter "Chen Bo'er and the Feminist Paradigm of Socialist Film" – Wang Yongfang reveals that the death was infanticide. In 1935, Ren beat the baby to death.[1] After this incident, Chen hired a nanny to take care of her other son, and also began to take him with her to her busy work events rather than leave him with his father.[1] Due to this tragedy, Ren became estranged from Chen. He was also estranged from her because of his involvement in the CCP, where he was unable to communicate with her for long periods of time.[1]

Yuan Muzhi, revolutionary and Chen Bo'er's husband

Chen found out in 1946 that Ren had remarried, and in 1947, Chen married her activism and film peer and old friend – the filmmaker, leftist revolutionary, and actor Yuan Muzhi. They had worked on several films together before being married in Harbin.[11] After the revolution, in 1949 when the People's Republic of China was founded, the couple played important roles in both the ministry of Culture as well as the Northeast Film Studio.[15]

Chen Bo'er suffered from an undiagnosed heart disease. Living in a Loessal cave in the "desolate rural perimeter" of Yan'an, Chen had little medical attention.[1] She often fainted while working, but would get up quickly and continue. In fact, Chen was so strongly devoted to her work both as an activist and filmmaker that in 1951 she stopped off in Shanghai while on a work trip back from Guangzhou to discuss critiques of the film The Life of Wu Xun, despite being obviously weak and tired. Only hours after the meeting she was hospitalized and passed away from heart failure.[1]

In her death, Chen's key contributions to China's film industry and leftist revolution did not mask or overshadow her feminist stance and strides in women's liberation. Many mourned her death as a major "loss to our party, people, and women."[16][1]

Because of her major cultural impact, it is striking to note that Chen Bo'er's life story has been largely erased from history.[1] There is little literature about her specifically and her life is given little to no importance in film studies, both in China and elsewhere.[1] Zheng Wang argues that this is "emblematic of the erasure of the socialist feminist cultural front."[1] Other scholars point to the emphasis on the cooperative and communal nature of the projects on which she worked.[2] In general, however, scholars who have written on Chen Bo'er agree that film history of the period in which Chen worked focuses on men; other female filmmakers alongside Chen Bo'er, such as Tang Cheng, Lin Wenxiao, and Duan Xiaoxuan, have garnered significantly less recognition in recent years.[2]

The following articles and chapters are recommended further reading about Chen Bo'er's life, career, and politics. These works are referenced multiple times in the above article, and engage with Chen Bo'er somewhat more extensively than some other references noted (which mention Chen only obliquely):

Du, Daisy Yan. "Mochinaga Tadahito and Animated Filmmaking in Early Socialist China" in Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s–1970s. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. Print. pp. 68–113.

Lent, John A, and Xu Ying. "Animation: From Hand-Crafted Experimentation to Digitalization" in Comics Art in China. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. E-book. pp. 150–194.

Tang, Max Xiaobing. "Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art." Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 18, 2016. pp. 21–50. E-journal.

Semsel, George Stephen. (editor) Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People's Republic. Praeger, 1987. Print.

Wang, Zheng. "Chen Bo'er and the Feminist Paradigm of Socialist Film." in Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1964. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print. pp. 143–169.

• Chen Bo'er at MTime (in Chinese)