Chen Bo'er

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.

Chen wrote screenplays and oversaw, directed, and produced animations. Animations at this time consisted, as Te Wei explained in a 2001 interview, of paper-cut, paper-folded, and puppet animation, as well as hand-drawn animation in the style of Disney's Fantasia.

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

Here, Chen discusses the effects of the male gaze in cinema long before the term had been officially coined by Mulvey in 1975. 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:

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. 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.

Her work at the studio had a large impact on the representation of women. In 1950, three of the fifteen films produced by the Northeast Film Studio had strong revolutionary female heroines, and five had female leads.

In Beijing in 1950, Chen established the Beijing Performing Art Research Institute which would later become the Beijing Film Academy – the first national film school in China.

After aiding in the transformation of Manchuria Film to the Northeast Film Studio – which would later move again and become the Changchun Film Studio in spring 1949 – Chen was sent to oversee productions in 1947. In spring 1947, her husband, Yuan Muzhi, was made director of the Northeast Film Studio while Chen was made its Party secretary.

In late 1949, the animation department was moved to the Shanghai Film Studio.

In summer 1949, Chen was sent to Beijing to be the art director for the Central Film Bureau of which her husband was also made head. When there were discussions here about whether Daughters of China was a qualified film with enough artistic quality to be sent to Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Chen threatened to resign. Because of her intense defence of the film, it succeeded in being chosen for the film festival.

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 was a pioneer of Chinese animation, and was a major player in the creation and leadership of the Northeast Film Studio and Shanghai Film Studio. Chen directed Huangdi meng (Emperor’s Dream or Dreaming to be an Emperor) in 1947. This film was a satire of Chiang Kai-shek and George Marshall, and painted Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek as a stooge propping up American Imperialism. In that same year, she directed the seventeen-episode documentary Minzhu dongbei (The Democratic Northeast).

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

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

In her work, Chen also encouraged and helped other women artists with directing, screenwriting, and producing films. Though she receives no credits, she helped co-author one of China's strongest feminist propaganda films of the 1940s, Daughters of China. This film was one of the films that eschewed the 'male gaze' – a sexist filmic eye for which Chen held great contempt, as she had made clear in her earlier writings.

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.

In 1938, Chen left Shanghai and settled in Yan'an where she would establish her lasting cultural influence. 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 1937, Chen joined the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Chen would go on to play central roles in China's early socialist film sphere.

Because of Chen's national pride, she saw to it that the animations had definitively Chinese characteristics. Thus, she made sure the team working on Emperor's Dream (1937) used the Peking style of opera. Chen also gave Mochinaga Tadahito – a Japanese animator who had a huge impact on Chinese mainland animation – his Chinese name. This was customary so that the credits on films had no Japanese names, which Chinese audiences could find offensive. She named him Fang Ming, and gave his wife Ayako the name Li Guang; together, these translate to bright light, which "signifi[ed Chen's] hope that the future and direction of Chinese animation would be very bright."

Zheng Wang notes that one of Chen's more famous works, "The Female-Centered Film and the Male-Centered Society," seems to almost anticipate the work of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey by decades. 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):

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Chen appeared in several films over her career as an actress. In 1934, she appeared in Qingchun xian [On Youth] (1934). She held a starring role as Li in 1934 sound film, Taoli jie [Plunder of Peach and Plum] which was known also as The Fate of the Graduates – this is one of China's earliest talking movies. In 1936, she starred alongside fellow political activist Yuan Muzhi, who would one day become her real-life husband, in Unchanged Heart in Life and Death, a revolutionary propaganda film. The film – as many of those in which Chen starred and on which she worked– is as equally entertaining as it is a realist, anti-government film, subtly hiding its revolutionary aspects to avoid Nationalist government’s censorship. In 1935, Chen worked on Huishou dangnian [Remembering the Past]. Chen also held a role playing a girl scout in Babai zhuangshi [800 Heroes] (or sometimes translated to 800 Brave Soldiers or 800 Warriors) in 1938.

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

Chen also acted in several street theatre productions in the 1930s. The left took up public theatre as a way to increase resistance among urban populations, including student voices and movements, especially in Shanghai and Nanjing as these were considered modern cultural cities. As an attractive young woman and rising celebrity, Chen's performances garnered a great amount of media attention – especially in Put Down Your Whip in 1937. As the daughter in this play, Chen "embodied, according to a report in The Shenbao, a new femininity in fulfilling her responsibility as a national citizen." Also in 1937, she starred in Baowei lugouqiao (Protecting Luguo Bridge), an anti-Japanese stage drama. Before Yan'an became a film studio – a transition in which Chen was instrumental – she staged and produced many anti-Japanese plays and dramas here.

It is clear that institutional support had an incredible impact on the history of women's filmmaking in China. Wang Ping, Wang Shaoyan, and Dong Kena were three other women filmmakers in the 1930s and 40s whose cultural contributions to socialist feminist film also began with institutional endorsement. Chen's initial endorsement and hard work allowed for future generations of women directors, such as these, to have successful and culturally significant careers.

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). She graduated from Shanghai Art University in 1929.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Chen Bo'er (Chinese: 陳波兒; pinyin: Chén Bō'ér; 1907–1951) was a prolific and revolutionary left-wing Chinese actress and filmmaker in the 1930s and 40s before her premature death in 1951. She began her activism work in Shanghai, writing essays for magazines and newspapers, where she expounded her beliefs about feminism, women's rights, and national salvation. It was also in Shanghai that Chen became a notable celebrity, starring in films and theatre productions and advocating for leftwing pro-communist revolution. In Yan'an, then de facto capital of Communist where she established a film studio backed by the Communist government, she produced anti-Japanese theatre and drama performances, and assisted in screenwriting, directing, and producing. She was the first female director endorsed by the Communist government. She later moved to Changchun to work as Party secretary of the Northeast Film Studio, where she was a pioneer of Chinese animation. In Beijing, Chen was made art department director of the Central Film Bureau. She advocated for the establishment of the People's Republic of China's first national film school, the Beijing Film Academy. Chen Bo'er was an ardent feminist, whose work paved the way for women filmmakers and revolutionaries in China.