Digital Cinematic Apparatus and Spectator Subjectivity to Explore the Communication Behaviours in Self-Media Platforms

Since 1949, the PRC has used cinema as a key instrument for shaping national identity and communicating state narratives. It tracks the changing forms of how filmmakers imagined a national ideology — through structures, aesthetics, cinematography, and technology — from 2001 to 2023 in the cinema. This research examines how cinema operates as a mode of ideological interpretation by analyzing how it activates certain spectator subjectivity and national discourses through the lens of Baudry’s Cinematic Apparatus Theory and Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) Theory. Conducted as a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 peer-reviewed articles coupled with contextual analysis of representative films that usher in some of the film industry’s most significant ideological transformations, this study has various objectives. The preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement was used to inform the SLR. The contextual analysis investigates those films against the backdrop of a wider socio-political context, including the ideologies that they convey and the impact of state policies, censorship structures and the influence of international film history upon their ideology. It explores film making techniques such as mise-en-scene, editing, visual symbolism, soundscape and digital effects and develops explicit and implicit ideological structures. The results suggest the ideological complexity and dynamism of the Chinese cinema, its changing nature from overt and didactic to rhizomatic and commercially embedded. The study extends Chinese cinema research beyond ideology, highlighting cultural negotiation and socio-political reflection across two periods.