CINEMA AND IDEOLOGY: LOOKING AT THE EASTERN MURDERER FROM A WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Although it is not as old as the place it occupies in human history, the place that the phenomenon of violence occupies in cinema dates back to ancient times. Accordingly, while violent stories feed the cinema; On the other hand, in almost every mainstream movie, the subject of violence is condemned by the applicable laws, religious rules or moral norms. In this regard, the story of a serial killer who committed brutal murders in the chronology of the last years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the novel The Killer Department (1993), written by Robert Cullen, attracted a lot of attention. For this reason, the research universe of the study includes the movies Citizen X (1995), Evilenko (2004) and Child 44 (2015), which are inspired by Cullen’s story. Another common feature of the films in question is that they were all adapted to cinema by western production companies. On the other hand Citizen X (1995), which tells the story of the murders committed by a serial killer named Andrei R. Chikatilo, makes references to the relationship between cinema and ideology due to its approach to an eastern killer from a western perspective and its dramatic narrative constructed within the framework of cold war rhetoric. Because the western descriptions featured in the film regarding the source of violence reveal the relationship between cinema and ideology, and the Soviet ideology is indirectly condemned due to the dominant perspective in the dramatic narrative of the film. It has been determined that the dominant perspective in the dramatic narrative of the film condemned the Soviet ideology due to western definitions regarding the source of violence.