Description
Book SynopsisCinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda.
Trade ReviewIn this groundbreaking book, Jie Li delivers a fascinating account of socialist cinema. Reviving the scene of mobile projection and reception, Li reveals the human as central to technology, infrastructure, and energy. By taking propaganda history seriously, Li makes a major contribution to global media theory and archaeology.
Cinematic Guerrillas will reverberate across multiple fields in the years to come. -- Weihong Bao, author of
Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in ChinaCinematic Guerillas is both a bumper research harvest and a thrilling read. The memories of Mao-era mobile projectionists and audiences make us understand and feel how the cinema enchanted its audiences with revolutionary spirit—and how it made them willing to pay the heavy price of utopian dreams. -- Chris Berry, coeditor of
Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of TranslationCinematic Guerrillas offers an ingenious exploration of Mao-era China. Jie Li considers state messages conveyed in film, embedding them in a physical mediascape of itinerant projectionists who hauled equipment, cash-strapped collectives who paid for local screenings, and villagers who flocked to open-air showings for entertainment and respite. Perceptive, hilarious, and heartbreaking. -- Gail Hershatter, author of
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective PastHow do you turn a scattered population into a revolutionary mass? Drawing on extensive archival and oral research, Li depicts the work of thousands of mobile projectionists traveling all over China training rural peoples for political struggle. A tour de force of historical reconstruction and theoretical intervention, this book shows how the Chinese revolution was also a media revolution dependent on the logistical work of ‘cinematic guerillas.’ -- Brian Larkin, author of
Signal and Noise: Infrastructure, Media, and Urban Culture in NigeriaCinematic Guerrillas is cultural history at its best. Not only does it provide an engaging account of the culture of the young and aspiring PRC, but it also lays out an impeccable method to study socialist culture, straddling media studies and political economy to critically analyze some fundamental features of its very effective propaganda. -- Laikwan Pang, author of
The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China's Cultural RevolutionJie Li’s research on Maoist cinema as a spirit medium reveals the constant struggle to keep revolutionary enthusiasm high after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949. Her research on mobile projectionists brings out the complexity of working with rural audiences who sought the entertainment value in films meant to be understood ideologically. This book is a fine contribution to the study of cinema under socialism. -- Wendy Larson, author of
Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of CultureThrough its marvelous narrative,
Cinematic Guerrillas makes a compelling case that reception constitutes the core of cinema’s function and value . . . What Li manages to both uncover and produce is a rich and richly contradictory history of Chinese cinema, or, more precisely, of cinema in China, detailing in its intricacies how projectionists and audiences became key conduits of the “media revolution” that others might more commonly call the “Chinese revolution.” -- Bruno Guaraná * Film Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Revolutionary Spirit Mediumship
Part I: Projectionists as Media Infrastructure1. Cinematic Nation-Building: Media Networks and Spiritual Battlegrounds
2. Mobile Projectionists and the Things They Carried
3. The Three Sisters Movie Team: Projecting Models, Model Projectionists, and Female Projectionists
4. The Cost of Spiritual Food: A Ritual Economy of Rural Cinema
Part II: Audiences as Creative Agents5. The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema
6. Guerrilla Cinema and Guerrilla Reception
7. Transcultural Guerrillas: The Reception of Foreign Films in Socialist China
8. Poisonous Weeds and Censorship as Exorcism
Epilogue
Appendix: Interviews
Notes
Index
