Author: Jie Li, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
About the book
How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals.
Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies.
Cinematic Guerrillas considers cinema’s meanings for revolution and nation building; successive generations of projectionists; workers, peasants, and soldiers; women and ethnic minorities; and national leaders, local cadres, and cultural censors. By reading diverse, vivid, and often surprising accounts of moviegoing, Li excavates Chinese media theories that provide a critical new perspective on world cinema.
ISBN 9780231206273
December, 2023 Columbia University Press
360 Pages
“In 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 China
“Cinematic 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 Translation