Awards

• Winner of Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation 2024

Overview

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.

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Reviews

Jie 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 <i>Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture</i> Li offers us a cultural history at its best. Not only does it provide an engaging account of an indicative 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 <i>The Art of Cloning: Creative Production during China's Cultural Revolution</i> 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 <i>Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation</i> Cinematic 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 <i>The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past</i>

Jie 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 <i>Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture</i> Li offers us a cultural history at its best. Not only does it provide an engaging account of an indicative 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 <i>The Art of Cloning: Creative Production during China's Cultural Revolution</i> 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 <i>Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation</i>

Jie 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 <i>Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture</i>

Author Information

Jie Li is professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University. Her books include Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (2016), and Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (2020).

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