Aurelia Dochnal
Cinematic Guerillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China by Jie Li. Columbia University, 2023, 360 pp., $35
When Mao Zedong declared his extermination campaign against sparrows in 1957, media across China mobilized the people for war. In urban movie theaters and at outdoor projections, the documentary Besieging Sparrows (围剿麻雀) (1958) instructed viewers in the art of sparrow-slaughter. Trekking across jungles and rivers, projectionists laden with machinery brought film to the masses. In less than four years, 2.1 billion birds were massacred.
The Great Sparrow Massacre (and its extension, the Four Pests Campaign) became “a nationwide rite of passage through the crucible of collective violence,” writes Jie Li, professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. In Mao’s China, the sparrow was the enemy as well as an example. One of Mao’s favorite phrases was “sparrow warfare” (麻雀战术), a guerrilla tactic in which noise was the primary weapon. Children, raised by anti-sparrow cinema, would become Red Guards ready to employ “sparrow warfare” techniques against class enemies.
Li writes that “the Chinese revolution was a media revolution.” The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 initiated an unprecedented nationwide media network of film projectionists and radio broadcasters. Media became the most important pedagogical tool in Maoist nation-building. Li’s new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, traces a history of film projectionists and their audiences from the 1940s onwards. She excavates the links between cinematic mediation and spiritual mediumship, guerrilla movie projection and guerrilla warfare, and audience reception and ritual participation. Cinematic Guerrillas includes all of the people involved in Maoist propaganda networks: onscreen guerrilla fighters in revolutionary films; mobile projectionists conducting screenings in remote villages; and audience members whose guerrilla reception tactics often challenged or subverted the intended effects of propaganda films. By focusing on these guerrilla subjects, Li challenges the dominant modes of film history, which is often studied from an elite vantage point, tracking auteurs, actors, and their films. Li charts a grassroots history of Chinese cinema, tracing its development through generations of projectionists from the pioneers of the 1940s to 21st century China’s digital projectionists. In Li’s account of Maoist China, it is film projectionists and audiences who hold creative agency in their cinematic experiences.
Both film projectionists and audiences participated in what Li calls “revolutionary spirit mediumship,” a term that denotes the ritualistic, quasi-religious aspects of film screenings in the Mao era. Li argues that “cinema enhanced Mao’s sacred aura and multiplied the altar of his personality cult,” creating new religiosities in a spiritual landscape where religion had been condemned as counter-revolutionary. It was Mao’s image that attracted the most viewers and received the most applause at screenings. And it was the projectionists that acted as mediums between the audience (or congregation) and the propaganda (or proselytization).
Li centers her analysis of the physical experience of rural moviegoing around “hot noise,” a jarring and literal translation of the term renao (热闹) which is commonly rendered “liveliness” or “spectacle.” “Hot noise” foregrounds the multisensory quality of outdoor cinema. It also recalls the hustle and bustle that surrounded religious rituals. Screenings were frequently held inside temples, churches, and other spaces of worship. Some villagers mistook projectionists for shamans who could conjure up images. Projectionist troupes were greeted with feasts and conviviality that echoed religious celebrations. Lantern slides, transparent glass images projected onto the screen usually accompanied with clappers, traditional Chinese percussion, were often shown before the screening to clarify the film’s meaning and celebrate local model workers. Projectionists virtuosically performed these extracinematic tasks, handcrafting lantern slides and performing pre-screening speeches. Their embodied presence and cinematic mediumship defined the screening experience. Extrafilmic guidance was particularly important in “criticism screenings” of “poisonous weed” films: films deemed counterrevolutionary by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and political leader. These were shown to “vaccinate” audiences against western and right-wing ideas and aesthetics. “Bitter films,” depicting pre-1949 injustices, were also shown to rouse audiences’ indignation, transforming the movie-viewing ritual into a sort of collective exorcism. While ghosts and spirits were officially banned as superstition, these filmic rituals conjured up omnipresent ghouls and demons from the “Old Society” for the audience to combat.
Physical audience participation, which Li calls “embodied mediation,” was particularly important in the context of war films like Besieging Sparrows. But it also presented audiences with an opportunity for defiance. Guerrilla audiences would sometimes induce the expected emotional responses by dabbing tiger-balm under their eyes to induce tears, as in the context of Tibetan reception of the film Serf (农奴) (1963). Similarly, “poisonous weed” screenings, rather than vaccinating watchers against the evils of counterrevolution, frequently ended up “re-infecting and re-enchanting” their guerrilla audiences with their sensual imagery and humanistic attitudes. Li points out that, ironically, for some young people these “poisonous weed” viewings—often literary adaptations or foreign imports—made the Cultural Revolution “an age of enlightenment.” By centering grassroots projection and reception in her history, Li resituates the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976), often dismissed as artistically irrelevant in the history of Chinese cinema, as a rich cinematic landscape featuring unprecedented growth in projection and audience numbers. Trained in guerrilla tactics by onscreen guerrilla fighters as well as the multimedia methods of guerrilla projectionists, audiences could uphold—through acts like sparrow-slaughter—or undermine—through the covert celebration of “poisonous weed” screenings—the Cultural Revolution’s goals.
Li’s media history trains her readers in methods of guerrilla observation. By sensitizing us to the sight, sound, smell, and taste of viewing media, she awakens us to previously invisible modes of media participation. Li writes about the tears and laughter of audience members, the physical labor of projectionists, and the pregnant silences of women, aiming to answer the question “How has cinema and media changed your world(view)?” Instead of centering films and directors, Li takes as her primary sources a myriad of oral histories collected from across China, as well as Mao-era film projection magazines published for and by professional projectionists. Her book draws on a decade of research conducted across provinces as disparate as Heilongjiang, bordering Russia to the north, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, to chart a “guerrilla history” of Chinese cinema. Drawing on the grassroots testimony of former projectionists, sent-down youths, and village audience members, Li constructs a historical narrative against the grain. In doing so, she drives a wedge into the ways we read both film-texts and history books themselves. Her analysis of the ways guerrilla projection affected and even transformed audiences shifts her readers’ own way of seeing and reading history.
Utilizing her guerrilla history-writing techniques, Li devotes one chapter to the Three Sisters Movie Team in Hebei Province, a nationally renowned mobile projectionist unit with three female members. When Li and her research assistants came to the town of Laishui, Hebei province, in 2017, Zheng Yizhen, the original team leader of the Three Sisters, refused to be interviewed. Li wondered if perhaps it was the fear of “another hijacking of her story” that stopped Zheng from speaking to them. During the Mao era, the women’s model worker status had turned them into ventriloquized images, living depictions of the success of the party’s policies promoting gender equality, even as the actual projection troupe was largely made up of men who performed its invisible labor. Many of the stories and images of the Three Sisters’ labor featured in propaganda sources were embellished and staged. Li listens to both the words and the silences of these women against Mao-era representations of the Three Sisters team as model projectionists. She demonstrates the importance of juxtaposing oral histories and fieldwork with published sources, implicitly teaching her reader a lesson in guerrilla history-writing.
Li’s interviews—successful and unsuccessful—with “ordinary” women elucidate the gap between model narratives around women’s labor and the realities of gender’s role in film projection. Not only did women constitute a small minority of projectionists, they also watched far fewer movies than men. Li illustrates this reality through the story of an older couple from a Hubei mountain village. The husband watched a film every month while in the army, and upon his return home in the 1950s he was made village chief and frequently attended film screenings in the county seat or at the worker’s club. In contrast, his wife could not recall having watched a single film, even after her husband became involved in the mobile projection business in the 1980s. Beyond taking care of the house and the children, she also had to cook for all the relatives who came to watch movies. Model woman projectionists produced, embodied, and disseminated images of “gender equality,” but Li’s interviews with ordinary female projectionists reveal that they gained respect and acceptance from their audiences due more to their “embeddedness in local communities than to socialist gender ideals.” This resourcefulness and pragmatism points to the economy of cinema, a “Maoist ritual economy” of economic extraction, in which onscreen depictions of revolutionary sacrifice prompted peasants’ real-life sacrifices in grain and agricultural labor. It is by obtaining these on-the-ground reports and observing spaces that at first glance may seem empty that Li redefines the historical narrative around Mao-era filmgoing.
In Maoist China, the projectionist was a creative agent of spiritual transmission. Amidst the “hot noise” of outdoor film screenings, it was the projectionist’s guidance that provided film-texts with meaning and pedagogical value. Audiences both enacted and undercut cinematic lessons, emulating onscreen revolutionary martyrs through self-sacrifice but also subversion. Since the 1980’s, the centrality of the human in Maoist-era media networks has been radically transformed into highly individualized forms of media consumption: smartphones, laptops, and TVs. This does not mean, however, that cinema can no longer change our worldview. In Li’s example of China’s three-year-long “war on COVID,” citizens with cell phones filmed and circulated information, often circumventing algorithmic censors. Viewers discussed and organized around these images, frequently online. With the advent of digital video, the roles of projectionists, audiences, and filmmakers have blurred beyond recognition. It is the grassroots historical analysis that Jie Li offers us in Cinematic Guerrillas that equips readers to engage with their own media landscape in a way that centers modes of creative engagement that once seemed invisible. We, too, can now embody cinematic guerrillas.
Aurelia Dochnal is ready to learn a whole lot more about the world.