Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou Zhuoyi Wang (bio) Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou. University of California Press. 2021. 282 pages. $85 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. Winner of the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best First Book Award. In Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Chenshu Zhou places two ontological questions at the center of its historical investigation of film exhibition and moviegoing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1992. First, quoting Brian Larkin, she asks if the cinema has “a stable ontology that simply reproduces itself in different contexts over time and across space.”1 Second, she asks, “what does it mean for our understanding of cinema if we stop treating the ‘alternative’ as a mere ‘alternative’?”2 Engaging in a dialogue with works of such scholars as Charlotte Brunsdon, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Julian Hanich, and Laura Wilson, Zhou’s investigation poses a convincing and productive challenge to the habitual critical standpoint that over-generalizes Western cinema’s practice of directing audiences’ attention to films alone as the basis of a universal definition of cinema. Based on her empirical study of screening practices and moviegoing experiences, Zhou instead views cinema as “a system of interfaces.”3 In this system, viewers are active agents interacting with not only films but also such extra-filmic interfaces as “surfaces (screen, seats, etc.), atmospheres, bodies (the projectionist’s, other viewers’, and their own), objects, landscapes, and weather in a [End Page 208] manner that involved their entire bodies.”4 This was particularly true during the mobile, open-air screenings common in early PRC. Each of the book’s six chapters is organized around an extra-filmic interface. The first three chapters draw on archival sources such as newspapers and magazines, government documents, and publications intended for film exhibition workers to flesh out the Communist Party’s strategies for exploring, inscribing, and controlling extra-cinematic interfaces. The last three chapters examine viewers’ memories of their moviegoing experiences, focusing on where their interactions with interfaces “[exceed] textual reception and challenge us to rethink what cinema is.”5 The interface that chapter 1 focuses on is the film exhibition space, which the newly established PRC “de-associate[d] . . . from its former connections to luxury and foreign domination” in order to “reframe moviegoing in terms of ‘serving workers, peasants, and soldiers.’”6 Theatrical spaces were Sinicized through name, signage, and spatial changes; made accessible to low-income masses; and changed from an urban commercial business to communal gathering spots in work units, rural areas, and military camps. Zhou moves beyond the conventional dismissal of this transformation as simply “propagandistic” and instead points out that it was intended “to serve the goals of both political education and mass entertainment.”7 Both goals, as well as the tensions between them, were manifested in renamed, relocated, redesigned, and reorganized film exhibition spaces. Chapter 2 examines how the PRC state cultivated through heroic narratives an idealizing gaze on the projectionist’s laboring body, which “not only constructed an essential figure in the operation of the socialist cinematic apparatus, but also participated in the larger campaign to produce the so-called Socialist New Man.”8 Unlike those hidden figures working in theatrical projection booths, early PRC projectionists were a focus of the audience’s gaze, especially in rural open-air cinema. “If Western commercial cinema seeks to erase labor from its final products,” Zhou argues, “the importance of corporeal practices and bodily techniques in building a national film exhibition network was fully acknowledged and celebrated in socialist China.”9 The projectionist’s laboring body hence “functioned as an interface in the socialist cinematic apparatus.”10 With a focus on two interfaces, slide projection and projectionists’ live performance, chapter 3 examines the intended pedagogical functions of early PRC film exhibition. As a pre-screening activity, slide projection was designed to introduce and explain to audiences local news and weather, national events, agrarian knowledge, and the content of the film to be shown. In addition to complementing pre-screening slide shows with vocal and bodily performance, projectionists were also expected...