The cinema of make-believe: Rural viewers’ early reception of film propaganda in socialist China

Abstract

The substantial popularization of film only became a reality in China after the Chinese Communist Party sent down projection teams to the countryside in the 1950s to build a nationwide network of film propaganda. As rural viewers witnessed simultaneously the earliest arrival of cinema and the propagation of socialist ideas at the time, a study of their experiences offers an alternative understanding of early spectatorship which has long been structured by the conception of ‘the cinema of attractions’. I propose using ‘the cinema of make-believe’ to conceptualize the practices of film exhibition in rural China, indicating the isomorphism between the apparatus of cinema and that of propaganda. I argue that the capability of navigating film and reality was made prominent in rural viewers’ early reception of cinema, in which spectators were made to believe the presence of absent objects. Such ‘present-absence’ effect embedded in cinema facilitated the operation of socialist propaganda, despite obstructing the goal of universal agitation in certain circumstances.