Cinematic Guerrillas

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
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 The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past
How do you turn a scattered population into a revolutionary mass? Drawing on extensive archival and oral research, Li depicts the work of thousands of mobile projectionists traveling all over China training rural peoples for political struggle. A tour de force of historical reconstruction and theoretical intervention, this book shows how the Chinese revolution was also a media revolution dependent on the logistical work of ‘cinematic guerillas.’ -- Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Infrastructure, Media, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
Cinematic Guerrillas is cultural history at its best. Not only does it provide an engaging account of the 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 The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China's Cultural Revolution
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 Zhang Yimou: Globalization and the Subject of Culture
Through its marvelous narrative, Cinematic Guerrillas makes a compelling case that reception constitutes the core of cinema’s function and value . . . What Li manages to both uncover and produce is a rich and richly contradictory history of Chinese cinema, or, more precisely, of cinema in China, detailing in its intricacies how projectionists and audiences became key conduits of the “media revolution” that others might more commonly call the “Chinese revolution.” -- Bruno Guaraná * Film Quarterly *
Thoroughly researched and well written, broad in scope and fascinating in detail, Cinematic Guerrillas offers cinematic history as political and cultural history in Mao’s China . . .Li’s insights and kaleidoscopic approach, like a projector, keep many moving parts flowing so the images become clear, smooth, entertaining, and comprehensive, providing a model for studying socialist cinema. * Choice Reviews *
A rich, sometimes dense, multilayered investigation of film and propaganda in Communist China . . . [Readers] will come away from the book with a more sophisticated appreciation of the importance of cinema in contemporary Chinese politics and a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of propaganda transmission and reception. -- Russell Burgos * H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews *
A theoretically rigorous analysis complemented by extensive fieldwork research . . . Li exquisitely restores the memories and testimonies of mobile projectionists and audience members. -- Yiyang Hou * The China Quarterly *
A properly historical and ethnographically respectful account of film projectionists in the People’s
Republic of China (PRC), and their role in the political project(s) of the post-Liberation period, the Cultural Revolution and the years after Mao’s death and immediately preceding the Reform era. -- Stephanie Hemelryk Donald * Screen *
[A] fascinating, eloquent study . . . Jie Li is a guerrilla historian who relies on alertness and mobility, assesses the terrain of film and media studies, and surveys their relative strengths. Having grasped the situation of her historical subjects, she then quietly but effectively strikes. Cinematic Guerrillas is the result. -- Charles Musser * Cinéaste *