Screens of enchantment

From people’s mobile cinema to digital consumption

Abstract

Mobile cinema, once an enchanting spectacle of modernity, offered its audience a rare opportunity to experience the magic of audio-visual technology, particularly for those who had limited exposure to such techno-marvels. That, too, was the case for socialist China’s vast countryside, especially in the earlier days, when moving images and even electrification were novelties. Itinerant open-air cinema provided a fascinating experience for the rural population, and it is in this context that mobile cinema emerged as a powerful cultural and political instrument for the party-state during the socialist period, from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the advent of a mixed-market economy in the late 1970s. But what does it mean to screen and watch open-air propaganda films in twenty-first-century China, a wired 24/7 consumer society where even digital currency has become the norm? Is it that the more things change the more they stay the same, or is it that the more things stay the same the more they change? These questions are central to my research on China’s transition into the postsocialist period.2 As with many aspects of contemporary China, there is no simple or uniform answer to this paradox. Nevertheless, this essay offers a brief genealogical account of that transition and examines the issue of “revisionism” within the context of mobile film screening.