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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Film Propaganda as Medium of Perception Early Rural Screening in Maoist China (1949-1965)
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2021-10-06
2018-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Guo Yanping
2018/03/01
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - Film Propaganda as Medium of Perception Early Rural Screening in Maoist China (1949-1965)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16590/16933
18
Film Propaganda as Medium of Perception
Early Rural Screening in Maoist China (1949-1965)
Guo Yanping / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
The Chinese University of Hong Kong




   Despite that cinema was imported to China right after its invention in the
1890s, most of Chinese people, especially the peasants, had little access to film at
that time. Film remained a bourgeois entertainment in the urban area for a long
time. As the Chinese Communist Party took over China in 1949, the geopolitics
of cinema transformed rapidly. Following the Soviet propaganda view that
‘of all arts film is the most important’, the CCP saw film as the most effective
propaganda tool. The national film exhibition network was established in the
1950s to cover even the remotest area. Thousands of mobile projection team
were sent out to the rural land in the name of educating the masses with socialist
ideas and culture. It was the time that the large rural population of China finally
got to encounter with film on a regular basis. Rural screening, the particular form
of film exhibition conducted in the countryside area, then became a significant
cultural practice of socialist China.
   While Maoist China was known for its strict ideological control, the projection
and reception of film in the rural area demonstrated that film propaganda was less
a simple kind of brainwashing than a complicated process of communication. For
the illiterate peasants, in the beginning, rural screening was a novel entertainment
instead of socialist education. It was through their first encounter with film that
for the first time they witnessed the arrival of modern technologies at the village.
When projectionists brought the generator, projector, amplifier to screen film in
the village, it was both the content of film and the film medium itself that led the
rural viewer to experience the modernity. The peasants not only caught sight of
the modern machine in the film but also learned about the cinematic equipment,
the operation of electricity, and the socialist discourse of industrialization.
   For the propagandists, rural viewers’ unwanted responses should be
diminished. The campaigns of ‘helping the peasants understand film’ were
launched to standardize rural people’s comprehension of socialist cinema,
in which versatile projectionists performed different skills to attract viewers’
attentions and translate the obscure political thoughts into local languages.
However, such propagandistic strategy was in no way a foolproof. It was recorded


1
    Ph.D. thesis supervised by Professor Pang Laikwan. For informations: guoyp@m.scnu.edu.cn

                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                   Guo Yanping


that projectionists’ aberrant action during the screening and rural viewers’
deviant reception of film constantly hindered the efficiency of film propaganda.
   Here, rural screening functioned as a mediated space, through which the
cinematic experiences regarding the Party’s ideological control towards the
peasantry and the rural viewer’s diverse reception of propagandistic messages
were able to play out. It provides us an interesting conjunction to see how the
Communist ideal propaganda interplayed with folk experiences (folk culture,
folk wisdom) and how the active engagement of the viewer and the projectionist
reframed the state propaganda. By offering analysis on the transformation of
visual and bodily experiences in the rural society, which resulted from the advent
of film, I attempt to conceptualize rural screening as an alternative framework so
as to rethink the connections among film education, mass mobilization, and film
propaganda. In so doing, I hope to complicate the Party-Masses relationship in
a propaganda regime and enrich our understandings of socialist modernity from
the rural stance.
   The main body of my thesis consists of four chapters. In chapter one, I
provide a historical analysis to explain what thoughts and practices contributed
to the development of rural screening in Maoist China. I identify three kinds of
sources. First, the Soviet Union had great influence on shaping the rural film
exhibition network of China. I focus on Soviet ‘cinefication’ movement and
Lenin’s propaganda view to explain how the rural screening was made possible
in the Soviet society. Second, I turn to Mao’s ‘Yan’an Talks’ to understand to
what extent Maoist rural screening differentiated itself from the similar practice
of the Soviet Union. Third, I trace back the emergence of rural screening to the
republican period in order to situate the practice of Maoist rural screening into
a larger context of exploring the educational function of film in modern China.
   In chapter two, I intend to discuss the early cinematic experiences of the
rural audience during their initial encounter with cinema. I summarize these
experiences into three patterns. First, I notice that the attractional elements of
the film directly addressed the rural viewer and the viewer tended to receive
the propaganda film as spectacles. I summarize this situation with the phrase
‘seeing the attraction’. Second, I turn away from the viewing experience to
examine the environmental context that framed the viewer’s interaction with the
film and the projectionist. Holding onto the term kan renao, I argue that the
‘renao’ environment offered a more flexible viewing/walking position for the
viewer to casually ‘experience’ the rural screening. Third, I focus on discussing
the bodily experience the audience gained from their ‘tactile contact’ with the
film. I contend that their perception of film medium was closely related to the
existed cultural experiences rooted in the rural society.
   Peasants early film experiences mentioned above were considered as their
‘incomprehension’ of film by the Party, the Party therefore urged the projectionist
to help the rural viewer understand the film. Against this backdrop, in chapter
three, I investigate what kind of model projectionist was imagined by the Party
to embark an ideal propaganda. I begin by explaining the concept xiwen lejian

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(cater to the folk tastes), which became a standard to measure the success of the
cultural practices in Maoist China. By following the instruction of catering to
the folk tastes, the projectionist made use of the popular folk cultural form to
propagate the Party’s message to the rural masses. Moreover, the projectionist
also strived to build a good relationship with the peasant by catering themselves
to the rural community. Such an intimate relationship between the projectionist
and the peasant facilitated to improve the popularity of film propaganda in the
rural area.
   By looking into the actual communication existed in the different stages of
rural screening, I examine the effectiveness of Maoist film propaganda in chapter
four. I replace the conventional communicative model of ‘sender-receiver’ to
‘sender-mediator-receiver’ to highlight the role of the projectionist in mediating
the propaganda process. On the one hand, I discuss how the ‘deviant behaviors’
of the projectionists obstructed the effect of film propaganda during the rural
screening. On the other, I analyze the rural audiences’ diverse receptions of film
propaganda in relation to two different genres of film: news documentary and
war film.
   In sum, my study conceptualizes rural screening in early Maoist China as
the kind of film propaganda that was not an instrumental toll but an enabling
environment that allowed the rural viewer to engage with modern media and to
experience socialist modernity. I understand the rural viewer as an iconic figure
who maintained a dubious distance with the operations of dominant ideology.
The viewers managed to come up with multiple coping strategies in order to seek
out fun and pleasure of the activity of film propaganda.




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