East Asian Humanities Workshop: "Cinema at the Grassroots: Rural Projectionists in Socialist China", Jie Li

The first session of the spring's East Asian Humanities Workshop will feature Professor Jie Li (Harvard University), who will give a talk titled “Cinema at the Grassroots: Rural Projectionists in Socialist China”. The talk will be followed by Q&A and discussion.

Professor Li is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her books include Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014), Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020). 

A light post-workshop dinner will be provided for attendees. 

“Cinema at the Grassroots: Rural Projectionists in Socialist China” 

Abstract: This talk begins with a brief overview of my forthcoming book, Cinematic Guerrillas, a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that probes the powers and limits of audiovisual propaganda. I then zoom into two chapters with highlights of what I learned from fieldwork. A case study of the nationally renowned “Three Sisters Movie Team” explores model projection, model projectionists, and female projectionists to flesh out the fraught relationship between propaganda and reality. Another chapter on the “cost of spiritual food” examines how mobile projectionists collected “movie fees” from their rural audiences, thus shedding new light on Socialist cinema’s meanings and accessibility at the grassroots.