China's Traveling Movie Theaters

[Randy W]

Before TV and smartphones, teams of mobile projectionists drove “movie carts” pulled by mules into far-flung hamlets across rural China.

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Traveling movie 'theaters' that once brought joy to rural China fade in the face of tech
“I used horses and mules, and sometimes my own shoulders, to carry the equipment,” recalls wandering projectionist Zhang Yin Hua of the glory days before TV and smartphones.

Zhang Yin Hua, 56, had a quarter-century career as a traveling projectionist in Sichuan. A purveyor of old cultural films and public service announcements ranging from forest fire prevention to anti-AIDS messages, he’s now semi-retired—a victim of smartphones and internet entertainment.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL SALOPEK, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

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“I love movies,” Zhang explains sheepishly, waggling his battered phone. “But I don’t really make them. I only show them.”

Zhang has, to be precise, exhibited hundreds of films to thousands of local villagers. He has done this for more than a quarter century. Courtly and weather-beaten at 56, he is among the last of a fabled breed of showmen in rural China: a member of a fading guild of state-trained cineastes who travel through isolated communities, illuminating outdoor screens with movies, for free, at nighttime public squares. In his early years, Zhang lugged an old reel-to-reel projector by foot and horseback. Lately, he journeys by car. He can recite all the lines from decades-old patriotic classics like The Long March and Third Sister Liu. Since the reforms of the 1980s, his nomadic marquee has expanded to include lighter, purely entertaining movie fare. Between the main features, Zhang shows public service videos about HIV-AIDS, forest fire prevention, village sanitation, and demon drugs.

 . . .

Undercut by years of competition from television and smartphones, Zhang’s movie circuit is more modest these days.

Once a month, he visits only four villages in the surrounding Hengduan Mountains. Much of China’s countryside has emptied from urban migration. Local audiences have aged and dwindled. And the lure of communal movies in village squares, under the stars, where moths blaze like comets through the projector’s light, has been supplanted by kids absorbing TikTok on palm-size screens. Zhang is obliged to snap photographs of the start, middle, and ending of each open-air film he projects, to prove to his government bosses that he’s still on the job.

 . . .

For decades, government studios churned out heroic movies extolling the ideals of the revolution. (Third Sister Liu was China’s first musical, pitting a singing peasant heroine against an evil landlord.) As early as 1950, just one year after Mao Zedong’s victory in the nation’s civil war, nearly 2,000 technicians were trained to operate 16-millimeter projectors in villages across the nation’s sprawling rural hinterlands. Their ranks soon swelled by the thousands. Teams of “mobile projectionists” drove diànyǐng chē, rubber-wheeled “movie carts” pulled by mules, into the farthest-flung hamlets. Portable generators chugged out the necessary current.

Lu Xaioning, a historian of Chinese cinema at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, notes that millions of rural Chinese from that era had never watched a film before.

“They flocked to the screenings not to be enthralled by the film narrative, but to enjoy the ‘wonder show,’” Lu writes in her book, Molding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity. Farmers entranced by the strange worlds flickering to life on a whitewashed wall occasionally “got confused with movie characters and could not tell friend from foe” onscreen. But the outdoor movies nonetheless proved enormously popular. One early projectionist in Guizho Province, Lu writes, was astonished to find an audience of nearly 5,000 awaiting him in a remote village.

Zhang’s career began long after those glory years.