Screening Film in Western Sichuan, 1970s/2010s: Language, Technology, Place, and Ethnicity in the Making of Rural Cosmopolitanism

• In Event: Rural Cosmopolitanism in Modern China: Technology, Communication, Connection

Abstract

In 1973, Zhuo Ma began work as a film projectionist in Ruo’er gai, a Tibetan region of Sichuan’s Western plateau. For over thirty years, Zhuo Ma kept notes about technical aspects of film projection in a “Learn from Lei Feng” notebook, alongside records of the Chinese, Soviet, and other imported films he screened. In childhood, A-Ze often walked more than 10km to neighboring villages to see these films. As a result of national reinvestment since 1998 in rural film projection using digital technologies, A-Ze now works as a film projectionist in Ruo’er gai. From the 1970s to today, Dan-zhu-yang-ren has worked as a dubbing actor to make film and television accessible to Kham-speaking villages in Sichuan and region.
 
Tibetans, like these men, are employed as local agents in national cultural projects. They participate in production of rural social life that is embedded in (a) complex power relations informed by modernizing, colonial, and nationalist imperatives; (b) everyday acts of translation; and (c) cosmopolitan sensibilities rooted in ethnically-defined local spaces.  This paper reads interviews conducted in 2013 with Zhuo Ma, A-Ze, and Dan-zhu-yang-ren with attention to how these individuals articulate their roles, from the 1970s to the present, as cultural mediators in spaces that are coded as rural and ethnic, but that are also understood through national and global reference points, and specific experiences of modernity. Combined with archival research, these interviews shed light on the meanings of nongcun produced in Western Sichuan via film technologies and film-screening practices in the 1970s/2010s.

Author

• Tina Mai Chen, University of Manitoba