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Old timers looked forward to dragging their stools out to gossip loudly under the night sky whenever the movie plots lagged. On one occasion, he dove into the current to rescue a folding movie screen.įor five glorious years, he became the most popular itinerant in the region, a craggy and ethnically diverse upland inhabited by hardy Pumi, Yi, Tibetan, and Han communities.

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Whenever the nearby Yalong River washed out footbridges, Zhang would pole his moveable entertainment kit over the bucking torrent in wooden dinghies. “It could take days to come and go from movie screenings.” “I used horses and mules, and sometimes my own shoulders, to carry the equipment,” he recalls. He was farming in 1986 when county officials hired him part-time, between his grain plantings and harvests, to carry the 90-minute catharsis offered by three-act movies into his farming and herding neighbors’ roadless lives. Zhang’s career began long after those glory years. One early projectionist in Guizho Province, Lu writes, was astonished to find an audience of nearly 5,000 awaiting him in a remote village.

But the outdoor movies nonetheless proved enormously popular. 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. “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. 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.

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Portable generators chugged out the necessary current. Teams of “mobile projectionists” drove diànyǐng chē, rubber-wheeled “movie carts” pulled by mules, into the farthest-flung hamlets. Their ranks soon swelled by the thousands. (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. 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.įor decades, government studios churned out heroic movies extolling the ideals of the revolution. 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. Much of China’s countryside has emptied from urban migration. Once a month, he visits only four villages in the surrounding Hengduan Mountains. Undercut by years of competition from television and smartphones, Zhang’s movie circuit is more modest these days. You can even leave to have tea or go to the toilet.” “On this new device, you just pop in the memory card, and it starts on its own. You had to keep adjusting the focus,” he says he says, like a proud Vaudeville campaigner.

“With the old projectors, you had to stand next to them during the whole film. Between the main features, Zhang shows public service videos about HIV-AIDS, forest fire prevention, village sanitation, and demon drugs. Since the reforms of the 1980s, his nomadic marquee has expanded to include lighter, purely entertaining movie fare. He can recite all the lines from decades-old patriotic classics like The Long March and Third Sister Liu. In his early years, Zhang lugged an old reel-to-reel projector by foot and horseback. 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. He has done this for more than a quarter century. Zhang has, to be precise, exhibited hundreds of films to thousands of local villagers. “I love movies,” Zhang explains sheepishly, waggling his battered phone.