Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou (review)

Abstract

In Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Chenshu Zhou places two ontological questions at the center of its historical investigation of film exhibition and moviegoing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1992. First, quoting Brian Larkin, she asks if the cinema has “a stable ontology that simply reproduces itself in different contexts over time and across space.”1 Second, she asks, “what does it mean for our understanding of cinema if we stop treating the ‘alternative’ as a mere ‘alternative’?”2 Engaging in a dialogue with works of such scholars as Charlotte Brunsdon, Christian FerenczFlatz, Julian Hanich, and Laura Wilson, Zhou’s investigation poses a convincing and productive challenge to the habitual critical standpoint that overgeneralizes Western cinema’s practice of directing audiences’ attention to films alone as the basis of a universal definition of cinema. Based on her empirical study of screening practices and moviegoing experiences, Zhou instead views cinema as “a system of interfaces.”3 In this system, viewers are active agents interacting with not only films but also such extrafilmic interfaces as “surfaces (screen, seats, etc.), atmospheres, bodies (the projectionist’s, other viewers’, and their own), objects, landscapes, and weather in a