Building the nation on 16mm: Film formats and the institutionalization of cinematic portability in 1930s China

Abstract This article examines the role played by the 16 mm format in shaping ideas of portable projection in 1930s China. Drawing on research into the Chinese educational film movement, I argue for a format-oriented approach to cinema history that tracks heretofore neglected aspects of how the state—as well as non-state actors—exercised power on and through cinema. As a portable format, 16 mm extracted cinema from urbanized film culture while offering its users access to a broader ‘national’ audience. Educators built a mobile 16 mm network connecting schools and mass education sites and formulated a discourse that sought to codify the place of ‘small scale cinema’ in the Chinese nation and in global media hierarchies. Small scale cinema was deeply contradictory. While promising to make cinema broadly accessible to the Chinese masses, 16 mm also restricted that access. While seemingly liberating cinema from the sway of global film culture and China’s treaty-port cosmopolitanism, 16 mm subjected mass education to other patterns of asymmetrical development. By examining how educational cinema was formed at the intersection of global film technologies and local institutional discourses, I formulate an approach to cine-governmentality that shows how the state’s control of cinema worked from the bottom up, as actors on multiple scales negotiated chaotic circulations of films, equipment, and ideas.