By Jie Li

Thanks to Daisy Yan Du’s invitation to lecture for the Association for Chinese Animation Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, I had the opportunity to extend an underdeveloped topic in my recent book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023). The cover image (figure 1) is a 1966 propaganda poster of a female rural projectionist with a pair of bamboo clappers and two projectors. While relegating the film projector to the backdrop, this model image foregrounds a lantern slide projector with four lenses to facilitate animated special effects. In addition to exploring the history referenced by this image, the current essay also brings together the two parts of my book—“Projectionists as Media Infrastructure” and “Audiences as Creative Agents”—to focus on projectionists as creative agents. Given the considerable creative collaboration that went into animated slideshows, I propose that projectionists in Socialist China were not merely machine operators, but also inventors, artists, writers, and performers.

Figure 1. A 1966 propaganda poster of a rural projectionist foregrounds the multi-lens slide projector over the film projector.

Largely forgotten by the 21^st century, the lantern slideshow (huandeng 幻灯) was an important form of local propaganda and entertainment from the 1950s to the 1980s. Technically simple to produce from cheap and locally available materials, lantern slides could be projected using gas lamps in areas without electricity. Grassroots propaganda artists and film projectionists thus wrote, drew, projected, and narrated their own slideshows, creating local audiovisual media content when film production was centrally orchestrated. Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being “live” or “animated” 活的 and slideshows for being “still” or “dead” 死的, innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched a “Three Sisters Projection Team” 三姐妹放映队 from a rural county to nationwide fame by the mid-1960s (see figure 2). Over the next two decades, local cultural cadres from all over China recruited artists, writers, performers, and technicians to develop similar animated slideshows until the rise of local television.

Figure 2: Clip on animated slideshows from a 1966 newsreel on the Three Sisters Movie Team.

Through a media archaeology of animated slideshows, this essay seeks to excavate the creative ecologies of socialist China as well as to reflect on human creativity in the age of generative AI. By creative ecology, I mean the cultural, technological, political, socioeconomic, and institutional conditions that influence the flourishing and withering of creativity. In particular, I hope to interrogate the relationships between propaganda, technology, and creativity: How might political propaganda promote or stifle, mobilize or immobilize creativity? What is the relationship between technology and creativity? Through the course of the essay, my question will also shift from “What were animated socialist slideshows?” to “What did socialist slideshows animate?”

Enlivening “Rustic Cinema” and “Dead Cinema”

Lightweight and portable, the magic lantern appeared in China as early as the seventeenth century and was widely used by the early twentieth century for performance, entertainment, preaching, and education.[1] Popularly known as layangpian (拉洋片, “pulling Western slides”), or xiyangjing (西洋镜, “Western mirror,” or 西洋景, “Western scenery”), magic lanterns were fitted for public shows and peep shows at temple fairs, displaying foreign and domestic landscapes, fantastic depictions of heaven and hell, and photographs of nude women.[2] The 1934 film Scenes of City Life 都市风光, directed by Yuan Muzhi, vividly stages a peep show as the framing device for the film’s critical exposé of capitalism and commodification in Shanghai.[3] In the Republican era, lantern slides became an important medium for local artists to exhibit and market their talent: merchants displayed slides and sold New Year prints of the same image; storytellers used lantern slides to illustrate their ballads. At once exotic and familiar, the lantern slideshow thrived with other imported and indigenous media forms.

In various “liberated areas” in the 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party readily enlisted the versatile medium of the lantern slide in its propaganda network, such that county culture centers 文化馆 were often equipped with slide projectors years before cinema and radio. A 1951 slideshow manual tallied 1836 government-owned slide projectors nationwide, of which 788 were in North China. In Hebei Province, the number of slide projectors quadrupled between November 1950 to April 1951, from 91 to 385, with a monthly audience calculated at 155,000. [4] In Shanxi Province, 80 out of 92 counties had lantern slideshow performance teams, most of which were affiliated with the local culture center.[5]

Early 1950s manuals extolled the virtues of lantern slides over cinema in four ways: they could be projected without electricity (since gas lamps can be used as the light source); slides and their projectors may be constructed from indigenous materials 就地取材; they used color, movement, and sound to attract audiences 有声有色, and they could speedily represent local newsworthy events.[6] In sum, the manuals praise the medium’s low-tech flexibility, portability, locality, and indigeneity—encapsulated by the keyword “tu” (earthy, rustic, primitive local) which was opposed to yang (Western/foreign, modern, advanced, fancy). Quoting their audiences, the manuals dubbed slideshows as “rustic cinema” 土电影 and “rustic lantern slideshows that grow from the native soil” 土生土长的土幻灯. A cultural worker from Shanxi even developed a primitive slide projector by carving a pumpkin—imagine a jack-o-lantern as a magic lantern! Along the same lines, county-level culture centers, artist associations, and science education equipment workshops produced their own lanterns with whatever material they had at their disposal (for example, see figure 3).[7]   

Figure 3: A gas lamp slide projector made by a county culture center in Hebei Province. Source: Hebei Provincial People’s Government Culture Bureau 河北省人民政府文教厅文化处, ed., Huandeng 幻灯 (Lantern slides) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1952), p. 38.

Apart from “rustic cinema,” however, some audiences also called slideshows “dead cinema” 死电影 to distinguish it from cinema’s moving images. Nevertheless, they found lantern slideshows to be more lucid and relevant than films: “Although dead cinema cannot move, they are easier to watch and better explained, and the content is our own business” 死电影虽然不会动吧，可是看得明白，交代得清楚，更是咱们自己的事.[8] At a conference in October 1950, lanternists from Shanxi and Hebei provinces introduced ways to turn “dead” slides into living ones, such as by narrating a series of images with rhythmic verse.  Some lanternists created paper marionette figures akin to shadow puppets. Some pushed long strip format slides over a foreground or background slide to create the illusion of a train passing through a tunnel (see figure 4) or a person walking. The speed of movement depended on the content: foot soldiers should move at a slower pace, cavalry at a faster pace, and vehicles at an even faster pace. As for vertical movements, rain should come down fast, whereas sunrise should be gradual. Lanternists also created night scenes with green cellophane over the lens or the illusion of dawn by covering half of the lens with a piece of paper.[9] Sonically, a county culture center created a variety of sound effects, such as by playing a harmonium to imitate an airplane’s engine noises and shaking a kerosene barrel to approximate a train’s rumbling.[10]

Figure 4. An example of a movement slide from the manual How to Make Lantern Slides 怎样做幻灯 by Wu Dinghong 吴定洪 (Shanghai: Ertong duwu chubanshe, 1955)

What then animated these early slideshows of the 1950s? During projection, the performer’s body, with manual gestures and vocal sound effects, enlivened still images and mandated their movement. The long strips are particularly reminiscent of panorama slides or movement slides used in magic lantern shows in Europe, the United States, and Japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.[11] As Thomas Lamarre describes panorama slides used in Meiji Japan: “The landscape unfurled in projection, rather like a picture scroll unrolling before the eyes…. the magic lantern slide was pulled slowly or quickly by hand past the focalized light, allowing for a variable temporality, maybe punctuated with commentary: the time of gesture and speech.”[12] The magic lantern’s variable quality of movement is thus qualitatively different from the mechanical succession of instants in cinema, and the projectionists are somewhere between machine operators and instrument performers. At the production level, local cultural workers hand-made projectors and slides with indigenous materials, so the products are closer to art or artisanship than industrial manufactured commodities. Conferences and competitions further helped to inspire technical and formal innovations. Finally, at the reception level, the slides aimed to represent local people and affairs and thus elicited a sense of recognition among their audiences. As a report from 1951 put it:

Lanternists used local materials to connect with local realities: what happened today can be performed tomorrow. When farmers saw their acquaintances “get onto a slideshow,” they said enviously: “We must also work harder to get onto the slideshow.” Slideshows can also present and analyze local problems to help find solutions.

幻灯工作者就地取材结合实际，今天的事，明天就可以演出，农民看到熟人“上了幻灯”，很羡慕地说：“咱也要搞好生产，去上幻灯”。一个地方发生了什么问题，分析一下问题的内容，编画成一部幻灯片，放映出去，对问题的解决就可得到很大的帮助。[13]

Slideshows thus not only emulated lifelike movements but also interacted with and captivated lives beyond the screen. Even projectionists with little artistic talent produced lantern slides in creative ways. When asked to advertise a new insecticide for a township government, a projection team tried to draw the rice planthopper but failed to capture its likeness, so they caught some with the help of the local cadre and trapped them inside lantern slides to be projected live onto the screen. The heat of the light bulbs agitated the insects, so they became especially animated while agricultural technicians explained the workings of the insecticide. The magnification and illumination of living specimens turned out to be highly effective in convincing villagers to purchase insecticides to fight the pest. Thus, the movie team was praised for turning the slide projector into a microscope and an “insect trap.”[14] Indeed, a 1974 manual on slideshows encouraged the capture of live insects such as flies into lantern slide boxes to enlarge the movements of their furry legs to convince audiences of their carriage of filth from toilets to food.[15] What the slideshow of live specimens animates here, then, is the sense of disgust and loathing driving a mass movement to fight pests.

Figure 5. Instructions on turning live specimens into lantern slides to fight pests. Source: Wu Guang 吴光 ed., Zenyang hua huandengpian 怎样画幻灯片 (How to draw lantern slides) (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe 1974), p. 40

The Multi-lens Animated Slideshow

Although experiments from the early 1950s already sought to enliven “dead” slideshows with movement, sound, and interactivity, the Three Sisters Projection Team of Hebei Province’s Laishui County introduced and popularized animated slideshows in the 1960s with their invention of the multi-lens slide projector and sophisticated special effects. The story of the Three Sisters was inextricable from their mentor Wang Baoyi 王宝义 (1932–2015). A schoolteacher turned propaganda worker, Wang Baoyi organized village drama troupes and conducted rooftop broadcasting for the newly founded county culture center, where he discovered an unused slide projector and a set of twenty slides about a peasant joining the army. The optical device reminded him of layangpian peep shows he had seen in temple fairs, except that the slide projector projected images outward to hundreds in the audience instead of a few paying customers. Wang began producing and narrating his own slideshows on market days to propagate the Marriage Law, the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns, and the Korean War. He also assisted and later joined the prefectural mobile projection team, meanwhile continuing to produce and perform lantern slideshows with clapper talk. The local models he praised might interrupt the performance with flushed modesty, turning the show into a “crosstalk” 相声 as the audience enlivened the scene with laughter.[16]

Wang also made technical improvements to the team’s slide projector by adding a lens for a smoother change of slides. He drew blueprints and worked with the local blacksmith to build a double-lens slide projector. Studying animated film prints frame by frame, Wang Baoyi created special effects such as blinking eyes, babbling mouths, radiating sunshine, and undulating waves. Such animated slideshows won awards at competitions and earned Wang the honor of attending the National Film Distribution and Projection Model Workers Conference in 1957 and meeting Chairman Mao in person. However, Wang’s application for party membership would be rejected time and again because his father had worked as a policeman under the Japanese occupation. With this chip on his shoulders, Wang eagerly answered the party’s call with every campaign, such as expanding the film exhibition network during the Great Leap Forward.[17]

Having read about all-female movie teams in the press, Wang Baoyi recruited three young women into a new projection team soon to be dubbed the Three Sisters Projection Team. Like iconic female tractor drivers and pilots, female projectionists took on a physically demanding job that also required mechanical and engineering skills. [18] Female projectionists’ appearance in public embodied new gender equality that countered patriarchal norms. Wang Baoyi also recruited six young men to cover the county’s more remote and mountainous regions. The nine rookie projectionists not only learned Wang Baoyi’s animated tricks, but also added lenses to the projector, developed new gadgets for special effects, expanded their propaganda repertoire, and honed performance techniques through apprenticeship with local storytellers and radio announcers.[19]

Rather than applying for a patent or developing a product as might a tech start-up today, the Three Sisters Projection Team shared their technical know-how freely with any projection teams that wanted to learn from them. They also attended many conferences and went on tours around the country. Wang Baoyi wrote up their collective wisdom on the animated slideshow into a 1965 manual on multi-lens slide projectors (figure 6), detailing how to modify existing slide projectors with lenses and reflectors, levers and pulleys, how to paint and make special effects, as well as how to script and perform the animated slideshow. For example, rotating discs help create radiating light or radio waves (figure 6, middle). To create a lion dance, simply alternate between two slides with the lion and dancer in different poses (figure 7, middle). Applying the same basic principle of two-frame animation, two panorama slides of a parade alternate while being pulled to create the illusion of walking. Even more sophisticated is the Great Leap horse that gallops against the backdrop of a socialist countryside (figure 7, bottom).[20] This image harkens back to the first moving picture, “The Horse in Motion” (1878), but instead of Edward Muybridge’s multiple cameras capturing sequential images, there are only four slides superimposed on top of each other. Some animation effects also borrow from Chinese traditional arts such as shadow puppetry and papercuts (figure 6 bottom).[21]

Figure 6. Making and Using Multi–lens Slide Projectors (1965), manual by Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company.

Figure 7. Animated slideshows attributed to the Three Sisters Projection Team, from Making and Using Multi–lens Slide Projectors (1965), manual by Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company.

The manual emphasizes that animation should not be pursued frivolously or to flaunt technical ingenuity. Instead, special effects should serve the propaganda content. In a negative example, one projection team was supposed to show the miseries of the Old Society through a poor peasant’s memories of begging for food during a famine, only to be bitten by a landlord’s dog. The lanternists animated the dog while the performer vocalized its barking. As a result, the audience roared with laughter instead of weeping at the tragic scene.[22] By contrast, a positive example began with a riddle: “Head like a crab, with joints at its waist, this animal has a long tail and eight legs.” When the audience gave the correct answer, a scorpion appeared. The narrator continued: “All scorpions sting; all landlords are mean,” at which point a horizontal wipe replaced the scorpion’s head with the landlord’s head. The narration went on: “Scorpions are poisonous and ruthless, but landlords are ten times as cruel,” at which point the scorpion’s tail is replaced by the landlord’s abacus (figure 7, top).[23] The usage of transitions—a combination of the wipe and dissolve—created mystery and established an equivalence between class enemies and venomous animals. Whereas the dog was an extension of the landlord, the scorpion was a metaphor for the landlord, or rather, the exposed essence of the landlord. The usage of animals in both examples here could converse with Daisy Du’s work on socialist animated films, from the disappearance of talking animals and the animality of villains to the aesthetics of overanimation and suspended animation.[24]

The Creative Team as Propaganda[25]

The Three Sisters Projection Team won its renown not only through outstanding live performances at propaganda competitions and nationwide tours, but also through curated model narratives and images in the mass media (see figures 8 and 9). The three young women reportedly overcame the skeptical gossip of villagers and embarrassing failures as novices. Their villager hosts treated them like daughters by reserving for them the warmest parts of their kang bed and boiling many eggs for them as snacks. The “Three Sisters” in turn braved and ice to bring cinema to mountain dwellers, learned clapper-talk from local performers, and to research, produce, and perform slideshows.[26] Refining and updating this model narrative, the “Three Sisters” team leader delivered speeches at model conferences, such as one entitled “Chairman Mao’s Works Gave Us Infinite Wisdom and Power,” emphasizing how “we are not only a movie team but a propaganda team” that learned to write, to paint, to sing as well as to tinker with the slide projector to make “dead slides come to life.”[27]

Figure 8: Propaganda poster from 1966 portraying Hebei’s Three Sisters Projection Team, by Sun Yu, Liu Zhenye, and Yang Deshu.

To supplement official narratives with retrospective testimonies, I took a fieldtrip to Laishui County in 2017 with two research assistants, Lyu Hongyun and Li Bingbing, to see if we could find the three women and interview them, but one had already passed away, another couldn’t be found, and a third refused to meet us despite appeals on our behalf from her cousin and former teacher. Through extensive interviews with eight of their former colleagues, however, we learned that while the Three Sisters were animated slideshow performers, they were not painters, writers, or inventors as credited in the press. Instead, their slideshows were scripted by Wang Baoyi and painted by Yan Heming 闫鹤鸣 (b. 1940), an amateur artist hired as a professional lanternist for the Laishui movie station in 1962, who applied various visual styles to enrich the medium’s expressive means. He recalled having to keep the colors transparent while ensuring accuracy in their miniature format, as all mistakes would be magnified through projection. Strenuous for the eyes, hands, and shoulders, the fastidious work left him with arthritis and other health issues. Yet in our interview, Mr. Yan did not consider those handmade slides to be works of art worthy of preservation, only an effective propaganda means that demanded craftsmanship. As for artist credits, Mr. Yan suggested that the “Three Sisters” was a much larger model collective and compared them to a corporate brand nowadays, with the women as the “red flowers above the green leaves.”

Other “green leaves” included members of two other all-male projection teams who made technical improvements to the multi-lens slide projector, wrote the narrations, and designed the animation effects for several famous slideshows later attributed to the “Three Sisters,” who went on nationwide tours to popularize the animated slideshow. As their audiences shifted to political elites and the mass media, they had little time to perform routine screenings. Whereas press photos and newsreels show them fording a stream or lugging machinery on a donkey through mountain passes (figure 9 left), the three women were assigned to screen films for the county seat and the surrounding plains. Male colleagues responsible for the mountains helped to carry their equipment up the hill, but had to move out of view for the camera. A photo of an open-air cinema under the moon (figure 9, right) was staged in a mountain village not ordinarily on the Three Sisters’ circuit. Former Colleagues thus cynically referred to the Three Sisters as “darkness under the lamp” 灯下黑, suggesting that the media limelight obscured more than it illuminated.

Figure 9. Photo spread of the Three Sisters Projection Team. China Pictorial 人民画报, no. 11 (1965).

Most “green leaves” swallowed their pride, but one projectionist by the surname Liu lashed out at the photojournalist and the cadres: “You’ve deceived the entire nation, now you want to deceive the world?” His hot temper soon got him in trouble. When a Four Clean-ups work team came to investigate corruption, Liu was accused of having illicit affairs and sent to labor reform. Afterwards, he worked as a rural technician and retained a peasant’s sociopolitical status. Whereas other projectionist retirees we interviewed lived in work-unit-allocated high-rise housing, Mr. Liu lived in a dilapidated brick house across from a real estate development. He chain-smoked and drank a bitter tea during our interview, often becoming quite upset when recounting the injustices he had suffered. Although my research assistants and I had explained my academic purpose to all interviewees, our presence and questions must still have reminded them of investigations by Maoist work teams or of the propaganda journalists who collected, embellished, and sometimes fabricated stories. Perhaps it was the fear of another ventriloquist hijacking of her story that prevented the original team leader of the Three Sisters from speaking to us?

In the Cultural Revolution, the Three Sisters turned against their mentor Wang Baoyi, who was denounced as a “capitalist roader” because of his leadership position and bad class background. He was given a yin-yang haircut and paraded through the streets with a rope around his neck and a two-meter-long dunce cap painted with oxen and snakes. He was later imprisoned in a “cowshed,” forced to clean the public latrine, and escorted daily to read a special column of big-character posters and caricatures against him.[28] A few months later, the Three Sisters themselves fell from grace because they had once performed for President Liu and First Lady Wang Guangmei, who invited the projection team to dinner, with fresh peaches for dessert. Instead of eating her peach, the team leader took it home, wrote “The Source of Power” 力量的源泉 on it, and enshrined it in a glass case in her office. Wall posters depicted this incident in caricatures of her worshipping the disgraced First Lady’s peach until it rotted.[29] According to various witnesses we interviewed, the projection team and culture center concentrated the county’s artistic talent, so that their parades and struggle sessions were especially spectacular.

While all projectionists were busy making revolution or being revolutionized, film screenings and slideshows came to a halt. Still, extra-filmic propaganda was used only to demonize and exorcize class enemies as “ox-demons and snake-spirits” at live denunciations. Some projectionists in Laishui adapted their propaganda know-how to the latest political winds, but their jobs remained volatile. In 1969, former projectionist Mr. Han inadvertently superimposed a lantern slide of a “capitalist-roader” onto an image of Mao, an accident that made him an “active counterrevolutionary.” [30] No wonder projectionists became paranoid about making political mistakes with live performances and slideshows: “You can’t pierce your hands by wiping your machines, but it’s truly risky to wield a brush to write or paint.”[31]

After 1971, however, extra-filmic propaganda became a criterion for selecting new projectionists, so that slideshows with live narration became the local media production of every commune. After my father and several of his friends were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, their artistic talents soon freed them from grueling physical labor. Apart from painting Mao portraits on the walls of villages, they were recruited into movie teams to paint slides about local heroes, occasionally also producing animated slides. As shown in a 1972 woodcut (figure 10), when a projection team arrived at a township, they were supposed to ask local cadres about “good people and good deeds” 好人好事, draw relevant slides, and write a script for performance with the triple-lens slide ahead of the screening. Many local cadres I spoke to praised “rustic cinema” as being especially effective at labor mobilization. As late as 1982, a lantern slide manual by the Shenyang Army political department provides some vivid color illustrations of a panoramic battlefield, a sentinel on a night shift, a gradual sunrise, and the superimposition of a battle scene on a wounded soldier’s bandage to suggest flashback.[32]

Figure 10. “Before, during, and after screenings.” Papercut by Shangzhi County Movie Station, Film Work Correspondence, no. 1 (1972).

By the time I visited Laishui in 2017, the County Cinema still hosted an exhibition about the Three Sisters with press photos and various artifacts, including multi-lens slide projectors and old slides. The cinema manager, Ms. Yu, was recruited in the late 1970s for the “Little Three Sisters Movie Team.” She spoke of her training from bike- and horse-riding to lasso-like rope-throwing to hang the screen. There was also voice training for narration and singing, manual training for bamboo clappers and slideshow projection, and coordination training like a chamber music trio. Watching Ms. Yu’s gesticulations as she pantomimed the animated slideshow, I realized that, even while receiving the support of male authorship and craftsmanship, model female projectionists were neither puppets controlled by male cadres nor charlatans deceiving the public, but rather virtuoso performers.

Concluding Reflections

What might a media archaeology of animated slideshows tell us about the creative ecologies of socialist China and beyond? Two findings in my research on lantern slideshows contradict prevailing wisdom. First, propaganda can promote creativity. In the People’s Republic of China, xuanchuan 宣传, the term for propaganda, was as much a verb as it was a noun, referring less to a collection of texts than to a constellation of acts. For projectionists, xuanchuan became an umbrella term for all kinds of creative endeavors outside of operating machines: interviewing locals, composing songs, drawing lantern slides, and performing slideshows and clapper talk. The socialist institutions of rural culture centers and film exhibition networks—as well as broadcast stations and drama troupes—encouraged local media production that integrated and cultivated folk artists. Their talent, craft, and voices made propaganda interesting and relevant for local audiences. The question was not just how to animate slideshows, but how to make slideshows animate their audiences. If animation 动画 is “defined and analyzed as an art of movement,”[33] then socialist slideshow was all about mobilizing the masses to participate in movements 运动. The visual rhetoric of (animated) slideshows, with its ability to exaggerate, caricature, and transform, often drove home ideological points not easily achieved through words, photography, or cinema. Their usage of local materials and art forms made them especially versatile at addressing local priorities and thereby effectively appeal to the logos, ethos, and pathos of local audiences.

Second, the popularization of animated slideshows demonstrated how creativity could emerge and thrive out of technological limitations. For much of socialist China, the lack of cameras, television, and even electricity in the Chinese countryside heightened the need for grassroots artists, artisans, writers, and inventors to create local media with their talent and skill. In some ways, presenting an antithesis to AI-generated animation, animated slideshows from the 1950s and 1960s relied on manual labor, handicraft, voice performers, tinkering, and bricolage. If, as Ted Chiang puts it in a recent New Yorker article, “an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” then animated slideshows in socialist China required precisely “making choices at every scale” [34] from conception to implementation, from production to projection. Yet in ways reminiscent of contemporary digital media companies and tech start-ups, grassroots culture centers and mobile projection units also encouraged competitive innovation as well as creative collaboration under brand-like models that concealed individual authorship. The uneven attribution of credits generated tension and resentment that erupted into conflict during the Cultural Revolution, but the prototypes they developed—such as the multi-lens slide projector—still gained widespread currency. In sum, animated slideshows flourished with socialist China’s propaganda mandate and technological poverty, ironically becoming a site of indigenous technical innovation and artistic creativity.

[1] Qing Sun, “The Early Slide Projector and Slide Shows in China from the Late Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 12, no. 2 (2018): 203–26. For an account of the slide projector’s educational uses in modern China, see Chenshu Zhou, Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2022), chapter 3.

[2] Frank Dikotter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 251–52.

[3] For an insightful analysis of this film and its framing peep show, see Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), chapter 3.

[4] Hebei Provincial People’s Government Culture Bureau 河北省人民政府文教厅文化处, ed., Huandeng 幻灯 (Lantern slides) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1952), 8. Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiao 幻灯工作参考材料 (Lantern slide work reference materials), compiled and printed by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous People’s Government Culture and Education Department 内蒙古自治区人民政府文教部编印 (1951), 7.

[5] Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiao, 30.

[6] Central Culture Ministry Science and Technology Education Bureau 中央文化部科学普及局, ed., Huandeng shouce 幻灯手册 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1951), 1–3

[7] Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiang, p. 17; Huandeng, 14–26.

[8] Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiang, 52

[9] Huandeng shouce, pp. 50-51; Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiang, 10, 20–23.

[10] Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiang, 30.

[11] Many examples of European movement slides are available on the website of the Magic Lantern Society: https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/slides/movement-slides.php.

[12] Thomas Lamarre, “Magic Lantern, Dark Precursor of Animation,” Animation 6, no. 2 (2011): 127–148.

[13] Huandeng gongzuo cankao cailiang, 12.

[14] Guangdongsheng dianying faxing fangying gongzuo shiliao 广东省电影发行放映工作史料 (Historical materials concerning film distribution and exhibition in Guangdong), 3 vols. (Guangzhou: Guangdong wenhuaju, 1991), 2:7–9.

[15] Wu Guang 吴光 ed., Zenyang hua huandengpian 怎样画幻灯片 (How to draw lantern slides) (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe 1974), 40.

[16] Wang Baoyi 王宝义 and Wang Xuying 王旭营, Wangshi ruyan, Wangshi ruyan: Yesanpo de tuohuangzhe—Wang Baoyi koushu shilu 往事如烟：野三坡的拓荒者—王宝义口述实录 (The past is like smoke: Yesanpo’s pioneer—Wang Baoyi’s oral history) (Beijing: Xinhua, 2011), 48.

[17] Wang Baoyi and Wang Xuying, Wangshi ruyan, 28–49, 63.

[18] Daisy Yan Du, “Socialist Modernity in the Wasteland: Changing Representations of the Female Tractor Driver in China, 1949–1964,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29, no. (Spring 2017): 55–94.

[19] Wang Baoyi and Wang Xuying, Wangshi ruyan, 77–79; “Nongye zhanxian shang de wenhua jianbing” 农业战线上的文化尖兵 (Cultural vanguards on the agricultural front), Dazhong dianying 大众电影 (Popular Cinema), no. 1 (1980): 21–23

[20] Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company 河北省电影发行放映公司, Duojingtou huandengji de zhizuo yu shiyong 多镜头幻灯的制作与使用 (Making and using multi-lens slide projectors) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1965), 74–79.

[21] Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, Duojingtou huandengji de zhizuo yu shiyong, pp. 97-98.

[22] Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, Duojingtou huandengji de zhizuo yu shiyong, pp. 101, 108.

[23] Hebei Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, Duojingtou huandengji de zhizuo yu shiyong, pp. 104-105.

[24] Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019), chapter 4. Daisy Yan Du, “A Theory of Suspended Animation: The Aesthetics and Politics of (E)motion and Stillness,” Discourse 44, no. 1 (2022): 42-77.

[25] This section includes considerable overlap with chapter 3 of my book Cinematic Guerrillas.

[26] Dianying fangying 电影放映, no. 5 (1960): 8–16; no. 10 (1960): 10–11.

[27] Zheng Yizhen 郑义珍, “Maozhuxi zhuzuo gei women wuqiong de zhihui he liliang” 毛主席著作给我们的智慧和力量 (Chairman Mao gave us infinite wisdom and power), Dianying yishu 电影艺术, no. 1 (1964), 21–26.

[28] Wang Baoyi, and Wang Xuqing, Wangshi ruyan, 95–110.

[29] Ibid., 91–93; interview with Yan Heming, Laishui, Hebei, 2017.

[30] Interview with Mr. Han, Laishui, Hebei 2017.

[31]China Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, ed., Dianying xuanchuan faxing 电影宣传发行 (Film propaganda and exhibition), no. 5 (1971): 22–27.

[32] Lantern slide textbook writing group of the Shenyang Army Political Department 沈阳部队政治部幻灯教材编写组, Making and Projecting Lanternslides 幻灯的编绘与放映 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1982).

[33] Daisy Du, “Suspended Animation,” p. 1.

[34] Ted Chiang, “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, August 31, 2024.

Bio:

Jie Li is the Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, and Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, which won the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, the 2025 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Joseph Levenson Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. She also co-edited the volume Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution and published various articles on film, media, museum, and sound studies. Jie Li has been named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching as well as a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history, or art.