{"id":5523,"date":"2025-05-09T22:46:42","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T14:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acas.world\/?p=5523"},"modified":"2025-05-10T07:27:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T23:27:00","slug":"animated-slideshows-and-creative-ecologies-in-socialist-china-lecture-by-professor-jie-li-430-600pm-june-9-monday-hong-kong-time-cheung-on-tak-lecture-theater-lte-hkust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acas.world\/zh\/2025\/05\/09\/animated-slideshows-and-creative-ecologies-in-socialist-china-lecture-by-professor-jie-li-430-600pm-june-9-monday-hong-kong-time-cheung-on-tak-lecture-theater-lte-hkust\/","title":{"rendered":"Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China, lecture by Professor Jie Li, 4:30-6:00pm, June 9 (Monday, Hong Kong time), Cheung On Tak Lecture Theater (LTE), HKUST"},"content":{"rendered":"

Title:<\/strong> Animated Slideshows and Creative Ecologies in Socialist China<\/p>\n

Speaker:<\/strong> Professor Jie Li, Harvard University, USA<\/p>\n

Moderator:<\/strong> Professor Daisy Yan Du, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK<\/p>\n

Format:<\/strong> 40-50 minutes\u2019 lecture, followed by around 30 minutes\u2019 Q & A <\/p>\n

Time: <\/strong>4:30-6:00pm, June 9 (Monday, Hong Kong time)<\/p>\n

Venue: <\/strong>Cheung On Tak Lecture Theater (LTE), HKUST<\/p>\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the 1950s to the 1980s, lantern slideshows, dubbed \u201crustic cinema\u201d (tu dianying<\/em>), were deployed as an important form of local propaganda and entertainment.  Technically simple to produce from cheap and locally available materials, lanternslides could be projected using gas lamps without electricity.  Local propaganda artists and film projectionists thus wrote, drew, projected, and narrated their own slideshows, often featuring local heroes and local histories, thereby enabling the creation of local media content when film production was centrally orchestrated. <\/p>\n

Whereas rural audiences celebrated cinema for being \u201clive\u201d or \u201canimated\u201d (huo de<\/em>) and slideshows for being \u201cstill\u201d or \u201cdead\u201d (si de<\/em>), innovative experimentation with slideshow animations launched a \u201cThree Sisters Projection Team\u201d from a rural county to nationwide fame by the mid-1960s.  This projection team invented a slide projector with multiple lenses to create illusions of movement\u2014such as red flags waving, horses running, and masses celebrating\u2014to the sound accompaniment of clapper talk with rhyming verses. To emulate such animated slideshows, local cadres around the country recruited grassroots artists, writers, performers, and technicians to participate in propaganda endeavors over the next two decades.  <\/p>\n

Through a media archeology of animated slideshows, this talk seeks to excavate the creative ecology of Socialist China as well as to reflect on human creativity in the age of generative AI.  This talk will show how propaganda, censorship, and technology promoted or stifled, mobilized or immobilized creativity through their complex interactions with talent, skill, economics, politics, and institutions.<\/p>\n

Bio:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jie Li is a Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life<\/em>, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era<\/em>, and Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China<\/em>, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, the Katherine Singer Kov\u00e1cs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Honorable Mention for the 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 <\/em>and published various articles on film, media, museum, and sound studies. Jie Li was 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.<\/p>\n

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