Institutional Change And Flow Of Power: Mobile Cinema Screening In Khams, China

The mobile cinema in Khams, China, has witnessed a long history of institutional change. With its beginning in the Republic of China,the mobile cinema network had spread all over the rural and urban areas after the founding of the PRC. In the "seventeen years" of cinema history, the network was employed to implant communism ideology and served for cultural enlightenment. In the whole 1980s, the network was commercialized and flourished all over China. In 1990s, the mobile cinema system shrank and almost vanished from rural China. At the end of last century, the state started a nation-wide project to reconstruct the mobile cinema system.This dissertation attempted to employ the institutional change theory of Douglass C. North and modernity theory of Antony Giddens to analyze the relations between the state governance and the institutional change of cinema in Khams. Based on field study and document review, the study shows that the state is served as the crucial role in the institutional change of cinema by constructing the urban-rural structure of cinema to cater its appeals in ideology or economic incomes.On the basis of the interviews of nearly forty projectionists of different generations in the Khams, the paper applies the discipline theory of Foucault and practice theory of Michel de Certeau to analyze the position and the fate of the projectionists, as well as their resistance strategy and tactics.The paper also focus on the investigation of the audience of the mobile movie. Based on historical files, audience interviews and the experiences of actual screening tour, the paper shows the profile of Khams rural audiences and their interpretation of the movies and the mobile cinema itself.The paper declares there is a kind of power flow in the state-projectionist-audience relations, which includes not only the regulation and control, but also the physical or ideological resistance tactics, which should be considered when we want to define the nature and characteristics of the cinema.