IAS Distinguished Lecture: Prof. LI Jie (Jun 9, 2025)

Okay, good afternoon everyone.

Welcome to HQST to attend Professor Li's wonderful talk.

I guess Professor Liier uh is a reuned scholar who does not need an introduction but for sake I still want to give you a very brief introduction to professor Lee.

Um, Professor Li is a professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University.

She is the author of Shanghai Homes, Panimpos of Private Life, utopian luans, a memorial museum of the Mao era and cinematic gorillas, propaganda, projectionists and audiences in socialist China, which won the Kraina cross movie image book award, the Katherine Singer Carics book award from the society for cinema and media studies and honorable able mention for the Joseph Levenson book prize from the association for Asian Studies.

She also co-edited the volume Red Legacies in China cultural afterlifees of the communist revolution and published the various articles on film media museum and sound studies. Li was named a Harvard College professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching as well as a water ching kabot fellow for scholarly eminence in the fields of literature history and art. So here I want to highlight one of professor Lij's um monographs cinematic gorillas.

Uh this is a new book and I have been using this book for my uh graduate course um a socialist of film culture and uh if you have the time uh just feel free uh to take a look uh circle this uh around yeah this is a little book and before professor Lee starts her talk um I want to say that um you if you can please uh don't uh take a photos not this nice um and don't upload them to social media.

Uh in today's world, we don't want to go viral online.

So just uh you know um listen to her lecture carefully and ask questions during the Q&A. Okay.

Uh now let's welcome Professor Lee to deliver her wonderful talk. Okay. Give him a pause.

[Applause] Well, thank you so much, Professor D, for um inviting me here. It's a truly an honor to be at u um Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. And uh I'm also really grateful for everyone for coming from different parts of Hong Kong to to to make it to the talk.

It's I'm very moved to to see you here and um especially quite a few of your your scholarship has been um very influential for me.

Um this uh talk actually this this topic dates back I was looking up my emails I think a conversation that um professor Du and I had back in 2019 actually because I I don't work on animation per se um but um but she suggested that you know these slideshows that are actually like that have movements isn't that animation and so that actually inspired me to think harder about this topic um but because of covid because of various reasons it I kept on postponing the the the um the writing of this paper until very recently.

And it also gives me a a great opportunity to extend a topic that's actually on the cover of my book, but I I don't actually go into it in detail on the um because you would notice that the projectionist here is not really that the film projector is in the background, but what's in the foreground uh is her clappers.

uh and she's actually giving a clapper talk uh that accomp accompanied by like um um slide projection.

So um these uh the um the three uh lenses here are these triple lens or quadruple lens uh slide projectors that can u make actually animated special effects and that's what the uh today's talk is about.

But because it's a very new um for me I I haven't given this talk before.

Uh so like I'm also really looking for your feedback before I actually write this up. Um so okay let me move to the next slide. Um so I think the lantern slideshow I don't know how many of you still remember actually sitting in classrooms with actually slide projectors as the teaching tool.

Um, but I think by the 21st century, most of us don't have it anymore.

I was delighted to see there's a overhead projector here, which reminds me actually of high school. Um, it but it was a really important form of local um, propaganda education and entertainment um, in China, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s. Um, it's quite simple to produce and you can use very locally available materials.

So um lantern slides actually can be projected using gas lamps without electricity.

So grassroots propaganda artists and film projectionists they were drawing, writing, projecting and narrating their own slideshows.

So they're able to create local media content before the availability of photography, film and radio um in the 1950s already.

So whereas rural audiences um they said well cinema when cinema did come about um they were um cinema was live or animated it's uh but slideshows were still or dead but there were innovative experimentations with slideshow animations or animated slides uh in particularly by a three so-called three sisters projection team from lie county in her province that became famous nationwide by the mid 1960s. Um so the they invented this uh multiple lens slide projector and then performed them with clapper talk. So um this they are also the only projection team that actually like um whose slide projection has been filmed. So I'll just play a video clip from a 1966 news reel of their uh slideshow.

Um this is basically three slides that are dissolved into each other.

Explain that.

Fore.

[Applause] Okay.

So they're shown writing scripts and then drawing the slides and also performing them.

And over the next two days decades actually cultural cardre all over China were recruiting artists, writers, performers, technicians to develop slideshows, sometimes animated slideshows.

So uh that was actually my father's first work unit when he was a Sandong youth in northeast China.

he was spared um the labor of like going into the fields to work to to to draw uh lantern slides.

Um and then um so over my okay so some of the sort of key question and overview I think um what I'm doing in effect is a media archaeology of animated slideshows but I also want to try to explore the creative ecology of socialist China um as well as reflect perhaps also with your help on human creativity in the age of generative AI.

Um, and by creative ecology I mean the cultural, techn technological, political, socioeconomic and institutional conditions that influence the flourishing and withering of creativity.

And I'm quite interested in the relationship between propaganda, technology, and creativity. So how might propaganda promote or stifle, mobilize or immobilize creativity? What is the relationship between technology and creativity?

Um and throughout the course of my talk, I also want to shift from the question of um what animated socialist slideshows to what did did socialist slidesh shows animate?

Um a quick sort of overview of its history, right?

Um magic lantern of course is actually its own field of study, but um um in general they're quite lightweight and portable and arrived in China as early as the 17th century and was widely used by the early 20th century.

um for performance, entertainment, preaching, and education.

Um I'm just going to play this this clip from um Yamuji Scenes of City Life where he actually plays a uh um peep show proje projectionist in um uh before as a framing device for the entire film um for the film's um expose of capitalism and commodification in Shanghai.

But um overall this imported technology became an important medium for local artists who also exhibit and market their talent.

Merchants displayed slides and sold New Year prints of the same image.

Uh storytellers use slides to illustrate their ballots.

And of course slide projectors were used in classrooms and movie theaters in urban areas.

But um after 1949, the Chinese Communist Party readily enlisted this versatile medium um of lantern slides or magic lanterns into the propaganda network so that um rural sort of county level cultural centers which were called vanaguan.

They were equipped with lanterns years before the arrival of cinema and radio.

So these are just sort of some basic statistic.

A lot of this was actually in North China between Shani and Hub provinces and they were also making a lot of these slide projectors on their own and there's a lot of lantern slide manuals at the time that explained the virtues of lantern slides over cinema in a number of ways. Um one I mentioned already that it doesn't need electricity.

um you can use gas lamps and the the projectors uh themselves can be constructed with local materials.

Uh they also use color. So even films were black and white at the time or photography was mostly black and white but you can use color and sound to attract audiences and they usually represented local events. So um uh the um the manuals just praise the medium's low tech flexibility, portability and indigenity. So a lot of that can be captured by the word tool, right?

Um which is earthy, rustic, primitive, local.

Um I don't know if rustic cinema is the best translation of tying but it's um it slideshows came to be uh dubbed especially when there was movement involved.

Um what my favorite anecdote is actually this one uh there's a shy culture worker who explained how they built their own lantern slide actually with the help of a pumpkin.

So, what came to mind for me is like a jacko-lantern for Halloween being constructed as a kind of um slide projector or magic lantern. And um but most of them look like more like this, right?

There's there's a single lens on them and they are really made with uh by local cultural centers also artist associations and science education equipment workshops.

Um and uh so um but soon they thought that audiences they might not find these kind of slide projections to be all that interesting.

So um um these model lanternists um they introduced ways to turn these dead slides into living ones already in the 1950s.

So, uh, first they they changed single images to image series and then they added um they changed the narration to um clapper talk and some of them use paper marionette figures that are almost akin to shadow puppets. And um and another commonly used uh way of you know animating the slides was to make them into panoramic strips that are pulled through the slide projector. So it looks like you know there's some kind of movement um like such as a train passing through a person walking and the speed of the movement actually depended a lot on the content. So like foot soldier would be moving at a slower pace whereas the calvary with horses would move maybe faster but the with a jolting pace depending how you move the slide itself and then uh vehicles would be even faster.

The same goes for vertical movements.

I don't have an illustration of like but you know rain would come down faster whereas the sun would rise gradually.

This is um the illustration is from much later. Um and so there were also manual adjustments to lighting.

So there would be you know you can create a night scene with green cellophane over the lens or creating the illusion of sunrise by covering half of the lens with a piece of paper. Now this is actually not new per se because as early as the 18th and 19th century um there were movement slides in Europe uh US and Japan and you can see some examples here from like 1880s um and Tom Lamar has written about um panorama slides in Miji Japan as follows saying the landscape has 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 variable temporality maybe punctuated with commentary. The time of gesture and speech. So I think it's interesting to emphasize the time of gesture and speech that that temporality is not mechanical. Um so what actually animated the slideshow is is not actually a machine but rather the performer's body.

Their gestures, their vocal sound effects enlivened the still images and mandated the speed, direction and quality of movement which is very different mechanically also from the uh succession of instance in cinema.

The lantern slide projection is so is almost somewhere between a machine operator and an instrument performer. So you actually perform the lantern slide um almost um rather than just fun, right? And at the production level of course also uh local culture workers were handmaking these uh slide projectors with local materials.

And so there are actually a little closer to almost like unique I don't know about works of art but at least artisanship and um there were many conferences and competitions held at the local level to inspire technical and formal innovations.

And meanwhile the um the content of the slides also represented local people and affairs so that um their audiences usually rural audiences can see their acquaintances honored um on screen and then vow to work much harder to get into the slideshow as well. So in that sense slides not only emulated lifelike movements but also captivated and mobilized their audiences.

Um so in some ways I think about reception as a kind of in very interactive because it's also responding to what's going on in the room.

And um in reading through various ways of making site there are some uh lantern or or film projectionists were making lantern slide but they were not good artists.

So they couldn't make um uh so part of the their their work is to address c local priorities when they come to a village or to a township.

So, one instance I read about in um I think in in GuangDong is that um a movie of team was trying to draw an a pest.

It's called the plant um rice plant hopper, but they couldn't actually get it right.

So they asked the local cadre to go to the field and capture some actually from the field live and then put them inside like between um uh glass almost bit like a microscope and so that uh the heat of the light bulb actually made them move and in a very agitated way.

So they're overanimated in some ways, right?

And then the audiences like you know seeing the magnified insects really realized the danger of the pest and then they were willing to buy the insecticide to put them out. And so and I found like manuals later from 1970s that actually tell you how to um fight pests using slideshows by capturing the actual the insects that you want to kill.

So um much of these experiments happened already in the 1950s, but it was really by the early 1960s that animated slideshows became popularized thanks to one sorry one um projection team that many teams were actually learning from called the they were dubbed the three sister movie team. And I actually made a whole trip which I'll talk about in a bit about going trying to find the three sister the three women who represented um you know socialist um uh film um projection in the countryside going into the going through the snows and mountains to show films to the uh to the peasants and also making slideshows and being inventors and artists all embodied in one.

Um but uh what I realized as looking through the sources already is that their story has to start earlier with their mentor, their teacher and who was actually one of the earlier sort of inventors of this double uh triple um lens slideshow.

Um his name is Wai.

uh WAi w was a school teacher initially and then he um was recruited as a propaganda worker for the uh local vanaguan the cultural center and his job was to organize village drama troops as well as to conduct so-called rooftop broadcasting uh which is like before there was actually um you know wired broadcasting or radio um some messages were transmitted via like mograph into the villages and then there would be like human loudspeakers essentially people who are like sitting or standing on a rooftop or on top of a mountain reading out a sentence at a time and then p and then someone will relay the same message at the next rooftop.

So this was called uding guangpo and uh so that's something that um cultural cadres were also doing in order to extend the um governance throughout the country right also into the countryside without any um electrification and so so that's part a part of that he he found a projector inside I don't know which kind he found but he found a uh sort of a magic I guess it's more like a magic lantern that's in the cultural center itself and then he wanted to uh he thought this this is a quite an interesting technology.

It's the most advanced um technical object in the whole cultural center. They didn't even have a radio and it reminded him of Laang right these peep shows that he had seen at tempo fairs but um but it the the um that that projector was projecting outwards into a public and so he was developing you know he he found a set of slides I actually have some slides that are pass around there's sort of a a a set of glass slides and then there's also a set of slides about ayong so you can take a look um uh at the materiality of these slides. They're not animated slides though.

Those have not survived.

Um but um so Wong himself, Wai, began producing and narrating his slideshows um on market days to propagate the marriage law, the three NT and 5NT campaigns and also the Korean War.

He also assisted and later joined the prefectrol mobile projection team.

Um and um at that time he was also still producing slides and then doing clapper talk.

And one thing he mentioned in his memoir is that the local models who might be praised would also interrupt because they're they're a little embarrassed by what's being said about them being praised. And then so the whole show turned into a cross talk orang um and the audience was quite you know enlivening the scene with laughter.

Um one already started making experiments um well actually this is the sound of clapper talk again. So try to imagine that there's a I after so many years I still haven't learned it myself.

I should like really go apprentice myself to a clapper um storyteller.

Um but so he was also experimenting with trying to add a lens onto the existing.

So what you saw earlier were all like single lens projector and he started building another lens so that it became possible to put say two sorry two slides on um two slides and then make them alternate.

Right? So it's like a basic two-frame animation of a lion dance for example.

um and uh and so that already started to charm audiences.

He also developed some other techniques that I get into and a lot of this won him um competitions and even an opportunity to meet Chairman Mao himself in the 1957 model worker conference.

Um but as much as he tried to apply for communist party membership um the application would be rejected because his father had once worked as a policeman under Japanese occupation but he still very eagerly tried to you know serve as a good propaganda worker and answer the party's call with every campaign.

So in 1957 there was this eager hope to develop mobile projection network to increase the number of um projection network uh projection teams and uh so WAI was in charge of recruiting more people and he read about um female projectionists especially all female teams and so um you know these were from um uh Jang and Hub provinces and there was a lot of information about them in the press. Actually, I I thought there would be more female projectionists initially before I went to interview and then I realized they're a tiny minority, but somehow the propaganda materials really emphasized that there were female projectionists.

So in some ways perhaps like um iconic female tractor drivers that Daisy has also written about um they took on this uh physically demanding job that also required mechanical and engineering skills.

Um so female projectionists appearance in public also embodied a new model of gender equality and countered patriarchal norms. So um at the same time that these three women were recruited um uh Wambi also recruited six young men to cover the county's more remote and mountainous regions.

So the three sisters were only showing films in the county area and on the plains and all nine rookie projectionists.

This is the only photo actually found of them.

This is actually from an film gaziteer when they went to learn from her um projectionists.

So um and then they you know they learned all these animated tricks.

They also developed innovated um um new uh animation techniques and also expanded the uh propaganda repertoire.

Um so I I almost thought that this kind of team is very similar to maybe today's startup company in some ways right but they didn't have a patent they didn't develop a product but you know they did share their technical knowhow very freely from any projection team that was willing to learn and then um and others had um contributed to writing this manual actually for um for projection teams around the country to build their own multi- lens um projector and making animated slideshows.

So um you know there's a lot of sort of technical information here I won't go into but they you know building adding lenses and reflectors levers and polies um also instructions on how to paint and make special effects and also how to script also making scripts that are very much like film scripts. So among the special effects that they were able to come up with are you know like um this would be like a radio waves that are uh spiraling and uh you know making a turn and I mentioned sort of the two-frame animation with the uh lion dance.

A variation of that would be a longer strip that you can, you know, two strips that are being pulled through at the same time so that it looks like a parade that's passing by. And uh there, you know, there there might also be sound effects.

Um um there there would be like an LPA record also saying what music accompaniment uh will be used.

Um, I quite like the the um the horse, the great leap horse that gallops against the background of a socialist countryside.

And in some ways, this image really hearkens back to the very first moving picture in 1878, the horse in motion.

But instead of Edward Murridge, the multiple cameras capturing sequential images, there are only four slides superimposed onto each other.

And um and then there's also the animation of the sunflower which um is uh a sunflower faces a sun and whereas tremau is a sun right so there's also sort of the effect of sunshine in the background which uh um I I think this is kind of a almost like a slideshow recreation here of the the sunlight shining in the background.

So this really charmed audiences and um won um the them fame. But the manual uh they also mentioned like also using basically shadow puppetry and so drawing from more traditional arts and also paper cuts.

Uh some of the slides are actually made out of paper.

I don't have samples of that because they they didn't last very long.

Um but the manual did emphasize that special effects or animation should not be pursued frivolously uh or to showcase technical ingenuity but rather they have to serve the propaganda content.

So one negative example cited here is that one projection team was supposed to show the miseries of old society through an poor peasant's memories of begging for food.

U and then he got bitten by a landlord's dog.

But the lanternist who they they animated the dog. They overan animated the dog and also the the performer was vocalizing its barking. So as a result the audience was laughing and they they thought this is a really comedic scene rather than like a tragic you know they they were laughing instead of crying.

So that's the wrong way to use animation.

And a positive example by contrast is um to sort of um okay so first uh the it it begins with a riddles.

The projectionist would ask um um head like a crab with joints at its waist. This animal has long tail and eight legs. And then when somebody guesses the right answer uh you would see the appearance of a scorpion.

And then the narrator would continue, "All scorpions sting. All landlords are mean.

" And then at this point, there would be a vertical wipe here that uh replaces a scorpion's head with the landlord's head.

And then also the scorpion's um tail with the landlord's abacus.

And you know and then the narration says scorpions are poisonous and ruthless but landlords are 10 times as cruel.

So the use of these sophisticated transitions which you know also combines uh they talk a lot about transitions about when do you use a cut when do you use a wipe when do you use a dissolve and what effect it's supposed to have.

It creates mystery and establishes equivalence between class enemies and malicious animals. Um and so I am very much uh reminded and also uh I Daisy has written about sort of the disappearance of or talking animals and the animality of villains um in your book and also the aesthetics of overan animation and suspended animation.

So in the case I think these usages of um animals in the in the um the slides uh examples that we have are also quite interesting.

You have a dog that's overanimated extension of the landlord, but you also have a scorpion as a metaphor.

Um that and and then there was sort of exposing the essence of the the landlord to that he um you know or becoming like exposed as a scorpion.

So, um, I'll be happy to discuss this a bit more in the Q&A, but I also want to get into kind of the the the team itself and what I have been able to find through fieldwork because it's such a famous projection team. Uh, they're, you know, the subject of a news reel.

So there's a lot of press about them.

There are propaganda posters about them.

There's news reels about them.

They you know there's sort of um accounts of how they overcame the gossip of villagers and then they are initially um you know failing at their learning the machines and then but their villager host treated them like daughters um gave them the warmest part of the beds and boiling many eggs for them as snacks and then they brave snow and ice and went into the most remote mountains to show films to the mountain dwellers.

Um and then that they also performed and you know these are some of the photo photographs actually the best quality photographs of film screenings under the moon and um by um people uh people's pictorial magazine.

Um and um um we also have images really of them not only performing but making the slides.

Um, but when I went to the field trip, I in almost like paying pilgrimage to this model projection team back in 2017 to see if I can find the original three sister and see if I can talk to them.

Uh, one had already passed away by then.

Another could not be found and a third refused to meet us despite um, you know, appeals from on our behalf by um, by her former teacher and cousin.

but other colleagues and it it turned out that we realized that it's actually a much larger uh group of people who cons um who made up of this uh three sister uh movie team.

There is an exhibition hall and I get back to this and so a few of their um former colleagues did talk to us and told us that well they were performers but they didn't paint, they didn't write, they and you know they didn't invent as they had been inredited in the press. instead uh the slideshows were pretty much all scripted by Wambi and painted by um um yeah so this is the the press pictures but actually the real artist of a lot of their famous slides is um this man uh Mr. Yan who was an amateur artist and lanternist who applied a lot of visual you know different visual styles to enrich the medium's expressions means he recalled that he had to keep the colors transparent while in ensuring accuracy in the miniature format and any mistake would be magnified through projection.

Right? U this is just images from a manual but trying to imagine what it's like to actually paint the slides and it was quite strenuous for his eyes, hands and shoulders and the work actually left with him with all these medical issues that um when we visited him later and but at the same time he didn't consider he does not he didn't himself did not even keep a single slide that he had painted after all those years and the ones we found in the museums looked like this.

they basically almost you can barely see what's on them anymore.

So, um he said they're not really works of art, but rather an effective propaganda means that demanded craftsmanship and for him it's very much a um a livelihood too.

And then um other um male colleagues that we had interviewed also contributed their ideas, talents and labor.

But um they were supposed to be the so the the the green leaves beneath the red flowers.

And um and then it's the the three women who were the three sisters who went on these nationwide tours.

And then their audiences also shifted from the grassroots peasants to political elite.

So they performed from for Premier Joan Li but also for um Leoi and Wanguang May. And when there are news reel photographs of them going into the countryside, these are all places they never went to normally.

They were all staged for the for the um um for the magazine and uh and so like their colleagues were sort of carrying their equipment for them and they they um and going in to show films in villages that they had never been to before.

So um former colleagues actually they refer to the three sisters as a kind of which means um darkness under the land suggesting that somehow the media limelight actually obscured much more than it illuminated. And then some um green leaves these men um swallowed their pride.

One projectionist, Leo, was um quite angry and he lashed out at the photojournalist uh who took those pictures and he said, you know, because it's a it's a magazine that has a international global distribution, he said, well, you've deceived the whole nation and now you want to deceive the whole world.

Uh and so his hot temper really got him into trouble.

And later uh when the uh with the socialist education campaign and the four cleanups, work teams sort of accused him of um crimes that he didn't commit and later he had to retreat from the movie team and ret and um become a sort of a rural technician.

So actually when we went to visit him he thought that we came to rehabilitate him from the government and which is something that we weren't able to do at all.

And it does sort of you know my re when I go to the countryside I feel that somehow the academic purpose and what how our subjects understand uh our research is often at odds with each other.

So um perhaps our presence and questions had reminded them of the kind of the work teams Mauis work teams who came to visit um and collected embellished and sometimes fabricated their stories.

So perhaps it is the fear of this hijacking of the stories that the original team leader of the three sisters refused to speak to us. But as we also learned during the cultural revolution the they turned against their mentor Wambi as a capitalist rotor because of his leadership position and bad class background.

He was given an ingyang haircut and paraded through the streets with a rope around his neck and a 2meter long dunce cap painted with oxen and snakes as and uh Wong's memoir also recounted being imprisoned forced to clean the public toilet and he was escorted daily to read a special column of big character posters data and caricatures against him and actually later they said because everyone in the cultural bureau in the cultural center and they're very talented.

So their and their struggle sessions were particularly spectacular and actually enjoyable for the public to come and watch.

So um and then the the three sisters themselves soon fell from grace because they had once performed for President Li Shiaoi and first lady Wang Guangme who um was also herself had to suffer sort of humiliation wearing a necklace of ping pong balls. Um and then because once Guang Bay invited the three sisters to um to to show their slides in Beijing and then invited them for dessert um for for dinner actually and then there was uh fresh peaches for dessert and then the team leader did not eat her peach but she enshrined it.

She put like words on it, the source of power. And then um and then so wall posters depicted this incident in caricatures of her worshiping the disgraced first lady's peach until it had rotted. So um at this by you know by late 1960s um well film screenings almost halted but there was only slideshows for the sake of condemning or exorcising class enemies as orcs ox demon and snake spirit.

So I found some materials about like slideshows of certain films before they were being um projected, films that were criticized as poisonous weed films. Um but one of the projectionists in in Li I we interviewed he had inadvertently he superimposed a um a slide of a local capitalist rotor onto an image of Ma.

So it was an accident but it also made him into an active counterrevolutionary and so it was no wonder that um projectionists became paranoid about actually making slides because they said that you can't pierce your hands by wiping machines but if it's very risky to wield a brush or write or paint and so a lot of the more earlier sort of acts of innovation and creativity had ceased East.

Um yet, uh when you know the politics was was a little died down a bit more, it was possible again to make a slideshow. And in fact, it became a requirement for um uh for the selection of um projectionists into movie teams. And uh so um uh my my father and several of his friends were actually recruited into movie teams in order to to paint these slides of local heroes and local events. Um and um as shown this is a a woodcut from 1972 and you can see that there's a kind of a requirement or this is a a suggestion that every movie team is supposed to show slide uh you know also interview locals make slides and then also explain the film that they projected and then also hold discussions afterwards.

Um so um and and lo local cadres also mentioned that slideshows were very effective at labor mobilization and all kinds of local mobilization.

So um as late as 1980s actually this manual was also showing all kinds of um animated um animation tricks but more pertinent to the army. um including this um panoramic battlefield, a sentinel on the night shift, so you can actually do a um you know like a pan as well as a tilt in a very cinematic way. Um you see in the sunrise already, but you also have like you know panoramic slides of this soldier kind of having a flashback of the battle pulled over his um his head.

So um so these these uh animated slideshows continued into the 1980s um before television really came came on and by the time I went to LA in 2017 the county cinema still hosted this exhibition about the three sisters and I talked to the cinema manager miss who came into this um projection network in the late 1970s um as the small the little or the little three sisters movie team and she talked about her training and I really gained a new sense of respect for the how much training went into being a slideshow or projectionist because there's bike and horse riding there's lasso like you have to throw a rope to in order to hang the screen um in the countryside they they also did voice training for narration and singing manual training for with baboo clappers uh for the slideshows and also a lot of coordination between the three um projectionists.

It's almost like a chamber music trio in some ways, right?

So I realized that even though they were receiving the support of like I guess male authorship and craftsmanship model female projectionists they were not quite puppets controlled by male cadres or charlatans deceiving the public but truly virtual so performers um in at some level.

So I want to come to um conclusion just some concluding thoughts and um uh on the on this you know what might this media archaeology of animated slideshows tell us about creative ecology of socialist China. I think that my sense is that two um what goes against received wisdom first of all is that propaganda seem to promote creativity.

Um and I I think I'm I'm also very indebted to Lyan's book for uh also this sort of thinking about creative production in the cultural revolution.

Um, and in socialist China, um, I'm really struck by the way people use the term shantran, propaganda, not so much as, um, almost not so much as a noun as a verb, it's an act, right? Referring not to con a collection of texts, but rather a constellation of actions.

And it's actually an umbrella term for all kinds of creative endeavors that goes beyond operating machines, especially for the projectionists.

Um the actual showing of the film, turning on the machine is not Shantran.

It's everything else like going to interview people and um drawing slides and performing slides and uh clapper talk.

That's Shantran, right?

So it's actually equated with creativity.

and then the socialist institutions of rural cultural centers and then um you know du these projection teams also local I'm I'm currently actually researching broadcasting I'm giving um a talk about radio in two days um but like gujan um at the grassroots broadcast station and drama troops really encouraged local media production that integrated local talent.

So something I realized um that in the 1970s 1980s there would be these correspondents or at the grassroots if they write an article if they write a good future story it's very likely that the local broadcasting station will read it over these wired loudspeakers.

So the whole they become famous in the entire county and so at that time you can like it's very hard nowadays to imagine a piece of writing grabbing the attention of an entire county right um so the talent craft and voices of these local artists actually made propaganda interesting and relevant for local audiences.

So the question was not just how to animate slideshows but also make slideshows animate their audiences.

And if um sorry if animation is defined and analyze an art of movement then socialist slideshows was all about mobilizing the masses to participate in movement. So from to yun um and then um so another point is that the popularization of animated slideshow and or like when did it end?

It ended because other technologies really came into being and um but because of technological limitations creativity actually is enhanced. Um, I know I I keep on thinking maybe more like about how generative AI is making it increasingly pointless to paint, to to write, to do anything. Um, because it feels like okay because the computer can do it so much better. But when it wasn't available, when you know the lack of cameras, the lack of television even electricity actually heightened the need for grassroots innovation and the significance of the human touch um gesture, voice and choice. So it's very much the antithesis of AI generated animation.

Um, and these slideshows relied on manual labor, handiccraft, voice performers, and tinkering.

Their creation is collaborative, but also competitive.

There's a lot of competition, and authorship was often anonymous.

You can't really find out who had written the scripts or who had written these manuals even. Um so in that sense the creative ecology there seems to share a bit generative AI's disregard for individual authorship and uh intellectual property and the three sisters movie team again I feel like there's something to them that similar to a a tech startup but their inventions had no marketable products and their key rewards are also not profit um but a kind of a fame I guess um and but the uneven Even crediting still led to tension and resentment that erupted into conflict during the cultural revolution.

So overall animated sites shows still flourished with the propaganda mandate of that period and technological poverty and becoming a site of indigenous uh um innovation, artistic um creativity.

I guess like one final thing.

I was thinking about this this morning, so this is not my official conclusion, but I was thinking that creativity is not necessarily an absolute good either because it seemed like it's a very creative team and they can really use their creativity to to dehumanize these so-called class enemies and legitimize or even carnivalize the violence towards them.

And so um you know um creativity can help to mobilize labor, obesence, hatred, fear, pride and shame.

So and and particularly with animation coming back to this, it's able to exaggerate caricature and transform um and really drive home ideological points that are not easily achieved through words, photography and cinema. So I would love to you know uh also hear your thoughts about how because I I did put in the uh you know how to think about creative ecology in the age of AI um very late um because it's something that that's very much on my mind but I would love to hear your feedbacks but for now I will I will stop here and um thank you for all for your attention.

Okay, thank you so much, Professor Lee, for your inspiring talk. Um, so now it's a Q&A.

I'd like to take advantage of my role as a moderator for Professor Lee's talk and ask the first one or two questions.

So the first question is about um uh the kind of emerging like a field of latrical cinema studies.

So your talk and also your book uh cinematic gorillas uh draw attention to a kind of you know uh non- theatrical uh cinemas because in film studies scholars often tended to uh pay attention to uh feature films uh released in theaters but in recent years there emerged a trend um to study the non- theatrical cinemas and uh this uh trend uh first happened in studies of American films films and then call it uh uh non- theatrical cinema, amateur cinema, useful cinema and also educational cinema.

So my first question is how how do you locate your research and not just this talk but also your new book cinematic gorillas in a larger you know field of non- theatrical cinema studies and my second question is about the issue of technology and um I know that um for the mobile projection and for the uh projectionists they rely heavily on 16 millimeter technology the cameras and also the projectors uh 16 millimeter uh cameras and projectors were invented in the 1920s and uh in the 1930s and the 1940s.

Uh this technology conquered the world just like AI conquering the world today and uh many mobile projection teams adopted this kind of you know uh portable um uh camera and projectors and I myself encountered a lot of accounts about 16 mm technology. So I was wondering in your research um of socialist China the mobile projection teams have you ever like um encountered any like accounts or discussions about uh this technology that conquered the world uh in the 1930s and the 1940s.

So these are my two questions. Uh thank you so much.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for um yeah, I feel like I've I've finished my homework to you thanks to the the homework that you had given me and indeed um I mean I think I've always been taken an interest also in documentary films which are often non- theatrical right um and particular I have I I just recently came back from Daai actually because in um in the 1960s there's a movement ma call down all of all of rural China to learn from Dajai, this one village in Sh in Shansi province and um and they have been the subject of countless uh um documentary and news reels and uh um and I went to many places in other provinces that had learned from Dajay, including like one mountainous village in WJO where they talked about how um in order to learn from Dai They had actually uh they were trying to build terrace fields.

So Dai was famous for turning mountains into um cultivatable fields and then um but in that village villagers said they had not seen films but film had affected the village and changed the outlook the landscape of the village because the the party secretary had gone to watch films about Dachi and then started to transform it.

So I I became really interested in what is it that films do to their audiences? Um not just at a psychological level but maybe even like to what it does to the physical landscape and particularly in this um um in this period in the 60s and 70s cinema was actually not necessarily for entertainment purposes.

It it of course served as entertainment as well, but these DJI films were all about just digging and it was about physical labor and so they were boring.

People watched them and they didn't necessarily find them inspiring but but but these films really transformed the physical landscape and also people's um daily schedule because they had to work much early.

Actually, one one of the neighboring villages said, "Well, So like so they they were so competitive.

They wanted all of us to be so competitive too. And then other reactions was like oh learning from we were so tired like we were exhausted basically.

And then so this regime of labor that was um created uh had relied on like various media um to propagate this and cinema played a very big role.

Right. So I I'm really curious about like how cinema affected. So in that sense I think I'm uh also with useful the uses of cinema and other um scholars work um also some military uses how does it promote uh maybe like usage of cinema for um for military purpose even for violence.

Um so yeah and so I'm quite inspired by all of that as well but uh with the millimeter 16 millimeter there wasn't actually so the prints a lot of them are on 16 millimeter but from 1970 onwards there was actually very active promotion of 8.75 mm uh projectors which were so lightweight that you can carry it on a shoulder pole and go up the mountains.

So the number of projection units had actually quadrupled in the like late 70s whereas like so few films were made.

So you can say that the whole cultural revolution decade is like a desert in terms of film making but in terms of film exhibition it really expanded because of the light the portability of the technology right. Um yeah, so so definitely like the the uh the film prints um and also the the projectors uh when they're small enough they can be carried up um and like slides are even lighter.

So they they were actually even more widespread but we don't have a lot of material to testify to how people reacted to them. Um yeah so I I don't have too much information on my reception.

Oh okay. Thank you so much.

I really learned a lot. So now the floor is open to the audience. Uh if you have any question please raise your hand.

Our student helper will give the microphone to you.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for the talk.

I was taking a lot of notes and there was several things that I was very curious about and I have one question and then I will explain my intention behind the question.

So the question is very simple.

So what kind of contents gets repeated in this period through the slideshows as I see some of the examples you've given us here it has two levels overlaying one background and one layer of words so it seems like there is certain level of repetition possible here right so that's my question the reason for asking it is because I was thinking and I was taking notes because this uh points to an important debate in generative AI there is a tendency to differentiate uh creativity from generation.

That's why generative AI is not called creative AI. And one of the things that distinguishes creativity and generative AI is exactly, you know, creativity is uh not exactly repeating what is regurgitated from a large corpus.

So, so that's why I was asking this question.

I felt that distinguishing these could help me understand more what is the creativity side of these projectionist work. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. That's a that's a great question and you're like the exactly I wanted to actually hear your feedback on the AI part. Um I think um the first of all with the slides that I had been pass passing around I these these are not the animated kinds um but I was trying to just find slides that are not mass manufactured and the glass slides where you might there I think one of them actually there's handwriting on it and quite a few of them are what film is going to be screened today right or um something uh so that you and write on it and erase it and reuse it. Um, so it's um, you know, to but but to enhance the aesthetic part.

I don't know if there's much creativity in just you know like writing down the information.

I think what I found creative in what these um um, slideshow projectionists um or lanternists I I don't like they they didn't necessarily give themselves a particular label.

um our invent invention and also artistry and also the fact that um um like various local grassroots talents can be chosen to engage in sort of propaganda work um but some of it is actually very um technical right so some of it's in uh I actually this is another thing I just brought back from the Dajai county is that the local I I spoke to a to someone in charge charge of the wired broadcasting and then he had tinkered for many years with automation.

He was trying to automate the sound of East is Red Dong in the morning so you don't actually have to play the record. And so he developed this whole charts of trying to figure out like you know with the Doriasi which um exactly which kind of um um oh like vacuum tube like radio equipment can produce that tone. And then he sort of built this this whole like automated almost like or like electronic music playing with the radio equipment that he had.

And I was just very moved to see how much um creativity I think or how much technical innovation has gone into it.

Um I think I I have to make up my own physics lessons to understand this.

I have to admit I don't understand all the electric circuits but it was it was really and it's someone who is just working at the um at the county um right and then I also met people who are artists who were singers who were you know dancers they were choreographers and they were all serving they were all trying to promote this uh this um agricultural learning from our model village and then like writers as I mentioned before they um they as long as they adhered to the propaganda mandate, you know, they can also write scripts.

These are almost like film scripts.

They didn't have the equipment to make films. So I think those are still like kind of human labor that goes into the and also um human imagination that went into the production of these like kind of locally relevant um kind of a sort of broadcast media you know and they also explain exactly you know from the closeup to what what is the animation effect here that is going to be used so that her eyes open and there's going to be a dissolve.

There's a lot of thought that goes into this that I don't think is as robotic as some of the AI generated um uh products that I have seen that there's something very predictable but at the same time I mean of course because they have to adhere to conventions.

I I am curious about the relationship between like formulaic like algorithms and conventions. In what ways are they um like can people actually become very robotic in their thinking and in their formal um uh inventions as well like as because there's formulas for how you write a propaganda text how you make these um slides and how you paint as well. So perhaps there's a formula and maybe that's also why it's somewhere between I mean even the artists themselves don't think they're art artists they talk about it's just shantran and it's just a tool so yeah but I I'd love to keep thinking about it with you yeah any okay Kenny and right thank you I would like to see if you can talk more about sound and oral oral narration uh in the projection uh activities uh particularly when you talk about mobilizing people or animate the people's emotions and yeah I think you might have some of these uh documents or or records or yeah about the audience and the performance of the performer and particularly we talk about uh the projectionist apparatus how about the broadcast apparatus is that something you can also uh talk more Thank you.

Yeah, I feel that this is actually like really I I was also talking to Shing about this the the because there you it's hard to find the slides but it's actually still possible to find scripts. So scripts are available, the words are still available and but because I was paying so much more attention in the writing of this book to the infrastructure and to the sort of um um I guess I was thinking more about the what instruments they were using and I didn't think too much about the text until recently now working on radio and thinking about radio scripts and the the actual language the actual content um but I was struck by just the uh the wide range of instruments and also the voice training because they were like the three sisters were learning how to perform through like local storytellers and also through radio announcers.

Um so uh all of this had to be trained right they they they kind of almost took lessons but um but the composition of these uh clapper talk they they have to rhyme I don't know I think they kind of they're a little bit similar to spoken word or to like even like rapping I I like for for actually students who had been working on chi like rap in China I always say you have to go back to you can't like start with the introduction ction of American um hiphop that what what about and so I I I very much want to explore more also the sonic dimensions and the composition of kind of a very local grassroots poetry some of it's just for a very practical purpose just saying the audience needs to sit down and these are the safety regulations but a lot of it's also about seeing the praises of local workers like that's the general content and some of it's a lot more poetic than others, right?

But um and and there's also competitions for that and so like when they they do a really good job, they they get a larger audience such as Joan Lee even.

Yeah. So, but thank you.

Thank you.

Uh thank you so much for this inspiring talk.

Um I have a a very small question actually.

Um I was wondering so speaking of all this handdrawn slides, obviously they speak to originality and authorship.

So I was wondering um did this local village cultural centers and projection teams did they ever claim ownership or authorship to this product of theirs?

In other words, could other you say um a projection team from different town come and borrow this slides without inviting their manpower to perform this you know presentations.

So that's basically my question.

Thank you so much. Yeah thank you. So the the content that they produced were often at the local level at the county level, right?

So when one set of slides were made, they would be shown by all the projection teams throughout the county.

So and then sometimes also, you know, if they win an award, then they would demonstrate it to other projection team who would also make their own slides.

Um yeah, but I think the so the authorship question is something that only got contested I think a bit later on but you know through my interviews I realized that there was contestation not so much about authorship but about like how credit is distributed because it's a big team of people working and but from looking at the press materials you would think it's three women who were like these super women who like you know who worked all day and all night and were able to produce these amazing slides and you didn't know. uh and and also also kind in some ways the propaganda uh press was not uh showing um sort of excluding uh various people from so then there's there's it's like they're not getting the credits at the end u but not so much authorship there wasn't a sense of wanting to preserve they're also very difficult to preserve like even I think as I'm passing the slides around like if you just um rubbed it with your finger, you can rub off some of the the colors.

So, yeah, they're very ephemeral and they're not actually I don't know if there's much.

I think maybe we what we could do is try to produce them ourselves, try to, you know, or build a radio ourselves.

So, it's more Yeah, I don't know where it resides as a as a work of art. Um, or there wasn't a strong sense of authorship at that time.

Uh, like and the gentleman behind Um thank you very much for this and very exciting.

Um two things both related to performance.

You talked about um your questions about um the standardizations of the whole process. I think this is extremely important to the specificity of this kind of um cultural product productions or culture practices because it's very performative base. Yeah.

It's it's it's like every single time differs because you are going to different places and every time you need to set up your own as you mentioned the infrastructure and then you have it's almost like a makeshift kind of performance every time and then they are doing it in a way that can never be standardized almost but then they also doing everything they could to standardize it as you mentioned so there is this I mean it's the rural projection that is the nature of it that these people are going to the mountains to present uh almost like environment specific.

I mean it's like every single performance is specific to the locality. Yeah.

And so standardization can never be achieved as such but this is perform and this is propaganda so it must be standardized.

Um so I think there's a lot of um tensions and conflicts over this specific kind of like form of um propaganda that you mentioned that actually answer back to the questions that um um about AI because I think this is so in a way you can say there are reference but also there so damn different too because like this is performance performative more than much more than the AI it's meant to be I think it's not meant to be performative right I mean there is a performative dimension of AI I think but then this is also extremely standardized to the extent that it's yeah a lot of efforts behind to make the generations sort of like presentable and predictable that's my quick um response to your questions and then I want to ask you about also this performance dimensions about the Wang Wangme scene. This is amazing.

I don't know that there's this projectionist behind.

I wonder whether you want to say a bit more because we do know that the Wongwang event was very much a performance too. It's also very visual spectacle and so you are saying that there are projectionist involved in this.

So I just wonder whether you want to say more about the spectacular dimension between Wang Wang and also the projectionist.

Okay. So I should uh clarify that it's not um it's after the fall of Wanguangme that anyone associated with her and with Liaoi uh became a target as well and they were targeted in the same kind of carnivalesque way of um I mean they they didn't get ping pong ball necklaces but they you know I don't know what they did with peaches or like I don't know it's like they talked about um one of the saying at from villagers I talked to at the time was like oh these Um uh the three sisters rotted because they were the flowers before and now they they and they became uh so it was also like these very visceral metaphors about how you they um because uh they had fallen from grace in some ways and then but that also was performative. So I think that one difference between I don't know if you can talk about AI as performance.

I think for me what's very key about performance is the presence of the body and also like with the whole slideshow that the role of the manual movements the vocalization live performance um this almost this very immediate you know in the room you mentioned the environment of the uh the screenings and the content is actually not quite as standardized as we would so I think there's a big difference between what the slideshows were showing and what the Yambi were showing. So Yambi had to be standardized.

There was very strict although there were even local variations of local operas, right?

And you wrote about this too. So but but with the uh content of the slideshows had to do with the local priorities at the time and that's why they actually had to talk to the local caderies about what's important now. So if it's about pest then how do we fight the pest?

If it's about the local hero who had died, then we make something about the local heroes.

So that actually is less standardized than the so it's kind of the a more improvised version of propaganda than film uh which is the same every time, right? And then part of what the film films are doing is to standardize these performances to people learn to perform Yamani the same way every time.

But I think this is actually a lot more there's a lot more freedom maybe to um to create something that's slightly different and maybe uh and you know other than the culture revolution which was very volatile um there there might be more room for just inventions that are more interesting made specific for so I I got these in from like kung fu website which you know like is this yeah I guess it's garbology research we and I don't know where they come from I don't know how they were used so it's also interesting like how do we use these like material artifacts to make some conclusion my sense is that they're not made handmade except for the um I think by by the late 70s a lot of there were slideshow or sort slight factories in many places and they were mass distributed.

So the lay phone set is absolutely a printed version, right?

Um so the handdrawn ones actually don't survive very long. There's also paper slides like paper dipped into oil to make them transparent, but that would has no chance of survival, right?

It's almost like sand painting or something.

Thank you for this wonderful talk.

Thank you for this wonderful talk. So um I wonder if you can say a little bit more about the concept of Juan in here. Yeah.

uh so for example I'm thinking about uh it's illusion enabled by lighting but at the same time it's also perhaps about a kind of enchantment because it's about bringing things in uh to life and also I'm thinking about enchanted revolution like ka face recent war so I wonder how you think about this notion of Juan thank you I love this question although I really haven't come across any discussion of the in a very different context when I was writing about um Manuria actually like films that were made in Manuria because Japanese scholars keep on talking about them as like Juan but mabosi in Japanese as this kind of almost this fantasmagoric.

because I was trying to translate Juan as Fantam is more goric because there's a haunted quality but I think um I'm not sure if I can read as much into the Juan on because it became such a standard term to I think there was actually someone else who has written quite extensively about uh Juan is uh Joe Chenu's book and cinema offscreen there's a whole chapter about and I think she she didn't actually use magical energy think we can't actually call this magical lantern because of the projection the the quality of the slide projectors had is closer to later projectors but I think it actually varied a lot in the early vanaguan type of these you know uh self-made with gas lamps that's actually very close to the older magic lanterns so magic lantern I feel is a a very it's a it's a more fun translation of even though it has a very specific reference to the type of technology because by the 1950s in the US and in like western country like slide projectors referred to a bit more automation of like having a deck of slides that can u go through the machine more quickly than like just putting them in one by one and there's also overhead projector which is another yeah so those are yeah but I I I I do think that magic lantern or lantern having all these connotations of maybe also like, right?

Like perhaps we can trace it back in a more poetic way to think about the the genealogy of this that goes beyond um just this period.

Um but thank you for that question.

Okay. Uh the gentleman in the back.

Yeah. Thank you again. This was really lovely and fun. Obviously great visual aids and and really uh interesting to think about.

Professor Pong stole some of my ideas because I also wrote down tension being really really key to this.

Uh the things I wrote down, you have both pre-planned and scripted material and then oral live material. You have uh both handdrawn elements and mass-produced elements.

You have localization and standardization.

You have these national competitions where somebody wins a national competition.

They come to train together at a national level and then they go back and intensely localize the content that they're creating.

You talk about the complexity of both creating the material, the circulation of the material, even erecting the the infrastructure, the exhibition, and then a message that is often extraordinarily simplified down to a very very direct, you know, oversimplified story about these are three women, they do everything, they go everywhere, it's it's posed, it's fake, but it's also genuine.

So, all of these tensions are really fascinating.

Uh but I wanted to ask a question just a little bit about the actual uh performance itself or however you want to kind of describe it.

How long are we talking here?

Like how many slides were being used in an average performance?

Did they have a structure to what would happen?

Was there kind of a prologue where they'd welcome everybody with the first few slides and do local stuff first and then talk about national stuff? Was there a progression that they were following each time that they did this?

Uh and also just in terms of time as you mentioned it takes time to show up to talk to the local cadres to figure out the message that they want to actually produce then to animate that message to write the scripts. How long were they spending in these places? How long was an average trip to this place?

Would they do several nights? And then also kind of relatedly, were there other uh attractions that would happen after the slideshow?

Are we getting a slideshow and then somebody's doing a performance or doing the um uh puppetry or things like that?

Just kind of the actual experience of the day like what does that look like? Thank you. Thank you.

Yes. Uh so I think the the length really varied because there were slideshows that were just like one or two slides, right?

to say, you know, be quiet or it's time to get um and then uh there's also slides earlier on to introduce a film to explain the characters because audiences might get confused about who is who.

They were also there's very local slides but with the three sisters I think they were impressive because they produced a kind of a larger number maybe like um my I actually haven't I I can't uh I I think more around like 50 slides is this um but if you look at like the leong that that deck of slide that's about 30 right so that might be standard but sometimes they have more elaborate productions and some of the scripts that unfortunately I don't actually I photograph those but in the in the exhibition hall I saw that they had also instructions about what music to play u on the so they actually had to change it on this you know LP player actually like so it's a lot of um physical mechanical tasks that are being performed at the same time and so there's something really um you can watch the performance of these machines almost like an orchestra or not not quite an orchestra.

That's why I thought like a chamber music or something, right? So, so um and uh and these were always taking place before the film screenings. Um but I've read various versions of how much people were uh like what program before the film uh existed. And uh in the book I actually compare it much more to like there's something liturggical about the process that it's almost like going to church and you have um you know everybody settling down. They might play a music at the beginning like entry music and then um when they settle down there there'll be like readings and or like announcements and uh I guess it's could also just be an you can think about it as agenda but because a lot of almost very um not religious but almost like you know talking about transmitting the revolutionary spirit and so on.

So there is something almost like film screening is about um it's less one of my like um key phrases in the book is about film is less cong less representational than it's congregational.

It's about bringing people together and participating in these rituals and it was actually quite important to have and also because there's a lot of time where people just waiting for film prints to arrive because um it uh the there are very few film prints in general. So the same print might need to be screened in five villages in one night. And so they did something called like copy running or palpen.

So there would be like four simultaneous screenings and they would start with one reel here and when they're done like it's 10 minutes, right?

It would somebody would get on a bike and bring that reel to the next location and then wait for the next reel.

So there's actually a lot of time between rewinding the wheels or waiting for the next reel. There's all this dead time.

So what they do is to get people to sing together and so imagine like also singing competitions. Uh this is this started in the army but they started doing this all over the place like called laka and you know to see which side will sing usually not not sing better but sing louder right so imagine I divide the room into two parts and you all had to like sing one song after another just to pass the time so that you can finish watching the film and so you know there's a lot of programming that u might also be somewhat improvised depending on the whole situation.

Yeah. So indeed it's quite unique every time because of the physical conditions of these um of these film screenings in the countryside.

Yeah. I think now we have uh some time to collect the last round of questions.

So if you have any questions raise your hand and uh we will connect all the questions together.

this gentleman.

I just wonder if there was a reason or pattern to selecting these three sisters to young three sisters. um these there's a gender element in um putting the highlight the on uh on these um protagonists while there was a much larger team was this a pattern in in propaganda in in this period yeah thank you yeah I think it there's a effort to brand this movie team so they were very consciously creating a model that also a kind of a brand that will make them uh more famous than others and the three sisters somehow became a very useful brand for the entire team. So that by the time um you know photojournalists came they really wanted only the three of them because they embodied uh also I think the idea of uh female projectionist I guess female tractor drivers to some extent too are very public figures too but female projectionist they are out there and then so they are actually performing work that is usually you know men's domain but they're also extremely visible so that they are really carrying the or embodying the idea that you know women can you know take can do whatever men can do um and uh and also can be seen in the public domain. And I think that they also stayed so when they they went into these villages sometimes they stayed with um elderly women who would normally not come out and watch films but because they're staying with them they're more likely to persuade that demographic into the uh political process.

So I think that uh uh having women actually as projections also helped to recruit audiences uh who would otherwise may not be coming to to cinema.

Yes, but gender absolutely was a was a key dimension and yeah thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much uh Professor Lee for your wonderful talk and uh for the exciting Q&A.

Let's give her a big applause.

Thank you. Thank you everyone.