Once upon a time, travel ‘theaters’, which brought joy to rural China, faded in the face of technology

I am walking 3,600 miles in China.

Long walks can cause a variety of mental states. One is self-reflection, for better or for worse. “It’s crazy, man — to think, to think, to think, and to watch a movie of my life over and over again,” said Mohamed Banonoh, an unstoppable colleague on the road in Saudi Arabia. We constantly edit these movies. As a poet, we are directors of films other than the one starring, and we are shining in our minds. And then one day, you will find a professional forecaster like Zhang Yin Hua.

I saw Zang on the side of the road in Madilong, Sichuan Province. Zhang is a small and powerful man. Zhang, a Pumi minority from the eastern Himalayas, seems to be a common farmer in the southwestern Sichuan mountains. His face has been covered with sun-covered masks for years. His hands are tied. But around the smoke of the electric fire, like a cat, he dances. A chandelier bursts around the neighborhood creating a brigade, carefully shooting each bullet with the writer’s eye.

“I love movies,” Zhang said, shaking his cell phone. But I don’t. I’m the only one showing them. “

In fact, Zhang has shown hundreds of films to thousands of locals. He has been doing this for over a quarter of a century. Beaten by trial and weather at the age of 56, he is one of the last people in rural China to tell a story. At an early age, Zhang wore an old real-to-real projector on foot and on horseback. He has been traveling by car recently. He can read all the lines from decades of patriotic classics. Long March And Third sister Liu. Since its inception in the 1980s, its nomadic branding has added to the value of a simple, completely entertaining film. Among the main features, Zhang shows public service videos about HIV-AIDS, forest fire prevention, village clean-up and demon drugs.

“It’s hard work,” says Zhang. “The roads here are bad. i am tired. But when I play the movies, the people are very happy and satisfied. That gives me confidence. ”

Zhang invited me home. In the living room of the barn, where the ears of oranges are dried, he erects the tower of the projector of the cinema archeology of his life.

From the 1970’s onwards, a small white projector, and then the blue one since the 1980s, respectfully said, “I will never part with these money.” “These are part of my eternal life.”

It is somewhat foggy on a new machine that produces digital images.

“You had to stand by the old projectors all the time. You had to adjust, ”said a proud Voodwill campaigner. “On this new device, you just pop up the memory card and it starts automatically. You can even drink tea or go to the bathroom.

After years of uninterrupted competition between television and smartphones, Zang’s film cycle is now more modest.

Once a month, he visited only four villages in the Hengduan Mountains. Most of China’s rural areas are empty of urban migration. Local audiences are getting older and younger. And in the village squares, under the stars, the moths have been replaced by children taking Tikitok on palm-sized screens, with moth-like comets gleaming in projector-like light. To make sure that Zhang is still working, he is required to take photographs of the first, middle, and last film of each open air.

Cinema helped build socialism in China.

For decades, government studios have produced heroine films that highlight the ideas of the revolution. (Third sister Liu A year after Mao Zedong’s victory in the country’s civil war in the early 1950s, about 2,000 technicians were trained to build 16-millimeter projectors in villages across the country. Widespread rural countryside. Soon their ranks were filled with thousands. Teams of “mobile forecasters” traveled day, “Wheelchairs” with wheels, towed to distant villages. Portable generators generate the required stream.

Lu Xionon, a Chinese cinematographer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London, said millions of rural Chinese had never seen a film before.

In her book, Lu explains: “They went to the show, not to enjoy the story, but to enjoy the ‘wonderful show.’ Shaping the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity. Farmers in the alien world are “confused with movie characters and unable to distinguish between friend and foe” as they move to life on a whitewashed wall. But foreign films have become very popular. According to Lu, an early protagonist in Gizho State, he was surprised that about 5,000 people were waiting for him in a remote village.

Zang’s work began long after those glorious years.

In 1986, while he was working on the farm, county officials hired him to carry out a 90-minute catalog of 90 minutes between planting and harvesting for his farm and street life.

He recalls: “I used horses and mules to carry the weapons, and sometimes I used my shoulders.” “It can take days to come and go from movie shows.”

Each time the nearby Yalong River washed its sidewalks, Zhang hung his entertainment kit on a wooden stream. At one point, he entered a dove to save a bending movie screen.

For five glorious years, the region’s most famous nomadic, brutal, and ethnic group lived in the highlands of Pumi, Z, Tibetan, and Han. The children of the village rejoiced at his arrival. Beautiful girls flirted. As the plot unfolds, the old watchmakers look forward to dragging their feces under the night sky. Then the first microwave towers fell to the top of the mountain.

“Television came in 1991, and that was the beginning of the end,” says Zhang. Soon there was an uprising with eight-track cassettes and Kung Fu films.

His favorite paintings are based on at least one generation and ancient Chinese illustrations. The Legend of the White Snake It is a story about love. The monkey goes west Dedication and Friendship 16th Century Fiction Destroyed. He has seen them hundreds of times.

“I think foreign films can return to fashion,” Zhang says. “People are tired of having remote control at home. They are bored. They yearn to be together.

He told me this while sitting in the living room with green tea. He is wearing a blurred football cap, a Tibetan shepherd’s jacket, and an insider. His wife is busy in the kitchen. Two older girls take turns using cell phones and a bully – one of Zang’s grandchildren. A TV with a large flat screen like Zang plays a cartoon from the corner. No one is watching.

Zhang took me out of Maidilong. We raise our hands.

In the nearby canyon-down village, about a thousand miles away in China – I found the first and only living person who is still not separated by cell phone and internet connection. Zhang will stop there with his choice of 48 films. Public billiard tables stand in front of small shops, free for all to use. When the signs finally come, these artifacts disappear. When two young men from the village were shot in the sun, I thought walking next to them would be a good thing for a movie.