Being Present: Mobile Cinema in Kham Tibetan Areas

This book presents the restoration of rural mobile cinema network in the Great Triangle region at the conjunction of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Tibet in China in the new century, which has added a new chapter to the long-standing complex relationship between cinema and social change.

Based on five years of multi-sited fieldwork, abundant interviews and oral history narratives, this work shows the entanglement of the State, the projectionists and local film viewers in the historical and social context in a holistic analytic framework.

By using the key concept of “being present” to examine the tangling relations between the actors in mobile cinema as social practice, the work argues that mobile cinema and contemporary Chinese society are mutually constructed in both textual and practical level.