 Thank you for this very kind introduction. It's really an honor for me to be included in this series of distinguished speakers at the SOAS China Institute and also thank you to everyone for tuning in. I'm really looking forward to your questions and comments. So, let me just share my screen, my slides. So my talk today actually will bring together two new book projects that try to historicize and theorize audio visual media in social that's China. Actually, the sound project has a longer timeline. Cinematic Carillas is a book that I have just finished and hopefully will be coming out next year. It has the current subtitle as Maoist propaganda as revolutionary spirit mediumship but I may be changing that to propaganda projectionist and audience and socialist China. And it considers exhibition and reception in from the 1950s to the 1980s. Another new emerging project I would really like your feedback on is called revolutionary echoes, radio loudspeaker and noise in modern China. And I'm thinking about dating it for a century from 1920s to 2020 is the ending date I haven't decided on yet. So these are also related to my first two books in the sense that they are the examine the mediation of experiences and memories in 20th and 21st century China. So, together cinematic or less and revolutionary echoes argue that the Chinese Revolution was a media revolution. So from the 1950s to the 1970s, the Communist Party actually build up this giant film exhibition and wired broadcasting network with more than 100,000 film projection units and 100 million loudspeakers. So by media revolution, I mean not just a revolution in media content but also a revolution of media infrastructure and revolution through media impact or effect. So, media content represented rapid revolution, media infrastructure amplified revolution, whereas media mobilization made revolution in some mass media help to conjure into being the revolutionary masses, the masses. And that leads to my second thesis, which is that the Chinese Revolution was also a hot and noisy revolution from slogan shouting to collective seeing to mass parades with guns and drums, making noise in big crowds was an integral part of making revolution as the phrase now coming is a noisy revolution stirring up revolution also suggests. But in terms of audio visual memories, I noticed when I was interviewing Chinese villagers about their memories of a radio and cinema. They often talked about Rua now, you know, or hot noise instead of film titles or radio programs is that going to film was watching hot noise and listening to great broadcast is listening to hot noise which suggests that the content actually mattered less than the hustle and the bustle of the event. Taking their earthy language quite seriously I wondered first about radio and cinema as communicators of propaganda messages and secondly about noise as unwanted sound and disrupt disruption of signals. So I want to share it to theorist Jacques Attali who talked about noise as violence associated in all cultures with a weapon blasphemy and plague. In the final course for Chinese popular religion theater and markets described what anthropologist at Adam Chow called sociothermic affect a lively busy and boisterous ambience sort after at New Year celebrations, temple fairs, weddings and birthdays. Not only does it sound but also color and clutter smoke and steam. It's really very much generated through this assembly of warm bodies, a multi sensory and proliferous celebration of life. Now I know that now is a common place that belongs to a Chinese dictionary of untranslatables and hot noise is absolutely incondensurate as a translation but I think there's something can be gained from this jarring translation because it de familiarizes the original and also compels us to interrogate the sources effects and valences of heat and noise. So whereas you are now has always been part of the Chinese everyday life, I would consider the socialist hot noise to have achieved unprecedented scale and intensity with the technological amplification of audio visual media. Now loud speakers and cinema had summoned mass assemblies parades calisthenics and struggle sessions. So where's the heat in your now refers to the bodily heat of a gathered crowd. The heat in socialist hot noise derives from a synergy between body and electricity that also so dirt scattered populations into the revolutionary masses. I'm going to talk a little bit about loud speakers in the first part and then about open air cinema in the second part of the talk and then close with a coda on the current sort of updates on the uses of loud speaker and mobile cinema in the contemporary in the last couple years actually. So, before 1949 China had only about a million radio sets radio receivers most of these are in urban households, and thinking about radio in the republican period we can take a look at this 1936 cartoon, which kind of shows a politician in the center, you know, saying that there's a national emergency, and then he's calling out quite ineffectively because the rest of the radio listeners around him are all listening to popular music so instead of listening to the politicians siren like warnings of national crisis, they are listening to siren sounds that distracted them from the looming danger. In 1989 however, now of course announced the founding of the PRC over radio and inaugurated revolutionary Beijing time, and very quickly the CCP has sort of monopolize the airways in the next couple years and you know something like 60 radio stations in Shanghai are reduced to just the central broadcasting station and then the Shanghai people's radio station. And while in the meantime, also the government tried to stop radio owners from listening to the noise of enemy stations, such as noise of the voice of America by mobilizing technicians to actually physically dismantle shortwave on all radio sets, in order to quote, cut off the enemy's tongue so that it cannot spread any rumors. And then following Lenin's praise of radio as a newspaper without paper and without distances, the CCP used it to govern this vast country with poor transportation and the mostly illiterate population. So through collective listening radio transformed from domestic objects into public loudspeakers which are also deployed at mass rallies, so called broadcast rally. So it was a long way to suppress counterrevolutionaries and to mobilize for the Korean War in 1951. But at that point available loudspeakers were not loud enough to reach China's vast countryside so a vast radio reception network was established with radio operators who carried radio sets to villages for collective listening wired to loudspeakers and they also transcribed and mimeographed the radio broadcast for distribution through school pupils so they would take these mimeographs into their villages and these would be then transcribed on to the Blackboard bulletins, as well as read out loud to be something called rooftop broadcasting which is Wu Ding Guang Bo. So the criers would be using these homemade speaking trumpets in order to relay messages from on top of groups. In this sense, humans played a very big mediating role in the Maoist media network, and corporeal voices became literally the mouthpieces or the throat and tongue the whole show of the party. Now I think there's actually a really interesting latent Chinese media theory of the mouthpiece houshe to be excavated all the way from the classics of poetry compiled by Confucius calling the king's ministers, his throat and tongue to the leaching thinker Liang Qichao, who talked about newspapers as the eyes, ears, throat and tongue are more houshe of a national body. And if Chinese villagers, they were likening radio broadcasting to the folkloric thousand mile I and win the company years. They served the jade emperor and then they, you know, I think that in a way they would intuitively understand also foundational media theorist the Marshall McLuhan's definition of media as the extensions of man. Sorry, but available loud speakers were actually not loud, not loud enough to reach China's vast countryside so the government established a radio. Oh, I'm sorry. But when mass media was was underdeveloped Mao also saw the potential of masses as media. So he was even writing in 1927 of the corporeal mediation of profit the viral propaganda, saying that slogans have grown wings and found their way to count the villages to the young the middle age and the old to the children and the women, they created their minds and flowed to their mouths. So instead of media as the extension of man, Maoist media networks turned humans into flexible extensions of media. So this is an idea that is actually illustrated in many Maoist film so for example in the heroic little gorillas, you know, small value children here are holding hands in order to connect a broken telephone cable so that the commander of the people's Liberation Army can order fire at the enemy. In another film called letter with feather. Then our standing Sentinel next to so called information tree, which indicates safety or danger. And this boy when he saw a tree fall in the distance he knocks over his tree and then shout at his comrades in the valley to beat their guns and drums to alert the villagers of approaching danger. So without cameras, telephones wireless radio, you know, or even loud speakers and we all vehicles this network of eyes, ears, voices and legs constituted a surveillance alarm communication and transportation network which I also call gorilla media network. Now, this gorilla media network woven out of human agents and not only substituted for machines but also perform the kind of revolutionary spirit mediumship. And I illustrate this with the ending of this other film everlasting radio signals in which the hero is a gorilla radio telegraph or who receives and transmits the party's messages and dies and martyr. But rather than hearing the messages that he taps out, we see the super imposition of his face the clouds and radiating wireless ways suggesting this intersection of technology and spirituality media and mediums. So the party's missionary turns into an angel and what he mediates is less ideological principle than the revolutionary spirit of self sacrifice. So, while human voices served as mouthpieces human bodies also learned to respond to the call of loud speakers through broadcast gymnastics. They were borrowed from Japan's sort of radio gymnastic radio Taishou and because radio in Japanese and then, you know, said in Chinese sounds a little bit like that, which means chili peppers. And actually, Guangbo, he told our broadcast gymnastics was actually called a cell cell or chili pepper gymnastics and amplify at that point, factory loudspeakers were also introduced from the 1950s onwards and they amplified not just the party states boys but also invited labor models to speak and talented workers to sing almost in the kind of community karaoke. And they also staged many labor competitions which very much stressed out my grandmother, who was a silk worker in Shanghai she would blame those loudspeakers for her later high blood pressure and impaired hearing. Now in the 1960s, the broadcasting network expanded greatly into the countryside. And so the statistics, especially like there was a hike during the cultural illusion period, and village loudspeakers regulated daily rhythms almost a bit like European church bells, but they also industrialized the rural time and labor discipline. And so in an ethnographic account Chen about Chen village, the broadcasters first announcement, got the women out of bed to feed the pigs and prepare breakfast before their husbands arose she would give pep talks praise diligence and criticize laziness and when other villagers saw her coming they would joke well be better watch out because if you're a little lazy, you would be on the loudspeakers. In this sense loudspeakers served not just propaganda but also surveillance and this is very much true in the covert era which we'll get to a little bit later. And but in terms of labor mobilization is I also read about how bells and horns enforced labor discipline in the antebellum South. I also have to ask a socialist loudspeaker sounded liberation or slavery for Chinese villagers. The culture revolution answering mouse call to make revolution red guards installed high volume loudspeakers in public spaces nationwide blasting revolutionary songs and slogans that also contribute to the mouth called this briefly but local loudspeakers also led collective readings from the little red book, such that one interview I spoke to associated with this practice with the mean a red loudspeakers calling Muslims to prayer which she had witnessed as a tourist Morocco. And she said that really reminded her of the cultural revolution. The acoustics of the loudspeakers was very echoey, as you can hear here. It's not good for message translation transmission at all, but it's rather a kind of acoustics of power due to the omnipresence of these disembodied voices. And it's a bit like the soundscape of cathedrals and other sacred spaces of worship. I actually also thought about how reverberant acoustics correlate with divine power while rewatching journey to the West TV drama with my son. So you see that the Buddha had long echo to his voice whereas the monkey had none right so the Buddha is much more powerful apart from his visual size. And apart from this kind of almost as a sacred quasi sacred landscape soundscape loudspeakers also led to acoustic conflict for voted and fueled physical violence as rebel factions were fighting over broadcast stations so that even when they were broadcasting very similar revolutionary messages shouting matches between competing loudspeakers suggest that power in the cultural revolution was measured in decibels. Here I'm also inspired by comparative studies in the context of 1930s Germany and contemporary Nigeria where loudspeakers escalated conflicts between ideological groups and religious sects. Now for many revolutionary targets, the loudspeaker did become a source of terror because one way that say Red Guards tortured intellectuals like Chiminko was to hang a loudspeaker his window so that this reactionary academic authority can hear the angry indictment of the revolutionary masses. Some red guards even called on their targets to appear before impromptu interrogations and put an alarm clock next to the microphone to magnify the time bomb like picking. No wonder writer Shin Song then considered a great improvement of his living condition to move out of the earshot of a high volume loudspeaker. Now the same red guards who tortured with loudspeakers likely participated as children in the noisy war against sparrows in the 1958 for pests campaign. Directed by loudspeakers men women children and the elderly of entire counties and cities clamored from dawn to dusk to keep sparrows from landing so that they can fall from fatigue. So the voiceover says if you visit this township now you won't see flocks of sparrows anymore nor sparrows nests and eggs as long as we set up nets above and snares below sparrows cannot escape even with wings. So this documentary newsreel was actually made in Sichuan the method itself originated in Sichuan so and this newsreel was actually shown ahead of similar campaigns throughout the country. And after every battle loudspeaker vans decked with debt sparrows toward the street so the final tall was something like 2.1 billion debt sparrows, which is about four times the Chinese population at the time. It was staged and contributed to the Great Famine. Now, besides a great sparrow massacre red guards are also likely inspired by sparrow war tactics Machiazhen Shu, where the sparrows are not the victims of the attackers so sparrow warfare was a synonym for gorilla tactics and was invented in the 1930s, and celebrated in military pedagogical films like tunnel warfare. This film has also been watched by 2 billion views from the 1960s to the 70s, and you'll see how gorillas here are imitating sparrows by dispersing forces in the mountains and making noises in order to perplex, unsettle and soak chaos so that the enemy cannot eat or sleep in peace. Now, our mission is to use Machiazhen Shu to harass the enemy. Okay, so whether... So whether it's imitating sparrows or killing sparrows, sparrow warfare was a war of noise as both disturbing sounds, and false signals. Now this kind of noise terrorism might be rooted in Chinese popular religions such as the annual exorcism of the Nian monsters with firecrackers on Chinese New Year. And in some ways this kind of exorcist logic of censorship is also applied to so-called class enemies and you know from 1957 onwards Mao had advanced this exorcist logic of censorship saying that that the ox demons and snake spirits come out to make some noise and here he's referring to critics of the party so that the people shocked to find these ugly things still existed would take action to wipe them out. More exposure than disappearance, more sound and silence, censorship as exorcism in a way was reviving a pairing of incantation, with interdiction in these Taoist exorcist healing rituals that use powerful words to eliminate demons that cause pestilences. Modern media technology is greatly amplified exorcist incantations which were printed, calligraphed, chanted broadcasts and projected. And the lot speaker particularly growing more than 10 fold in the early years of the culture evolution contributed to the soundscape of pandemonium, while serving as a key source of entertainment for much of the 1970s. The end of the culture evolution was also sounded by army present loudspeakers playing somber music to more mouse death and yet afterwards high volume loudspeakers were dismantled to reduce the noise pollution which also suggests a cooling of revolutionary passions only to see a revival in recent years which are addressed a bit more in the coda. So now I want to go on to talk a little bit about cinema which is the main mode of movie going, the open air cinema in particular, which was the main mode of movie going in rural China from the 1950s to the 1980s and here I define the hot noise of open air cinema as as it's extra filmic sensorium so the side sound smells case and textures beyond the film. And I like to use one clip that's, you know, from from John Chen's film to reconstruct this kind of multi sensory experience. I'm watching heroic sons and daughters in the countryside and you see the embodied presence of the mobile projectionist and his machine here. And audiences are kind of seeing along as well. And if you were there you might be able to hear and smell the power generator in the cattle. Okay, so the cinema initially sort of gathers a crowd like a ritual opera at a temple festival where's the sing along or revolutionary songs is reminiscent of Christian congregational singing. So in so far as occasion these collective rituals cinema was not just representational but also congregational. And along these lines my also the practice of seeing before during and after more more before and during a screenings was was very much advocated by projectionist magazines as well. And in terms of congregational gatherings I would argue that mouse cinema was also a form of revolutionary spirit mediumship that can be summarized with the keywords magic cult liturgy conversion and exorcism. Many Chinese villagers encountered film for the first time through these mobile projectionists who carried cinema into areas without electricity. In that sense also cinema and mouse media networks in general was constituted not just by machines, but also by by human bodies. And many early reports from the 1950s mentioned the bumpkin wonder of first time audiences at the technological magic of cinema so for instance audiences of a war film might return the next morning to look for leftover artillery, or a village with cook up a feast for all the actors in the film, etc, many sort of anecdotes like that. And a team high projectionist wrote about the wonder of Tibetan nomads saying how can a hanging white cloth envelop thousands of troops how can a wooden box speak in so many different voices how can that long long sounding power generator. What the mother of electricity draw lightning from the sky. All of this is truly mysterious and unfathomable for people who worship gods and spirits without knowledge of science and technology so this is recorded in the team high young guys at here. So this kind of descriptions of so called primitive encounters with modern technology are also curiously reminiscent of European colonial discourse. Michael toxic notes the white man's fascination with the other fascination with white man's magic such as cameras and gramophones and argues that this actually reflects the West's own obsession with a mysterious underbelly of technology. This colonial sublime to describe British colonizers efforts to showcase modern infrastructure, such as rare roads, radio and cinema as evidence of the supremacy of European technological civilization. While the Chinese communists were clearly anti colonial revolutionaries they also harness cinema to enhance the emerging personality cult of Mao, and Mao's appearance and newsreels was reported as the greatest attraction for real audiences who would applaud take their caps or ask the projectionist comrade to slow down and let German I'll stay a bit longer so there are all these reports which I really would take with a certain grain of salt, but beyond the illusion of life presence mouse image did literally light up these dark village nights without electricity and projectionists were also actively staging these, these congregations of worship. There are many screenings in the Mao era that take place in former spaces of worship such as courtyards of ancestral shrines, temples and churches. So that cinema in the way was taking after their sacred aura. The revolution in particularly the villagers often welcomed newsreels of mouse red guard rally films with gone and drum processions, led by village chief who would then carry the film prints with red ribbons in the mouth portrait from its last projection site. So that contra water bended is polarization of exhibition value and called value cinema became a cult object via its mass exhibition. And beyond this projectionists in themselves were a bit like ritual specialists who curated cinematic liturgies. The ritual instruments included not just the noisy machines and film prints but also bamboo clappers and lantern slideshows and in particular, like this one is animated slideshows by the three sisters movie team where they put multiple lenses and were slide putting the slides to create animation special effects. The voices and gestures of film projectionists translated these standardized films into local dialects and performance genres. And this kind of extra filmic noises by the projectionists not only help audience comprehension of the films, but also enlivened the cinematic event with audience participation. Okay, now, akin to missionaries projectionists also try to convert their audiences to faith in communism. So in the 1950s cinema was often dubbed socialist distant horizon education so we do we use engine show you showcasing Soviet collective farms killed by tractors to promote rural privatization. Projectionists also reported many conversion testimonies such as now that I have seen such and such a film or a slideshow my eyes grew bright and I will work hard all my life to turn these mountains into a paradise. In a way spiritual conversion was leading to energy conversion because audiences are urged to emulate the revolutionary spirit on screen sometimes by forming to do today or shock work predates that are named after war heroes. So if martyrs can bleed and die for communism what's a little sweat for socialism. That was one of the slogans. So projection is not only carried power generators they became power generators, which gathered the hot noise of the masses and urged them to emanate light and heat. Sometimes grassroots cadres even hired movie teams not to show films but rather to provide electric lighting and sound amplification and mass rallies. Even for these all nighter shifts for infrastructure construction project and in this sense cinema became sheer electrification that inspired and conscripted the masses to make revolution day and night. Now lastly the spirit mediumship of my cinema lies with its exorcism of class enemies so whereas ritual opera stage at ghost festivals were banned in this period. Revolutionary cinema conjured up the hell of old society and were coordinated with struggle sessions so after screenings possessed by the ghosts of the pre revolutionary past audiences identifying with the films victims with speak bitterness and indict local landlords, who then also must be purged to ensure the purity of the revolutionary community. But public responses to films were not always genuine so for example this 1963 film called no no or serves this clip. It depicted the harrowing life of a poor Tibetan boy who was who would eventually be liberated by the communists but in a crucial scene in the middle. He was very hungry so he steals food from a temple and gets caught. But because the film is such a perversion of Tibetan history according to scholar Zirin Shakia audiences in Lhasa felt very little sympathy for him and renamed this film, The Altered Thief. Nevertheless, audiences in Lhasa were required not only to watch this film but also to cry, otherwise you risked being accused of harboring sympathy with feudal landlords. And Shakia said his mother and her friends put tiger bomb under their eyes to make them water. So even if audiences did not feel moved they had to act as if they were, and to join the socialist hot noise of leadership, labor mobilization and enemy denunciation. Some of the audience noise can also mock and subvert the films that are being screened. As writer Achim describes open air screenings in Yunnan's mountains in the 1970s. You needed several men to take turns powering the generator by peddling and sometimes the man peddling got tired and the electricity would fluctuate, causing the sound from the loudspeakers to become slurred, distorting the well known areas. While on the screen and uplifting scene of the heroic deeds might have started boldly but suddenly lapsed into hesitation. Other times the man on the pedals change the temple on purpose, creatively improvising and the old films would send the audience into fits of laughter. So as audiences became jaded with a repetition of formulaic films, extra filmic noise could become actually much more meaningful than the film proper and open air audiences also practice a kind of in place to listen to the distant thunder that meant imminent rain or barking dogs that meant threatening against thieves. So, in conclusion, the hot noise of loudspeakers and open air cinema were integral parts of the Chinese revolution that was also a media revolution. Electrified sounds and sites help to generate and magnify the revolutionary masses through immersive soundscapes and mass congregations. So the Chinese so it's a Chinese socialism was an age of mass media as well as masses as media and the synergy of machines and bodies is also exemplified by human loudspeakers and mobile projectionist, who are then like corporeal extensions of media infrastructure that turned propaganda into spirit and leadership. Now a coda for the sort of more contemporary period because in the post socialist media ecology of course loudspeakers and open air cinema had faded and cooled against the proliferating noises of consumer electronics. I just saw a revival both media forms. So such as the the new rural loudspeaker project, which was launched in 2018 to broadcast a party policies, but many villagers also complain about the noise pollution. Since the COVID outbreak, rural loudspeakers were praised for going the last mile in fighting the pandemic as local loudspeaker local broadcasters, they were issuing the stern warnings to tell everyone to stay home in colorful local dialects. And two years ago even in Boston, we heard last loudspeaker trucks like this. In all the talk about social distancing, the mayor of Boston says some people still aren't listening. So today the message was delivered loud and clear from a speaker. Paul Burton shows us how that message was taken to the streets. New York has declared a public health emergency in the city of Boston. Stay home as much as you can. Sunday had a different sound in the air other than church bells, several sound trucks made their way through many different Boston communities, broadcasting a message about the coronavirus and so sorry. But I think in China the government has launched a much hotter and noisier and also omnipresent propaganda and campaign against the COVID with both the newest and oldest techniques so to give an example of not loudspeakers but just like a local village parade. So remember to ventilate, wash your hands, often for good hygiene, don't go for drama, John poker, healthy entertainment is at home, and you also have very high tech versions where loudspeakers attached to drones. So granny this is our village drone if you don't wear a mask then don't go out run along now go home. So many people or so many villagers talk to you and it was no use we had to send a drone to fly you home. Now in her youth this granny was probably mobilized to make noises to shoot away sparrows now the sparrow has returned as a flying drone to shoot her home, and indeed carried by drones, robotic dogs like this one in Shanghai. Or carried by people telling him to go home and go home. Okay, so carried by drones, robotic dogs and humans mobile loudspeakers are now enforcing immobility on the ground with a militant language of the people's war. And instead of congregating the masses they're not charged with dispersing them, except when getting them in line to take PCR tests and I just last month in her day I thought a very interesting use of loudspeakers also for surveillance and humiliation. And old hasn't was caught doing his spring planting during a lockdown and he had to he got caught and he had to make a public confession on the village loudspeaker. Okay, of course. Okay, of course it's spring planting season and he was eager to go to the fields and do his spring planting but now he got caught by the police and had to make a confession over the loudspeaker. So he's now serving again as a surveillance as well as propaganda and we see here also a point in reversal of people shooing away the sparrows from the fields in 1958 versus peasants themselves are being shooed from the fields. Now as for mobile cinema. Well, in, in the, not not exactly today this is field work that was done in the 20 the mid 28 teams and rural digital projection as are the, they're they're showing films in villages as well. But during the covert outbreak, many of them converted their mobile cinema vehicles into multi multi media hygiene propaganda trucks that also distributed face masks and disinfected public spaces. And as some official media put it in mobile projection is are transforming themselves into mobile loudspeakers. Now why are these grassroots media practitioners such eager propaganda and mouthpieces, and maybe they are trying to prove their value to the current political economy and secure their livelihoods and not so different from some of these are former projectionists who are petitioning their provincial governments for retirement pensions, holding a banner that reads the pioneers of cinema have no support in their old age, while the government procrastinates, we can only sit still and wait for death. So, those who formerly served as the parties whole sure throat and tongue are now making noises for themselves only to be quickly harmonized, and I want to leave you with this image also as a call to recenter the human in media studies which has very much turned focus away from texts and authors to technologies and materialities and infrastructures. And Friedrich Hitler even called to exercise the human spirit from the humanities that by recentering the human in media studies I don't mean to just return to the great authors and masterpieces but also to rediscover human agency and subjectivity, labor and creativity experiences and memories in their media engagement. So thank you very much. I look forward to your questions and comments. That's great. Dr. Lee let's thank you so much for this fascinating and insightful talk. I think your talk has really opened up new venues that were invigorate the studies of Chinese cinema culture. Yeah, I was especially struck by how you call our attention to the role of a media in Chinese politics, because normally we only pay attention to the content of political messages or political campaigns, but we seldom actually focus on the media, the role of the media or to reinterpret Chinese revolution as a media revolution and to recenter the humans as to recenter the human in the media studies. So now the floor is open. I welcome participants to raise your questions in the chat box, while we're waiting, I'm going to throw out my own question. It's wonderful. You've talked a lot about the hot noises, loud particular songs, which are generated or produced by Chinese folk instruments, etc. And the cluttering and the voices by the children by women, etc. But I wonder what is the role of the silence and the silence. How does the, how does the silence contribute to political management, governance, etc. Because the clip you showed from the surf, obviously the protagonist is mute for the most part of the film, right, the silence, silence only toward the end, he is able to speak. So maybe you can elaborate on this point. Well, thank you. That is a really great question. I think it's quite interesting actually to go. Maybe it's sometimes I'm using even though I'm talking about content beyond the film sometimes the films themselves serve as perfect allegories for the media situation of that time period and the muteness seems to be a recurring theme in a number of most films and I think that in the in the in this case, it's kind of make helping the mute speak up, helping the mute, giving the mute a voice. And in some ways that's something that loudspeakers were meant to do broadcasting stations were also meant to do. In a factory loudspeakers were installed initially many workers were invited to come to the broadcasting station and articulate their experiences and so it's interesting that the idea is that the party state, you know, in the in the in the film serves, it is the party that comes and then the mute learns to speak, or he is able to say something and of course the first words he says is long live chairman Mao. And then the in the in the case of other loudspeaker, the actual uses of loudspeakers I think it's interesting that who gets to speak over the loudspeakers are often labor models, who you know before they're the, I don't know it's about her and who did not have a voice who were never able to articulate themselves. And then they are finally sort of given the mouthpiece or given the loudspeaker given the voice by the party, and then they are there their voices are amplified but but that voice but then but that that corporeal voice actually becomes an instrument it's it's being ventriloquized so the they can't necessarily use their own voices even though it carry a lot of local color. So I think that it's it's an odd situation where the the literal voice, the corporeal voice is being amplified but whose voice is it, whether it's really their voices or not there's really a lot of silence, even in the in the loudness that is being projected and amplified in the in that process. And because silence I think there is also this this need to participate. I'm trying to think of the, actually, your, your own work on these counter espionage films or films that call for the masses to participate in surveillance was very inspiring to me, and to read about how it's, you were making an interesting distinction actually between part to sort of the Maoist to participatory surveillance on the one hand, and the Foucaultian surveillance on the other and I think the need to participate that that everyone contribute their voices to the revolution is is what what is actually demanded by the party of the people of each individual people so to say it stayed silent, or is already sort of putting yourself into a precarious and dangerous situation under the new regime when you're you're invited to speak. So I think silence in different contexts and I can have a lot of different kinds of meanings so I know so I just sort of many different angles that sorry. It's amazing. We've got a question from David Smith. Thank you so much. I was wondering if you could please talk about how the CCP's loud speakers inferenced music aesthetics in Maoist and the post Mao China. How much would you say that this aesthetics has evolved from its Mao era incarnation. Okay, that's a that's an excellent question that's a little bit beyond my expertise but I would one thing I can, I would very much recommend Andrew Jones is new book called circuit listening which has a chapter on quotation sounds during the culture evolution. And I think one point that he actually makes with these kind of quotation sounds that are broadcast over monotone mono. So the particular technical aspect of these loud speakers is such that they, you have to have very loud and simple songs that are that can be easily transmitted over these loud speakers because otherwise there's a lot of distortion. So that that that has an impact on the composition as well of what kind of sounds are best played over loud speakers. But as the loud speakers got softer and people are listening to music through other means and especially I think through transistor radios and then the sounds. The voice of Teresa Deng and also Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular singers are coming into China and then sort of cassette tapes and they're sort of better high quality sounds are introduced through other types of sonic technologies. The musical tastes has also changed and the way people listen to music has very much changed as well. And I think that's a that's a fascinating question about how musical aesthetics correlate to the technologies through which we're listening to it. And, and I think they're actually certain certain kinds of films such as Jia Zhang Ke's platform which begins in 1979 and ends around 1991. It's almost like in cycle or it's kind of a showcase of different musical technologies, going from like or sonic technologies from loud speakers to cassette tapes to radio. Radio is also very, very noisy, because of the jamming and because people sometimes you're listening across the borders. So, and then how that correlates to the type of popular music is also can can also be sort of hurt through through that film but, but I think more work really needs to be done in terms of how people were listening to music over time and how composers are thinking, along with the types of technologies that were being used to to to circulate the music things. Okay, our next comment question comes from Jing Fei Zhang. Thank you Dr Lee. This is really fantastic lecture. You discussed the cinema and propaganda strategies in the culture revolution. I was wondering how did the audience think of these collective film screening. How did they get their pleasure of watching these propaganda films. Thank you. Thank you for asking this question. I mean one of the reasons why I started doing this kind of film reception beyond the film text kind of project had to do with when I was when I've been teaching Chinese cinema oftentimes the socialist period the socialist films are the most difficult to teach because they're so obvious and so in some ways so boring to the two current students they're almost unteachable on their the main propaganda message is being like reiterated over and over again within them. I was having a hard time reconciling like the film texts, the formulaic film text themselves, and the pleasure and the nostalgia with which my parents and their friends will live through this period speak of movie going. And then I asked them precisely about their experience of the cinema of cinema. What is it that they're actually our nostalgic for is it the stories of the film is that the actor is a sort of a combination of different things but the stories that they tend to tell are of for example like waking up in the middle of the night in order because the movie team has arrived. And you know it's been like month and months since they had to see in any film. So, getting up in the middle of the night to go to a film no matter what it is just to gather together and have some kind of respite from the the tedium of of Labor in the countryside was a special event another kind of story that they would often tell are the highlights in certain films such as. There's a Soviet film that was shown over and over again called Lenin in 1918. And it's like it's really really dry as dust. And if we watch it today but there's a ballet sequence and there's you know, there's a lot of soft-skinned music and, and you can see women dancing and then they're they're also red attachment of women right so those are those films are being enjoyed for reasons other than the propaganda messages there's also kissing scene in in 1918 so and and they would tell stories about how projection is, for example, like during those more erotic, they charged scenes, they might actually put their hand in front of the projector. In order to to censor those moments, and yet you know and then the audience would heckle and they would become very upset and and then the projection is my let go of the lens and so the the the manual censoring of the film, along with the audience and this noise that was being made on all attributed additional meanings to the film that went beyond what was going on so I think that in speaking to audiences about their specific memories of movie going and the pleasure that they had taken from these propaganda films it's I guess this is also why like in the in the book project on cinematic gorillas I also think of audiences as gorillas because they're in some ways taking pleasure in films that were not meant that were not intended at the time. So, so a lot of that pleasure is created by the audience themselves. Thank you. Okay, our next question comes from Parlenna Hartono. Yeah, this is such a wonderful talk on the subject of loud speaker from film projections as a spiritual mediumship. I'm curious if there are examples of early PRC era religious or organizations or individuals, however limited as they were that used these audio visual media for their own spiritual ends. Yeah, thank you so much, Paulina and thank you for tuning in. Yeah, I'm trying to think, because I was looking a little bit into the scholarship on religion under socialism, and trying to just find any evidence of how they. I would say that religious organizations necessarily had access to these technologies, but many of the early film screenings in the in at the county level or township level. In the 1940s or 1930s actually happened inside churches like a guy I talked to someone in the Catholic Church, who remembered watching many films from about like life and death and Jesus Christ and things like a sort of religious films that were shown by a priest that was brought to to the countryside so there was obviously projectors that are films that were available in this tie in the before the before 1949. I think after 1949 the official films are often anti superstition films, but these anti superstition films sometimes had the opposite effect. So it was quite curious to read about how some there was a there was a, I don't remember it was a documentary film or like a fiction film called shengui bullying or like God and ghosts are in efficacious they're not they they can help cure your diseases and then there was a projection this actually gave an account of saying that because there's a sequence in the film that shows a shaman or show shows a spirit medium in the film and the purpose of the film was to show how they are in effect in efficacious and didn't manage to cure but because the performance was so vivid afterwards the villagers came to the projection is thinking they're the shamans right and then so so that for them. So audiences might actually understand the films in a very different way from the original intent that had been built into the narratives. Another example I have seen was actually in Professor Harry and to Harrison has a book about Catholic village and there was an instance of a slide show like where I think someone wanted to prove to her that there was a record of a miracle and took out a bunch of lantern slides. That was actually an anti superstition campaign so that there's a description of that if you want to look it up. So there's not the only two small instances that I have found of maybe sort of local religion or local villagers understanding these modern technologies in their own terms and in in very different ways from the way that they were being intended. And I think that just just the fact that many film screenings were taking place inside formerly religious spaces or spaces of worship has an impact on the reception of the audience as well so thank you. My question is from Professor Chris Barry at a King's College London. Thank you so much for the talk. I was very interested in the contemporary covert use of loud speakers to enforce rules. I've heard in the news about the communities in Shanghai, yelling protests and the banning pens. So there seems to be a kind of a counter run out. Did you also come across any reference to resistance or protest in the mall era. And did they also take the form of a counter run out. Professor Barry thank you so much for attending this talk. Yeah, I was, I actually haven't finished my research on the covert uses because there are actually tons and tons of these two way kind of loud speaker uses and very colorful and very comedic it's a genre of comedy now in terms of how loud speakers are being used to buy even local cadres they're of course enforcing rules for the most part but there's something very comedic and subversive about these very local uses as well. And then from the, yes, I've seen the some videos of the Shanghai yelling protest and the, you know, the banging pots so like almost the old strategies that were used against barrels are being reused for for resistance. I think in the mall era, I haven't really come across. I think the counter run out would be more sort of mocking the messages of the film so the even the quote from option that I was reading of sometimes people would be actually to go back to another learning learning 1918 example that you see in in the film in the heat of the sun is that if people know the lines backwards if they know all the they know a film they can call out the lines before before the these before that part of the film is being played so they're kind of making a mockery of the film that is being played. So in in terms of movie going I think I've seen this, but in terms of the uses of loud speakers because loud speakers are very locally controlled. So I think there's a lot of local errors and because local cadres are themselves villagers who are using, you know, the local languages and saying very interesting things. Sometimes they also make mistakes so what I have come across are often the broadcasting of enemy radio, the accidental broadcasting sort of accidents of broadcasting accident I think they're called like wrong bush or something where they would because this radio is part of the broadcasting station that, and then someone leaves the broadcasting station forgets to turn off the radio or forgets to turn off the loud speaker, and then the radio picks up actually like a foreign radio station that is making propaganda against counter CCP propaganda and then that creates almost like an incidence, but but those are not intended, I think that in the in the Mao era it would be very dangerous to intend this kind of counter now. I, yeah, I, those are moments I would definitely be looking for as well I think it's more of like a whisper whereas loud speakers is very much enforcing the voice of authority. I'd like to remind participants, we welcome your comments and questions please type them in the Q&A box. So, yeah, I really share your sentiment and reflection on the difficulty of teaching my era cinema. Of course, it's like so so boring so now, but as your research has demonstrated, if we do it well, this field is fascinating, because your research has demonstrated the potential of using Mao Mao era cinema to challenge the Western theoretical paradigm. For instance, I've noticed you now pay attention to you also kind of use the phenomenological approach to pay attention to importance of the human body, the corporeal dimension of the revolution and the revolutionary media. For loud speakers and open air cinema, I think they may not be restricted within Maoist era, if we're looking if we look at the socialist revolutions over the in the whole over the world. So, is this major now like a hot noise unique to the Chinese case or not in socialist revolutions. Yeah, thank you so much for I actually have been thinking a lot about what's really what we mean when we use words like Maoist versus socialist and what is being because sometimes they use them more somewhat interchangeably and then but socialist might have a longer time duration from me, I think you can extend socialist to the 1980s. And then also is social is connected to collective ownership, because Mao era is so much associated with a period that Mao was alive and in power. And, but there's definitely a sense of ending right by Maoist also suggests like something unique to China as opposed to sort of a more global socialist arena and so socialist already suggest a certain kind of comparative framework so I think that these can be used strategically depending on what we are what we're trying to get at. But in terms of what is I think it's always a good question actually to ask what is unique in the Chinese situation because the kind of the Maoist media networks if we talk about Maoist I think the in terms of the 1950s, a lot of the radio networks and then the also film networks are modeled after the Soviet Union so the Soviet Union really provided the Soviet experts came in and try to they gave a lot of advice and then so even like film projection magazine at the time was doing a lot of translation of just the Soviet examples, and then sort of also Lenin and Stalin's slogans were everywhere in terms of talking about the significance of radio and cinema, what what radio is for or you know cinema is like film is the greatest of all the arts. But I do think that the corporeal uses the way that humans substituted for technological inadequacy is quite specific to the Chinese context. And that's also why I look at some of the earlier writings from Mao and other other sort of communist Chinese communist leaders, especially from the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of what was done under guerrilla warfare against Japan in the, in the face of inadequate technological developments, what kind of networks can be built with human forces and I think that's even in the case of radio I think it's quite interesting that instead of saying, or electrifying the entire country, instead of creating electrical grids and creating us, you know, having like everyone have a radio set, or having loudspeakers everywhere what was done initially was to actually have people take the radio sets into the villages and to stage these collective events. And these collective events I think that you know to get back to the idea of spirit mediumship or you know they kind of take the place of former temple fairs, they take the place of a lot of local gathering local community events whether they're sacred or, or just a secular, but I think that a lot of the earlier indigenous religiosity is being displaced by, by the new government that is not necessarily just about importing something foreign but rather saying like, you know, even I think of films such as the white haired girl, the rhetoric of turning ghosts into humans and then a lot of there there are many kind of indigenous religious elements that are present in malice media production as well as in circulation and and usage that I think are specifically Chinese to and and that's even though the technology might be borrowed or some of the larger infrastructures are created under the, you know, kind of modeled after the civilian and but when the, when the technology is not in place when there isn't enough, then certain gorilla tech tactics are being employed from the period of the Sino-Japanese war so I think there are many specific Chinese elements to the usage of media in this period. So thank you so much. Our next question comes from Liu Wenjing from a university in China. Thank you very much for your fascinating talk. Do you have any comparison between Chinese experience in the media media use with other socialist and communist countries way of using public media. I think you have just partially addressed this question. If you want to add anything more, please do so. Yeah, no thank you very much, Dean for this really great question I think that I really would like to do more comparative work as well some a lot of the work on not speaker, not necessarily in communist countries but I just found it fascinating to read a book about the in Germany the Nazi soundscape book about the uses of not speaker bands in 1930s Germany, that there were also quite a lot of interesting parallels between the sort of domination of the soundscape and uses in a way to to conquer a space using sound was, and we see this even today right a lot of the, the uses of loud speakers today it's also to impose a certain kind of sonic authority. And I'm not sure if it was used in exactly the same way and I think that every place has a very different way of dealing with soundscape so for example, it would actually be really interesting to find out how, like church bells or minarets and like the types of public sounds were regulated in different places and I think I've heard about how church bells were had to like sort of lower or change their their sounds, also in, in other socialist and communist countries that they couldn't be as loud as they were. So, so that's something that really awaits further comparisons but thank you for for this for your suggestion. Oh, I don't see any new questions, but I'd like to ask you the last one. So maybe an advice you can give to students and the scholars who research in Chinese media and the culture, because your project is a very, you know, it's very challenging one, and I have seen you use different kinds of methods materials. So could you say some say a little bit about your methodologies and how you look for locate those primary sources. Thank you so much. I feel I don't know I, you know, in the research methods have changed so much in the, or they are going to change, or many of us who are located outside of China have not been able to go to archives or do field work. So the book project that I'm finishing up I have a section on methodology it's called cinematic girls so I'm calling my methodology also gorilla methodologies because it's very mobile and sort of mixes of a variety of different kinds of methods depending on what kind of materials that I have access to, but I really would suggest just being very resourceful about like locating different kinds of sources from different places because, for example sound is such an ephemeral thing it's very difficult to capture there are no archives, oftentimes. I learned that even if you had the best relationships to radio stations, maybe they didn't even have recordings of their radio programs. So the absence of archive the absence of these kind of the text itself means you know if you are still interested in radio programs, it's still possible to find pamphlets of because broadcasters have scripts. Right, so sometimes they are model scripts that they have been or like manuals for broadcasters so I found things like radio reception, like Guangbo show in and are radio receptionist manuals and they are. Those are actually widely printed widely available and then you can actually find out a lot about how to run a radio station from these. These kinds of manuals, and then you also have sample programs and now like in terms of, and then jumping to the covert era I think we all can't go to shine now those of us located outside of it, but it's actually really just amazing how much live streaming or, or just like record YouTube, I was typing in like that. And then just the number of amazing kind of little recordings that are made of local loudspeaker use in various dialects is actually extremely rich so even though we're not there there are some other types of ethnographies that are available. So there was, I showed like a cartoon from 1936 and I, I found that actually because I was really interested in radio listening so I, in terms of like thinking about keyword searches like tingzhong, right. I was, I was interested in how you construct the listener. And then so so this cartoon came out and this cartoon is very telling to so. But in terms of actual like if there's a way to actually go into China and do field work, then they're, I think, relying on local relationships and talking to people who have access as sort of to. I think that there's a way of doing like almost like using sociological methods as well and bringing in bringing clips bringing posters of films that you're interested in, and asking people and doing interviews that way. I don't know how possible it is to do sort of digital interviews nowadays via we chat but I also tried to question there's right like and then I got a few people who you know who really were very generous with sharing their memories and they were writing down these wonderful, you know, like memories of just their movie going experiences and how they related to particular films. They're also because we're in the digital era where it is possible to search like full text searches and then there are certain kinds of topics that you know if you know what you're looking for then you can actually collect a lot of interesting experiences. Yeah, and I actually tried the same thing with with cassettes I was also interested in like cassette players but those are much harder somehow like there's less written. So it also depends on, you know, I think for for some time when old movie theaters were being demolished there's almost a documentary impulse to preserve memories and then there was a lot of writing actually just about their memories of particular theaters or particular experience childhood experiences. And those are also really wonderful sources I think sometimes fiction can serve as sources if they are qualified and somehow analytically sort of treated so those are some of my suggestions. Thank you so much for generously share your sharing your tips and advice. I think if our participants today are present, you will hear a loud round of applause. I'm afraid I have to wrap up here and thank you all thank you to our audience today and thank you Professor. Thank you so much for having me and thank you everyone for tuning in. Bye.