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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Chenshu Zhou, "Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China" (U California Press, 2021)
Description: At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (U California Press, 2021) advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, inte...