In Cinema Off Screen, Chenshu Zhou decenters the film narrative shown on-screen to reconceptualize film spectatorship, exhibition, and consumption as material experiences of interacting with various “surfaces,” such as movie screens and landscapes (p. 13). Using the history of the cinemagoing experience in socialist China as a case study, Zhou theorizes film exhibition more broadly as a network of “off-screen” interfaces that shaped audience experiences and memories beyond the content shown on the movie screen and enclosed by an actual theater building.

Cinema Off Screen comprises six chapters focusing on different “off-screen” or “extra-filmic” interfaces (p. 25). The six chapters are as follows: “Space” (chapter 1), “Labor” (chapter 2), “Multimedia” (chapter 3), “Atmosphere” (chapter 4), “Discomfort” (chapter 5), and “Screen” (chapter 6). Chapter 1 examines the history of how China's socialist state created new film exhibition sites in outdoor spaces that served as mouthpieces for promoting the rhetoric of Communist China. The reconstruction of commercial movie theaters established during the Republican era (1911–49) took place alongside this strategy. Movie theaters were renamed, and film exhibition locations shifted from urban movie theaters to places such as “universities, factories, government institutions, mines, and the countryside” (p. 39). Indeed, by transforming exhibition sites from spaces of “luxury and foreign domination” into “space[s] for the people” (p. 40), film spectatorship in socialist China became both “political education” and “recreation” (p. 44). Alongside the shifting meaning and function of theater spaces was a transformation of moviegoers from “urbanites” to “ethnic minorities and those in remote rural areas” (p. 49).

The rise of audiences in rural areas was facilitated by a growing number of mobile film projection teams between 1950 and 1960 (p. 47). In chapter 2, Zhou examines how ideology was conveyed through the labor of these projection teams and the proliferation of Maoist narratives. Now socialist cinema was reconceptualized as a “postal system” (p. 61). The projectionists therefore became messengers who delivered the socialist rhetoric of moral virtue to the rural audiences. Further, their bodies and labor became the embodiment of the “Socialist New Man” (p. 75), as well as the object of the spectator's gaze. In Western film studies, the cinematic gaze of spectators is often theorized as gendered or fetishistic. Here, the gaze cast upon the projectionist was one of appreciation for the “physical labor” of the “projectionists’ body at work” (p. 56). During this time, protectionists on mobile film teams often had to travel across rugged terrain in small teams to reach rural audiences. Such heroic journeys and the selfless manual labor of the projectionists were featured in an increasing number of Mao-era narratives that celebrated the virtue of collectivity and sacrifice. Projectionists also became an “interface” connecting the films to their rural audiences, as they had to interpret the films for the public, for which they underwent political study and training.

Part and parcel of the elevation of the projectionists’ status was the assumption that rural audiences were an unsophisticated “national community” (p. 48). Chapter 3 examines the process whereby the projectionists produced “socialist subjectivity” by explaining the films to these rural audiences (p. 101). Between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, film exhibition in rural China did not merely highlight the centrality of film screenings. Rather, films were part of larger noncinematic multimedia technologies, including magic lantern shows, live performances, and slide projections, as a way to perform film's dual function as both “propaganda and education” (p. 78). Within this multimedia environment, films were actually marginal and film exhibition was a part of, and not always central to, “electrified education” (p. 79).

Chapter 4 uses cinemagoers’ testimonials to decenter the function of the film screen to the off-screen space of atmosphere (qifen). Rather than “privilege the theatrical model as what defines cinema” (p. 132), Zhou conceptualizes the audience experiences of filmgoing at mobile open-air cinemas as “atmospheric spectatorship” (p. 112). During the period from the 1950s through the early 1980s, open-air screenings made up the majority of screenings in China (p. 107). According to Zhou, what was central to their experiences was not necessarily the films themselves but their interactions with their environment and community. Just as films became marginalized as a form of didactic practice and communication in political education (chapter 3), spectatorship was about the experience of enjoying the atmosphere (qifen) rather than the experience of watching the films on-screen (p. 117).

Using Raymond Williams's notion of “structures of feelings,” Zhou argues in chapter 5 that socialist China saw “the struggle of the body to overcome pain and discomfort . . . as revolutionary, transcendent, and desirable” (p. 145). As “struggle was seen as the true source of joy and happiness in the Maoist ethical system” (p. 146), moviegoing and spectatorship in socialist China were not about the pursuit of comfort and pleasure, but rather embodied spectatorship in which the body of the spectator interacted with the environment, with all the discomfort it caused on the body (p. 135).

In the book's final chapter, Zhou debunks the stereotypes of rural audiences as impressionable and challenges the periodization of “early cinema” (p. 174). She does so by revisiting the question of when the “narrative of moviegoing” originated (p. 159). The screen as the originator of the fictional cinematic story world that audiences consumed is replaced by a cinemagoing experience in which audiences interact with the physical screen and with the spaces around it. Indeed, film begins when the “screen is hung” (p. 159). The screen is not the place where cinema as film narrative is projected—that is, it is not only to be looked at, but to be touched as well. When audiences were touching the screen, throwing rocks at it, sitting on the reverse side, they were in fact “playing with the screen” (p. 170). No longer seen as naive, rural spectators take part in the “[c]ommunal participation” of “domesticating cinema” and “assimilating it into the space of everyday life” (p. 175). This innovative, well-researched, and beautifully written book will be of interest to students and scholars in Chinese studies, film studies, film theory, and film history.