Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China. By Jie Li. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 341 pp. $140 (cloth), $35 (paper), $34.99 (ebook). - Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Cen

As fans know well, Chinese cinema is wildly diverse, in forms that vary from outlandish Hong Kong kung-fu flicks to heart-wrenching tragedies overseen by mainland auteurs.Scholarly interest in Chinese cinema, however, has largely centered on fictional films produced by famous directors for urban audiences.Fortunately, two recent publications offer a strong and necessary correction by emphasizing the complexity of Chinese cinema, both in production and reception, over the long course of the twentieth century.Jie Li's Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China brings to life the role of cinema in the vast Chinese countryside, where projection teams roamed for miles from village to village to bring Communist-approved entertainment to new audiences.Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China, meanwhile, expands the scope of inquiry to documentary media, broadly conceived in both form and content, and thus further destabilizes accepted conceptions of Chinese film.Together, these two books greatly expand the study of Chinese cinema and, in conjunction with many recent studies on Chinese opera, dance, and storytelling, foreshadow an increasingly comprehensive understanding of China's cultural scene.Read together, the two books reveal several shared concerns that will resonate with scholars of Chinese culture, starting with the difficulty of investigating their respective topics.Li's research for Cinematic Guerrillas was greatly complicated by the fact that her focus is film projection in the countryside, where few textual records remain.Li tackled this problem through extensive "guerilla fieldwork."Most notably, she delved into oral