ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the multisensory environment of the screening space has as much to contribute to the cinematic experience as the films. The first part synthesizes and theorizes extrafilmic visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic experiences at the cinema as “hot noise.” A key concept of Chinese popular religion, theater and markets, “hot noise” (renao) describes a sociothermic affect generated through an assembly of warm bodies, a polyphony of participatory voices, or a kaleidoscope of sense impressions. As open-air cinema grew into a quintessential form of public life under Chinese socialism, its hot noise also contributed to a politics of mobilization and an economics of austerity. The bulk of the chapter parses the sensorium of open-air cinema into “extra-filmic” sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch. Emanating from the apparatus, the audience, or the atmosphere, the hot noise of open-air cinema included heat and cold, wind and rain, moon and mosquitos, snacks and feasts, shoes and roads, hand shadows and stomping feet, screens and seating, power generators and loudspeakers. As festive occasions for spectacle, noise, commensality, intimacy, and nightlife against a backdrop of poverty, hardship, and dreariness, open-air cinema brought together revolutionary congregations, yet its hot noise also dwarfed and drowned out the films’ propaganda messages. Indeed, if socialist cinema’s open-air screen was intended as a flag, a sail, and a lighthouse, its utopian visions arrived at the grassroots as mirages and phantoms that paled against the noises of a lived reality.
