One day in December 1976, I received a notice from the secretary of the commune to go to work in the commune.
From that day on, I became a commune film projectionist.
In those days, it was also rare to be able to find such a job.
My job is even harder to come by.
Our family lived on the opposite side of the people's commune compound, and the family was familiar with most of the commune cadres, and at that time, only the commune secretary could bring his family.
At that time, the secretary took his wife and children to live in our village and rented our neighbor's house to live.
My mother learned from other commune cadres that a projectionist in the commune film screening team had been recommended to go to college, and that there was a vacancy in this position, and many people were competing for this position in the trust relationship. Therefore, my mother asked the neighbor to introduce her to the daughter-in-law of the commune secretary who lived in his house, got rid of her intercession for the secretary, and gave me this position indicator. In order to be able to let the family give us this position indicator, my mother went to the secretary's wife's house every day to do housework, they had three children, washing clothes, doing clothes and other housework my mother all took care of it, so she has been doing it for more than half a year, maybe she finally touched the secretary's daughter-in-law, in the winter of this year, I am about to graduate from high school, and the old woman also got the internal information of the secretary's daughter-in-law, saying that the secretary promised to give us the post indicators of the commune film projectionist, and said that several cadres are robbing, In the end, the secretary tried to defy the consensus and decided to give it to us.
On the first day I went to work in the commune, the secretary of the commune party committee arranged for me to meet my master, whose surname was Zhu, who was selected from the village in 1974 when the commune was the first batch of film screening teams to be established, and it is said that the reason is that Master Zhu's old father used to be a projectionist in the army, and at the beginning he planned to let his father come to the film team.
On the same day, the screening program of the film team was the feature film "Entrepreneurship", which told the story of Daqing Iron Man Wang Jinxi, at 7 p.m., the master took me to the screening point - it was a conference room of a brigade, a conference room of Nuoda, the lights were bright, the black pressure was crowded with people, hanging the screen, racking projection equipment, turning on the power supply, testing the projector, the master's operation of Ma Lisuo, I did not know where to intervene to help.
For the first time, in full view of such a large public and public presence, without any technical training, my heart was pounding and I was sweating nervously.
After the screening of the film began, I stood behind the projector, still feeling overwhelmed.
In the next ten years, I witnessed a new era of Chinese cinema, screened thousands of films for more than 30,000 peasants in more than 30 villages, experienced many meaningful things, and later went to work in the city, still missing the experience of mobile screening in the countryside.
(Stay tuned for "I'm a Commune Film Projectionist" (2)