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Everyday Movies documents the twentieth-century rise of portable film projectors. It demonstrates that since World War II, the vast majority of movie-watching did not happen in the glow of the large screen but rather took place alongside the glitches, distortions, and clickety-clack of small machines that transformed home, classroom, museum, community, government, industrial, and military venues into sites of moving-image display. Reorienting the history of cinema away from the magic of the movie theater, Haidee Wasson illustrates the remarkable persistence and proliferation of devices that fundamentally rejected the sleek, highly professionalized film show. She foregrounds instead another kind of apparatus, one that was accessible, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, and crucially, programmable. Revealing rich archival discoveries, this book charts a compelling and original history of film that brings to light new technologies and diverse forms of media engagement that continue to shape contemporary life.
“Everyday Movies is a gamechanger in film and media studies in the way it moves the scholarly gaze away from film and cinema towards a focus on the portable projector. In doing so, it brings to light the ways in which most people throughout a large part of the twentieth century interacted and consumed films in a multiplicity of locations and formats outside of the dominant cinema space.”
"Through her decades of meticulous archival research for this book and other projects, Wasson has challenged scholars to carve out a rightful place for small-gauge filmmaking in American film history and other national film cultures. Her work suggests we might do well to reexamine the term nontheatrical cinema itself."
Introduction: Portability and Projectability
1. Engineering Portability: The Rise of Suitcase Cinema
2. Spectacular Portability: Cinema’s Exhibitory Complex, American Industry, and the 1939 World's Fair
3. Mobilizing Portability: The American Military and Film Projectors
4. Portable Projectors and the Electronic Age
Epilogue: Vectors of Portable Cinema
Notes
Bibliography
Index