Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors And The Transformation Of American Culture

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. Rather, it unreeled 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 movie theater’s magic, 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. With rich archival discoveries, this book charts a compelling and original history of film, one that brings to light new technologies and diverse forms of media engagement that continue to shape contemporary life.