Description:
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.
Review Quotes: "A definitive accounting of the rise of small-gauge film cultures in the United States. Through meticulous research, sophisticated argumentation, and a strong sense of what was truly significant about portable cinema, Wasson has written a book that will help ensure, from now on, that film historians, theorists, and students think of the cinema as belonging not just to the theater, but also to the portable projectors that made movies possible everywhere they went."-- "Film Quarterly"