Everyday Movies Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture

"Exhaustively researched and exquisitely written, Everyday Movies is the first truly twenty-first-century history of twentieth-century film. Where cinema history has prized theatrical exhibition, Haidee Wasson shows that mobility is the central term for cinema history. Where film theory has fetishized a single kind of apparatus and spectator, Wasson reveals the wide range of people, institutions, and practices that defined what movies are and what they can do.”—Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

"In this captivating book, Wasson moves film history out of the theater and into the varied spaces of portable projection at world's fairs, military zones, stores, classrooms, workplaces, and more. More than just history of technical inventions, Everyday Movies looks seriously at a virtually overlooked device that transformed experience in twentieth-century life. Brilliantly researched and full of surprises!"—Lynn Spigel, author of TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television

"Everyday Movies is irresistible. Wasson directs our gaze in the unlikeliest of directions and then ends up reframing almost everything we thought we knew about film in America during the extended moment of classical Hollywood cinema."—Lisa Gitelman, author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

"Rather than discussing portable projectors as something on the fringe or periphery of film culture, Wasson repositions them in the center––as the norm for film viewing for much of the twentieth century. We come away seeing how the story of American film is also the story of big business, the military, public education, and information management systems. A highly ambitious and significant contribution."—Eric Hoyt, author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video

"This book offers a striking and important new perspective on cinema history, cultures, and institutions, as well as on media's intertwining with American social and economic history. While the technologies it examines are small, the questions it asks are big and consequential. Everyday Movies will have resonances far beyond its primary fields."—Alice Lovejoy, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

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.