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.
Table of Content
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: 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
About the author
Haidee Wasson is Professor of Film and Media at Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of the award-winning Museum Movies and coeditor of several books, including Useful Cinema and Cinema's Military Industrial Complex.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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