Overview

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 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 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.

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9780520331686

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Reviews

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 * 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. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television * Haidee Wasson's Everyday Movies complicates notions that movie theaters were the most popular means of access to the moving image in the United States before the 1950s by emphasizing the widespread and varied uses of portable projectors. . . . Everyday Movies presents a remarkably useful set of tools for understanding the state of America's current media landscape. * Spectator, USC Division of Cinema & Media Studies * 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. * JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *

"""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 * “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.” * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television * ""Haidee Wasson's Everyday Movies complicates notions that movie theaters were the most popular means of access to the moving image in the United States before the 1950s by emphasizing the widespread and varied uses of portable projectors. . . . Everyday Movies presents a remarkably useful set of tools for understanding the state of America's current media landscape."" * Spectator, USC Division of Cinema & Media Studies * ""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."" * JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *"

Author Information

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.

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