Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: 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
