In a field often concerned with big movies in familiar movie theatres, Concordia professor of film studies Haidee Wasson has been thinking about small movies in unexpected places.
In her new book, Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture, Wasson says that the number of films people have historically watched in theatres is utterly dwarfed by what they have watched with small, portable projectors since World War II. These machines were widely used to turn schools, living rooms, public spaces, and just about any other location into places to see movies for a wide range of purposes: information, research, therapy, religious worship, and yes, entertainment too.
Her research on small projectors, which were both portable and programmable, shows that cinema has never been just about special locations or spectacular events, but has long operated in ways similar to contemporary media, linking movies and their machines to the everyday way we use phones, computers, and tablets.
Wasson’s previous books include the award-winning Museum Movies, and co-edited collections, Useful Cinema and Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, which explore the ways film has been part of important institutional and cultural transformations such as the art museum and the American military throughout the 20th century.
Wasson recently answered some questions about her most recent book and why the history of portable projectors is significant in reconsidering how we understand cinema.
Why study the history of portable projectors?
Through the course of my research, I became fascinated by two basic facts. First, there were so many of them! These were little media machines that people were very familiar with and often had access to, using them regularly at work, school, and home. Second, there were many different kinds of projectors in circulation right from the beginning of the existence of movies. So it became clear that portable cinema was both common and diverse, with a very long history. Looking at these devices opened up a whole set of questions about why we liked to watch, how we watched, and where we watched films. This new viewing infrastructure created new kinds of audiences and made whole new kinds of movies possible: documentary, science films, personal films, pornography, avant garde and experimental films. The big screen and its movie theater was only a very small part of the story. Cinema was happening almost everywhere!