Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture 9780520974371

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Everyday Movies

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Robert and Meryl Selig Endowment Fund in Film Studies, established in memory of Robert W. Selig.

Everyday Movies Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture

haidee wasson

University of California Press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Haidee Wasson

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Wasson, Haidee, 1970– author. Title: Everyday movies : portable film projectors and the transformation of American culture / Haidee Wasson. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020014430 (print) | LCCN 2020014431 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520331686 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520331693 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520974371 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture projectors—History—20th ­century. | Motion pictures—Technological innovations—History— 20th ­century. | Cinematography—United States—History— 20th ­century. Classification: LCC TR890 .W37 2020 (print) | LCC TR890 (ebook) | DDC 777—dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020014430 LC ebook record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020014431 Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Stella and Ava

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Portability and Projectability

ix 1

1 . Engineering Portability: The Rise of Suitcase Cinema 37 2 . Spectacular Portability: Cinema’s Exhibitory Complex, American Industry, and the 1939 World’s Fair

71

3 . Mobilizing Portability: The American Military and Film Projectors

110

4 . Portable Projectors and the Electronic Age

143

Epilogue: Vectors of Portable Cinema

176

Notes 183 Bibliography 239 Index 263

Acknowledgments

There are so many people who helped me along with this book that it is difficult to know where to start. Complicating the sheer volume of interlocutors is the long, twisting path that I followed to get here. This project had its first real boost from my McKnight Landgrant Professorship, University of Minnesota. During this phase, Steven Groening provided crucial research assistance and steady friendship. Among the many gifted colleagues in Minneapolis, I want to single out John Mowitt, John Archer, and Ron Greene, who each provided intellectual guidance and inspiration. Raina Polivka at University of California Press has been a breath of fresh air with her clear-­sighted and unswerving support. Madison Wetzell has ably helped to guide me through the production process. Fantastic readers’ reports helped me to improve this manuscript immeasurably, providing lengthy, specific, and general commentary that is the stuff of writerly dreams. This project has also benefited from the support of Le Fonds de recherche du Quebec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful every day to have the support of strong, accessible, public education and research funding that actively advocates for humanities scholarship. The digging required for this book began before the digitization projects that have utterly transformed historical scholarship had reached a critical mass; it was also immeasurably shaped by this sea change. So, I must thank Eric Hoyt and his entire team for building the Media History Digital Library. And, in the same breath, one cannot say enough about the influence of Rick Prelinger, who released the floodgates of print materials and other ephemera. The possibilities of film and media history have opened up in ways I could not have imagined ten years ago. We all owe these people, and all others who labor to shore up research infrastructures, a ix

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debt that we can only repay by doing good and interesting things with the materials their efforts have bequeathed us. In addition, I have benefitted from archivists and resources at the magnificent New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the George Eastman House, the National Archives and Records Administration, the University of Iowa (Iowa City), Iowa State University (Ames), the University of California–Santa Barbara, the University of Maryland, and Duke University. A fruitful visit to the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco proved particularly helpful, hosted by Rick, whose charms and bountiful knowledge never cease to amaze. Barbara Miller also provided essential support, with access to resources held at the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens. Dino Everett engaged with my research questions and opened the doors to the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California. Brian Real provided able assistance navigating the National Archives and Records Administration. Ron Magliozzi and the inestimable Charles Silver also helped me through the Brandon Collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Thanks also to Oliver Gaycken and Kaitlyn McGrath for providing orientation, advice, and valuable resources. This project began as one devoted to so-called nontheatrical cinema and evolved into a one that amounts to a rejection of that term’s centrality. I began to search for other ways to conceptually capture the scale and scope of what I was discovering. This process was particularly fueled by the generosity of colleagues who invited me to present my ongoing work in a host of venues. Particularly helpful were opportunities to present my work at Carleton, Laval, Harvard, and New York University. Presentations at the University of California, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, as well as University of Southern California, were each stimulating and sun-shiney encounters. Papers delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State, McGill, and Northwestern University, and at the Universities of Iowa, Marburg, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, also helped to smooth out the edges, identify key issues, and dig deeper into what was at stake here. Invited lectures delivered at such gatherings as the Chicago Film Seminar, the Screen Studies Association of Australia (Monash University), the Screen Conference (Glasgow), the Films that Work Harder Conference (Frankfurt), New Cinema History Conference (HOMER/ Glasgow), Media History from the Margins Conference (Switzerland), and the Misfits Symposium (Carnegie Museum of Art) all provided grist for the mill. Among the many conversations I would like to thank Paula Amad, Erika Balsom, John Caldwell, Tim Corrigan, Michael Cowan, Scott Curtis,

Acknowledgments    /    xi Liz Czach, John Ellis, Andreas Fickers, Murray Forman, Allison Griffiths, Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, Mette Hjort, Jennifer Horne, Priya Jakumar, Jonathan Kahana, Aleksandra Kaminska, Caren Kaplan, Charlie Keil, Sarah Keller, Jeff Klenotic, Barb Klinger, Richard Maltby, Paul Moore, Lisa Parks, David Rodowick, Ariel Rogers, Jake Smith, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp, Alexander Stark, Jonathan Sterne, Kristen Whissel, Deane Williams, Pamela Wojcik, and Yvonne Zimmerman. This project also grew enormously during a one-­year visiting professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I feel sincere and significant gratitude for the time spent there in the orbit of such a stellar cadre of scholars, among them Peter Bloom, Michael Curtin, Bishnupriya Gosh, Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, Patrice Petro, Bhaskar Sarkar, Greg Siegel, Christina Venegas, and Janet Walker. Chuck Wolfe, whose generosity and professionalism are models for us all, read parts of this manuscript and generously shared his wisdom. I also benefit from a supernaturally stimulating research culture at Concordia University in Montreal. Colleagues in my home department provide daily reminders of what makes this all worth it. Sincere appreciation goes to Luca Caminati, Kay Dickinson, Martin Lefebvre, Josh Neves, Katie Russell, Masha Salazkina, and Marc Steinberg. Working out from there is a circle of local colleagues involved in the Media History Research Center, among them Jason Camlot, Sandra Gabriel , Fenwick McKelvey, Elena Razlagova, Jeremy Stolow, Peter van Wyck, and Darren Wershler. Having a strong cadre of engaged media historians in my midst has been instrumental. A network of cherished colleagues have especially shaped this book. Their generous reading of drafts and regular, ongoing discussions deserve special recognition. Lee Grieveson has been a career-­long collaborator, and his sharp mind and hard queries have made me a better scholar for over twenty years now. Greg Waller has supported this project for almost a decade. His steady collegiality and sober second thoughts have been indispensable. Dana Polan read this entire manuscript in its early stages. His generosity continues to amaze and surprise me. Justus Nieland has inspired me with his work on film and design and provided pivotal feedback on chapter 2. Both Eric Hoyt and Alice Lovejoy have read this beast twice, and at each turn helped me to hone argumentation and shore up my evidence. Vanessa Schwartz aided me in ways that only she could. Louis Pelletier provided precise and rigorous commentary from beginning to end, supplying helpful tips, documents, and his unparalleled expertise. Keir Keightley—through long and ongoing discussions—has consistently pointed the way toward rigor and the necessity of thinking comparatively

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about media history. His boundless curiosity and enthusiasm is infectious, thankfully. I have been blessed with a rich traffic in budding scholars who have come into the orbit of this project and performed some of the courageous archaeology that built it foundations. Kristen Alfaro deserves a special shout-out for her months of burrowing away in the various New York institutions that yielded up treasures. In addition, Bruno Cornellier, Natalie Greenberg, Phillip Keidl, Matthew Ogonoski, Kyla Smith, and most of all, Kaia Scott, who has read every word and seen every blemish. Thank you. This book has thrived on the good will of friends who, in addition to being smart, have just made it all more fun and rewarding. Mike Zryd and Tess Takahashi have been stalwart confidantes. Brenda Weber has never failed to say the right thing. And Jennifer Holt has given me a whole new way to think about airstreams, mud, and snitching, not in that order. My one-of-a-kind father, Daniel Wasson, also spent countless hours fixing my sordid prose. Thanks Pops. Finally, while there are few words to fully describe his contribution, Charles Acland must be recognized. We discussed this project over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and coffee, during road trips, daycare drops offs, hospital visits, child birth(!), grieving, and joyous celebrations. A team of experts working round the clock could not have crafted a more brilliant and inspiring partner. Lastly, it should also be said that early versions of sections of this book have been previously published as: “Experimental Viewing Protocols: Film Projection and the American Military,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, coedited with Lee Grieveson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 25–43; “Selling Machines: Portable Projectors and Advertising at the World’s Fair,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, ed. Nico De Klerk, Bo Florin, and Patrick Vonderau (London: BFI, 2016), 54–70; “The Protocols of Portability” Film History 25, nos. 1–2 (2013): 236–47; “The Other Small Screen: Moving Images at New York’s World Fair, 1939,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 81–103; “Suitcase Cinema” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 150–54.

Introduction Portability and Projectability

Media fly, orbit, hover, and float. The scale of our media and their movement varies significantly from speedy and interplanetary to settled and deep beneath the sea. An assortment of earthly conveyance systems also shuttles our words, sounds, and images along. Some travel by air and others by wire; millions of books, vinyl records, and DVDs are delivered along roads by trucks. It is also true that media move with our bodies. Today we carry phones, MP3 players, and computers, reaching for them in our pockets, purses, backpacks, and briefcases. Devices made to be moved by humans signal the enduring imbrication of media machines not only with our eyes and ears but also with our torsos, shoulders, hands, heads, and fingers. A quick look at the history of media design reminds us that portable media (machines we carry) are not unique to the present. Radios with belt clips, cameras with straps, and televisions with handles demonstrate the importance of the body throughout media history.1 Wheeled mechanisms such as carts and dollies have also helped to spread our media load; while we have long worn our machines, we have pushed and pulled them as well. Expanding Marshall McLuhan’s lasting insight that media are extensions of our physical and sensing selves, inversely, media can also be thought of as part of our everyday weight—adding heft and even a particular sil­ houette or gait to our self-­carriage. This pairing of portable media with our bodies and their movements tells us something about the ways in which small devices act as interfaces between us and our cultural content, introducing dynamics that shape our relationships to media in the broadest sense. When media are portable, cognate concepts rise to the fore: accessibility, affordability, ease of use, durability, adaptability, and—crucially—programmability shaping the “who, when, where, what, and why” of media experience and use. As such, 1

2

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Introduction

portable media have subtended transformations of basic concepts and practices not just of making, looking, and listening but also of leisure, learning, and work, to name but a few. Some media devices are more readily associated with qualities we can group under the rubric of portability: transistor radios, cellular phones, laptops. Each of these readily imply movement on a human scale. They fit in our pockets or in our hands. They might work while in motion, and they can often be carried with minimal effort. Used in many locations, portable media devices perform a range of functions and enable a degree of user control. For some forms of media, however, the concept of portability has been far less salient. Take, for instance, the history of cinema. The resolutely unportable movie theater has long played a key role in our understanding of why and where we watch movies, helping us to distinguish cinema from other moving-image media. There can be no doubt that the theater’s darkened and seductive spaces housing big screens, multidimensional sounds, and often controlled climates are central to the rise of film as an industrial, artistic, and popular form. These sites have hosted the screens and projectors that transform images secured on celluloid into large-scale audiovisual experiences, what some refer to as “the magic of the movies.” Projectors and theaters are fundamental to our experience of recorded stories, ideas, information, travel, art, entertainment, and what it has meant to watch and listen throughout the twentieth and into twenty-first century. Our fascination with the movie theater is in part a fascination with the architectures of projection and confirms the sustained significance of largescale illumination, amplification, and performance to our mediated lives. Everyday Movies shares this interest in projection as a transformative and foundational process. Yet it proceeds from the assertion that movie theaters are but one small branch of a much larger history of film projection that has for too long stood in for the whole. In other words, our fascination with the movie theater has effectively clouded our ability to see and assess the full range of projected film forms. This includes those that were the most common and numerous throughout the twentieth century, with crucial and formative legacies extending into the twenty-first—namely, cinema machines that were designed with a seemingly simple imperative: to move. The complex history of portable projectors, and the films and viewing scenarios they enabled, have long been relegated to the margins of film history. Yet, by number, portable projectors easily eclipsed the archetypical movie theater. Moreover, portable film projectors comprised a generative technical substrate not just more extensive than but also notably distinct from cinema’s theatrical iterations. These small machines were highly adaptive

Introduction    /    3 and included a family of devices deployed in varied spaces and performance scenarios. Portable projectors were not simply curiosities and occasional gadgets destined to become dusty basement junk. They were not merely a domestic memory tool or a hobbyist’s delight. Nor should they be understood as primarily a substandard method by which to re-­create the seamless illusion of a professionalized, theatrical presentation apparatus. Rather, by midcentury, portable film projectors in the United States were highly productive, common, familiar, accessible, everyday technologies offering up a diverse body of films to millions. They comprised a widely visible element of a thriving small-­media ecology, catalyzing a myriad of uncharted but widespread and influential protocols and practices. That these devices were already a commonplace element of an expanding media ecosystem at midcentury makes redressing their absence from film and media history plainly necessary. Moreover, this expanded media history also demonstrates that the everyday screens currently residing in our pockets descend precisely from this lineage of twentieth century film technologies that effectively normalized the place of small, accessible moving images in our everyday and institutional lives. Rather than a recent aberration from the dark, immobile theater in which we “used to watch movies,” the dispersed, formal, and informal dynamics of moving images are charted here as central elements of our past century as well as our current one, situating film history as integral to the rise of our present cross-­platform, mobile, media environment. Mapping the proliferation of these machines, Everyday Movies documents the conditions in which film projectors became everyday media. It focuses on the late teens through to the 1950s, examining the technological standardization and institutionalization of portability within but then mostly beyond Hollywood. It ends during the decade in which portable projectors categorically outnumbered movie theaters, becoming the most common viewing platform for showing and watching films. Key dates include 1923 and 1932, when the American film industry codified the small-­gauge film formats of 16 mm and 8 mm respectively, distinguishing them from the larger, industry-­standard 35  mm gauge. These new smaller, lighter apparatuses used nonflammable film stock and were precisely designed to minimize cost, weight, and size, as well as to maximize ease of use and movement, contrasting with the professional technologies in commercial movie theaters. The spread of these diminutive devices up until World War II was steady but, compared to the contemporaneous rise of radio, notably minor. During the 1920s and 1930s, American industry became early adopters, using portable projectors in its communication, public relations, and exhibition activities. Minor use in homes, schools, and museums

4

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Introduction

grew comparatively slowly. The war years catalyzed a remarkable surge in the American manufacture of small projectors. Military use of film technologies increased dramatically, making portable film projectors standard operating equipment and securing them an expansive global footprint. Everywhere soldiers went, a projector inevitably followed. At the end of World War II, the formation of a major civilian filmviewing and film-performance infrastructure within the United States can be readily observed. Consider that in 1947 there were 18,059 conventional four-walled movie theaters operating throughout the country, 2,000 fewer than immediate postwar highs.2 That same year American manufacturers such as Bell and Howell, Eastman Kodak, RCA, and Victor Animatograph shipped 92,858 16  mm projectors, and 215,533 8  mm projectors.3 Throughout the following decade, movie theaters chart a steady decline down to 11,335 theaters in 1959.4 This contrasts with the 4,632,500 portable film projectors estimated to be in concurrent use.5 Thus, by 1959, for every single commercial movie theater in the United States there were 408 small portable projectors in operation. These devices continued to proliferate rapidly, and by 1969 portable, self-operated machines outnumbered theatrical screens by a ratio of more than 875:1, with an estimated 8,526,000 projectors in use, compared to 9,750 movie theaters.6 By 1980 the ratio likely grew to well over 1,000:1.7 In other words, while the number of theatrical sites steadily declined after the war into the 1970s, this small, adaptable, programmable, portable film apparatus dramatically, unapologetically ascended, wending its way into homes, schools, libraries, retail outlets, trains, planes, museums, factories, government and corporate offices, research labs, and ongoing military operations. From the end of the war and for decades, manufacturers of portable projectors year after year churned out hundreds of thousands of devices, cumulatively creating a technological infrastructure that for almost fifty years provided a primary interface between film viewers and projected images. Such numbers make portability and projection a basic fact of film and media history, one that plainly requires mapping and analysis. This viewing infrastructure handily complicates the routine assumption in film and media history that the movie theater is the historically situated and de facto site of American film and our experience of it. To neglect consideration of portable projectors is to overlook the most common, accessible, and quotidian means by which film prints have been shown, watched, heard, and engaged with from the end of World War II and into the 1980s. There is a simple premise at the heart of this book: Watching films is a peculiar kind of proposition, one that has entailed a rather complex series

Introduction    /    5

figure 1.  Portable film projectors were normalized elements of the postwar consumer media ecology. They rose alongside radios and televisions as familiar elements of the electronic age, characterized by convenience appliances and push-­ button media. The national infrastructure of small-­media repair shops provides a clear view to one aspect of the ways that such devices became part of mediated life at midcentury, both as working machines and broken (but fixable) ones. Photo: Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa, circa 1949.

of technical, institutional, and cultural shifts that can only be fully understood if we denaturalize some of the long-­standing assumptions that have limited our discussions about film viewing.8 Everyday Movies does this by charting the numerous devices that shed the architectural, industrial, and regulatory weight of the theater and instead extolled notably contrasting virtues, including lightness of weight, accessibility, adaptability, ease of use, affordability, repairability (figure 1), and—perhaps most important of all—programmability. These devices provide a revealing entry point into the history of moving images and sounds, demonstrating the myriad ways in which still, discrete images and sounds captured on celluloid transformed into moving, illuminated encounters across a gamut of institutions and sites. Importantly, these encounters were rarely brokered by a vertically organized, profit-­seeking film industry, nor should they be characterized

6

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Introduction

simply as instances of film exhibition, the commercial presentation of movies to a paying and pleasure-seeking mass audience. Rather, through the rapidly growing network of portable machines, films were frequently and regularly presented to small audiences and private individuals, many of whom gathered as institutional subjects: students, soldiers, scientists, workers, managers, family members, scholars, artists, and activist-citizens. In other words, portable projectors—particularly those issued in the 16 mm format—entailed, authorized, and legitimated distinct kinds of institutions, audiences, and varied modes of viewing. These forms of viewing arose alongside and, in some instances, undergirded the more storied ideals of the renegade politico, the radical artist, and the noble amateur that tend to characterize noncommercial film histories. They also ascended alongside the so-called mass audiences of television and big-screen Hollywood cinema that all too often typify the era. This new technological infrastructure multiplied the locations where films could be seen and shown, making not just film viewing but film programming a basic element of cultural life. Film shows became everyday acts requiring selection, curation, and presentation. The ability to program films, to choose what would be projected and seen, made cinema into something much more akin to other small, consumer-grade media. Similar to the phonograph and its effects on music, the portable projector changed how and why films were made, circulated, stored, programmed, presented, and experienced.9 Take but one element of these changes: film circulation, or what is often called “film distribution.” The film prints shown on portable devices traveled according to imperatives distinct from those that appeared on commercial film screens. While occasionally rented, these other films were also frequently lent, borrowed, purchased, traded, or simply pulled from a shelf, accumulating in countless public and private film collections and dedicated film libraries. Specific titles were ferried about under the aegis of official institutions of state, as well as clandestinely and unofficially in brown paper bags, collectively constituting a mix of formal and “informal” media circulation.10 Portable projectors and the films that played on them enabled the wresting of film programming away from the hands of a highly centralized commercial industry and created conditions in which, ideally, anyone could show a film. Do-it-yourself film performance dispersed the powers of projection, spreading them to amateur, artist, aristocrat, anarchist, and authoritarian alike. Not bound to the simple function of playing a film, these machines and their newly emboldened users took up projectors in ways that invited particular kinds of authority but also creativity, improvisation, adaptation, and occasionally subversion

Introduction    /    7 of formal and officially sanctioned media content and use. Projection was integrated into a myriad of cultural activities and agendas; programming easily became counter-­programming. Equally important, this new infrastructure for film viewing created the conditions in which a broader range of films became possible, as there was a ready-­made infrastructure for seeing them. The tens of thousands of film titles and hundreds of thousands of circulating 16 mm and 8 mm film prints available at midcentury index more than the widespread availability and use of movies. They also suggest that moving images had become everyday phenomena; they were increasingly integral to ever-­widening spheres in an increasingly mediated era. Beyond entertainment, films were teaching, training, selling, and advancing spiritual well-­being. They were integral to political persuasion, social work, industrial display, governance, psychological therapy, aesthetic experiment, and sex, to name but a few. As a result, the expanded function of movies was normalized. Moving images became familiar elements of an increasingly mediated world. Portable projectors shaped an emergent media infrastructure that catalyzed new kinds of films. Yet projectors were also far more than simply playback machines. With them, new modes of behavior and media engagement, or what we call “watching films,” arose. For instance, if you wanted, you could watch a film again. Or you could watch alone. You might select only the good parts, the useful parts, the naughty parts. Or you could require others to watch the most salacious, threatening, or instructive parts. A quick survey of design tendencies in these devices tells us something about what other kinds of presentation and watching these projectors facilitated. What emerges is something other than a singular machine or uniform model with an enshrined ideal. Rather, what will be charted here is a flexible and varied apparatus, one that was designed and used in full dialogue with forms and functions significantly expanded beyond Hollywood’s. Some projectors were highly specialized and made for research and analysis, replete with frame counters, precision machinery, and remote controls that enabled repeated stopping, starting, slowing, and reversing of a film. Some were rugged and designed as all-­purpose, all-­terrain, military machines decorated in army green or navy blue to signal patriotic duty and to assist in camouflage. Many others were manufactured for a mass consumer market, with minimal features operated by simple buttons and levers and proudly espousing low cost and high value. Still others were experiments, oddities, or artistic tools for creating multidimensional experiences, responsive environments, or industrial and public relations events. These devices integrated varied kinds of light projection with sound

8

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Introduction

technologies that maximized their versatility. There was no single portable projector; the imperative toward adaptability meant that projectors developed to serve many purposes and were consequently part of an evolving multimedia constellation that often had plug-in ports, creating links to other media: slide projectors, microphones, record players, radios, and amplifiers. Portable projectors were thus integral to evolving small-media ecosystems that evinced commitments to improvisation, adaptability, and shifting applications that—taken on the whole—transcended strict adherence to the ideals of a particularly pure medium or to the institutions that directly arose to uniquely support one (i.e., the so-called film industry). This sea of machines created a form of cinema that was resolutely not the one normalized by the commercial movie theater or by Hollywood. Consider this example. A 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a modern marvel of intermedial engineering: the phono-cine-radio-recordograph” (figure 2).11 The device merged a phonograph, radio, amplifier, sound film projector, and screen. It could record sounds but also play them, summoning them from shellac records or capturing them from the air. It could play a film on a small screen that sat atop the device, perched like a proud ornament in the center of the hulking console. Still years before television had proven itself commercially viable, the phono-cine-recordograph promised a highly integrated home entertainment unit, which the magazine dubbed “concentrated entertainment” for its ability to bring sounds and images together in one magnificent media machine. The sizable device also offered media storage and a host of input ports. Even at this size and multifunctionality, further adaptability was anticipated. Straining commonsense definitions of portability, the recordo-graph weighed in at eight hundred pounds, and it took an amateur radio enthusiast a year to design and build it in his basement. The machine might best be thought of as amateurism gone awry, fanatical tinkering, or perhaps even science fiction. Yet there it was in a mass-circulated, do-it-yourself magazine that promulgated the goal of explaining “how the world works,” the publication’s motto, to its readers. The projector appeared alongside ads for water-going pontoon bikes and tips for training gentlemanly dogs. It would be an odd one-off if it weren’t for the fact that other similar devices, fashioned for aspiring showmen, were being engineered and sold during the same period. The Victor 40, announced two years earlier by the Victor Animatograph Company, provides another such example (figure 3). Known as the “Add-a-Unit,” in production from 1939 until 1947, the projector similarly espoused a devout multimedia modularity. It could be purchased with a

Introduction    /    9

figure 2.  The portability of film projection invited all manner of tinkering and jerry-­rigging of media technologies, which also served to demonstrate the hybridity and intermedial possibilities of consumer-­grade media technologies. Here a film projector became integral to a complex, multifunctional home entertainment system decades before such things were a practical reality. “Concentrated Entertainment,” Popular Mechanics 75, no. 6 (June 1941): 135.

record player, a radio, a microphone, a sound-­on-­disk recording unit, multiple speakers, and an auxiliary amplifier. The device invited users to create their own live or recorded soundtracks, to turn the volume up or down, or to make the image bigger or smaller. The company claimed that the projector played at different speeds and could be stopped in order to project a single film frame in suspended form. A portable screen, placed opposite to the projector, provided a stage for an unfolding show. Sold as an adaptable machine for public presentations and performances, the projector operated as a kind of base unit, one built to be moved, carried, and connected to other media machines, spaces, and uses. Unlike the bulky phono-­cine-­ radio-­recordo-­graph mentioned above, and more like other portable screens and projectors of its day, the Victor 40 came in a case integral to its design. A sturdy handle allowed it to be carried by a would-­be projectionist with

figure 3.  The “Add-­A-­Unit” was a media ensemble, modular and adaptable to a range of uses. The projector was a kind of base unit, to be completed or made whole by adding other devices to it. Advertisement of the Victor Animatograph “Victor 40” “Leadership: Victor 16mm Add+A+Unit Series 40” [sales pamphlet], August 1940. Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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Introduction

figure 4. Kodascope Library Unit. These early home film units exemplify efforts to harmonize film technology with domestic décor. Note here that the projector is pictured in operation from behind a small, integrated screen. Rear projection devices helped to ensure that home screens yielded legible images in spaces that might not have room for a conventionally mounted screen or ideal, fully darkened lighting scenarios. The Catalog of Eastman Home Movie Equipment (n.d., circa 1930): 20.

ease. These multimedia units were widely advertised and available, inserting the projector into a whole, if aspirational, media ensemble. Portability and multimedia modularity presented opportunities for hybridity and adaptability but also created other kinds of challenges. As they operated in very different contexts, it was important that these machines fit well with their environments. Thus, in addition to offering multiple functionality, from the 1920s onward, these devices arrived in varied styles. Each of the components of the Victor 40, for example, were similarly finished so that they looked good as a media set. In an effort to create a domestic market, projectors were sold to sit atop desks and side tables and were often pictured beside books. Screens that might otherwise seem unsightly in a middle-class home were collapsible and could be easily tucked away in a closet or perhaps concealed by a tapestry. Some projectors, like the Kodascope Library Unit marketed in the second half of the 1920s, came inside handsome furniture units, replete with storage for the growing home film library (figure 4). Such consoles emulated early phonograph and

Introduction    /    13 radio design, anticipating the hi-­fi units and television sets of the 1950s.12 Here the film apparatus became domestic furniture, implicated in family rituals and ideals of good taste. The home was understood early on by film equipment manufacturers as an important market. Yet, equally important, by the late 1930s, manufacturers actively created and marketed projectors as retail displays, automated information kiosks, museum exhibits, classroom tools, office machines, and industrial communication aids.13 Sometimes these devices looked like other machines, streamlined and metallic. Others, housed in ornate wooden consoles, resembled elegant display vitrines, like those in museums or shop windows. Similar devices also appeared in train stations, bars, and restaurants throughout the 1930s and 1940s, playing musical shorts, or what would decades later be called music videos.14 Some projectors operated like miniaturized and automated sales pitches, with looped product display films hanging from ceilings in department stores or sitting atop checkout counters. This variety of locations required that projectors accommodate spaces of different sizes and shapes, with multiple kinds of lighting. Projectors came with accessories that helped them further adapt. For instance, Kodak marketed its Kodascope L projector in the 1930s as “tailor made” for any space (figure 5).15 The device could be purchased with a selection of lenses and bulbs, placed closer to or farther away from the screen, and operated at different levels of brightness and in wide or narrow, big or small spaces. Kodak advertised “big pictures, short throws” in the (home) library as well as “extra-­size pictures and full brilliance in church rooms, auditoriums, or at the club.”16 It was a machine capable of bespoke operation. Portable devices also could be purchased with an assortment of projector-­screen combinations. Some operated conventionally with a projector in front of the screen; still others inverted this relationship, placing the projector behind the screen. Taking various descriptors such as “rear projection” or “daylight” projection, these devices limited the shifting effects of ambient, artificial, and ever-­changing natural light on projection, increasing the utility and adaptability of film in different spaces (desktops, department stores, train stations, airfields) at any time, indoors and out.17 Other principles also subtended many portable projectors. “Self-­ operation” was a primary feature, differentiating them from the professionalized apparatus so deeply rooted at the picture house. They worked by turning knobs and levers that were labeled and sized for ease of use by untrained projectionists, inviting manipulation, tinkering, and a degree of agency over projected images and amplified sounds. The principle of self-­ operation was not only about enabling individuals but also about servicing

figure 5.  Adapting to many differently sized, shaped, and lit spaces was a consistent design imperative for consumer-­and business-­grade projectors. “Kodascope L” [advertisement], Moviemakers 1935 (January): 26–27.

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16

/

Introduction

large institutions with expansive needs predicated on effectiveness and efficiency. The American military, for instance, issued operating protocols for portable projectors during the war that not only maximized simplicity of operation, but also emphasized reliability. The armed forces sought a projector that could play steadily and consistently, withstanding near-constant use. Far more than consumerist convenience, quickly training soldiers to operate film projectors that could be easily set up, maintained, and repaired became a pressing wartime need. Movies were regularly shown by the military as a means to train the enlisted, to increase their morale, to speed along their healing, and to help prepare and repair their minds, inevitably affected by the traumas of war.18 These very same machines also became tools of military strategy, munitions research, and basic intra-organizational communication. Portable projectors were essential to military operations. In this concrete sense, films, and the machines they played on, became crucial instruments of war. Ease of use and reliability of operation were far more than advertising slogans; they were imperatives of global consequence put in service of unprecedented, technologically advanced, industrialized war efforts. Claims to self-operation also applied to the common feature of connected microphones, which combined image amplification with voice amplification, layering live accompaniment and prerecorded imagery. Simple plugn-play operations, toggle switches, and volume-control knobs helped to facilitate this process. Convenience and utility included the adaptability that live commentary implied, potentially reshaping every projection with scripted or spontaneous instructions, exposition, translation, and sound effects. Portable projectors maintained a complex relationship to sound devices in general. They were also connected to phonographs, and, after World War II, some were equipped with magnetic sound-recording devices that allowed users to orchestrate or add a range of recorded audio complements and voiceovers to film prints.19 This recordable and rerecordable sound function (a kind of making and remaking) became an aspect of what a film was, prolonging its useful life and performative capacity, reconceptualizing any given movie as incomplete and transformable, one part of some other presentation or application. As an example, during the 1950s, Kodak advertised its magnetic projector as a near-universal translator: the perfect business machine (figure 6). Cosmopolitan and rugged, multifunctional, multilingual, and highly adaptive, the Pageant was marketed as essential to “public relations, sales promotion, training, research reports, stock holder presentations.” According to Kodak, “school and church” found the machine “equally valuable.” Such advertising techniques and uses of the

Introduction    /    17

figure 6.  Here the projector is a versatile, muscular, and also cosmopolitan machine, capable of recording, rerecording, translating, and ever-­expanding operations. “Kodascope Pageant Magnetic-­Optical 16mm Sound Projector,” Business Screen 18, no. 8 (1957): 49.

film projector tell us something about how projectors were being articulated to American industrial and business practices, as well as to American cultural institutions: adaptability and utility helped to make the controlled amplification of light, sound, and movement both familiar and essential.20 The projector’s adaptability took many forms. Kodak’s Pageant ran at several speeds, which allowed for showing films at their intended (default) speed while also permitting projection at other speeds to accommodate additional purposes. For instance, a film might be sped up for comedic effect. The projector had optical and magnetic sound capacity that enabled it to play silent films and conventionally recorded sound films (optical), as well as to record, erase, and rerecord sound tracks over a film print (magnetic).

18

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Introduction

Practically, this machine’s designers had the useful film library in mind, one that throughout midcentury held an increasing number and variety of films to accommodate changing applications and audiences. Devices like the Pageant helped to adapt films to shifting demands throughout their life cycle. Magnetic projectors, specifically, were new technologies in the 1950s. User-oriented and predicated on an ever-changing film text, they invited active relationships with media and a dynamic understanding of film use. Programmability, a key affordance of portable projectors, was only a starting point to projection scenarios that blended showing, making, and remaking. These machines, in particular, were part of a technological economy that brokered in newness, agency, and a degree of control over any given film, which here included altering and repurposing sounds in order to transform previously recorded titles.21 Such devices remind us that, in the most basic sense, portable projectors were also—for a good deal of their history—sound machines. The earliest portable projectors did not have built-in sound capacities. During the 1930s and 1940s, projectors rapidly adopted electro-acoustic playback and amplification functions.22 In the 1950s, they further integrated postwar innovations in magnetic sound technologies. Throughout, radio and more so phonographs populated the imagery of portable film performance. From as early as the 1930s, projectors were occasionally even marketed as standalone sound machines, engineered and sold as public address systems or as suppliers of ambient background sound or music to fill in transitions for other kinds of performances and presentations. And, as important as sound was for portable projectors, silent-only film projectors continued to be sold even up until the so-called video era of the 1980s, complicating easy narratives about the American silent-film era ending and the sound-era beginning in the late 1920s.23 These facets of media history will be developed in the chapters that follow. For the moment, take note: portable projectors upend received timelines for histories of film technology, form, function, and use. The fact that portable projectors achieved critical mass in the 1950s provides another view of a decade perceived as one in which television dominated and theatrical commercial cinema declined from its postwar heights. Everyday Movies charts the conditions in which this other kind of cinema became a common form of midcentury media, alongside but distinct from theatrical moviegoing and also from the one-way broadcast flows of television. It notes key developments in other media, as well as media industries, in particular the one we call Hollywood. It also enacts a time line with its own key markers. In charting the rise of portable projectors, it is crucial to

Introduction    /    19 note that the spread of these devices should in no way be considered as yet another sign of Hollywood’s decline or as a radical rejection of its commercial logics. Of course, there was occasional objection by exhibitors to what they termed “free shows” of 16 mm film prints, whether those licensed by the studios or simply those made by the thousands of other film production entities in operation at midcentury. Similar outcries were heard over “jack-­ rabbit” shows—a term used to name rapidly set up illegal projections of bootlegged Hollywood films shown on portable projectors, what today we would call pop-­up showmanship or perhaps pirate performances. Despite the inevitable disputes over intellectual property, performance rights, and just plain old competition for film viewers, this book contends that the rise of these devices should first be understood as the emergence of a shared technological commonsense that called for the normalization of moving images across spheres—a process that became possible within the workings of the film industry itself. These projectors came out of the labs, organizations, and technological ferment that Hollywood nurtured and needed to thrive. While those who designed, sold, and used portable projectors rejected the constraints of big-­budget narrative cinema, advanced technologies of presentation, controlled copies, and regimented shows, they also worked determinedly to expand the technological reach of film in the broadest sense, ensuring that projected images and sounds became integral to twentieth-­century life in both big and small iterations. Like early histories of home video, portable projectors were somewhat at odds with established media practices as they loosened Hollywood’s control of film circulation and viewing. This new infrastructure can then be functionally explained through two broad frameworks. First, a new set of protocols and legal agreements had to be struck to effectively build a bridge from settled practices to new systems of licensing and presenting films previously intended for movie theaters.24 Second, the unique capacities of portable projectors also worked to diversify and expand the forms and functions of moving images and sounds in the most foundational sense, growing an area of film activity far removed from Hollywood’s primary business model. Everyday Movies dwells largely on this latter field of media change, asserting that this path reveals the ways in which film viewing became normalized and entrenched within an unfolding and layered media ecology at midcentury. This book uses portable projectors and their small screens as a thread for weaving together a very different kind of cinema than the one enshrined in film history. Specifically, it reframes the historical dynamics of ­cinema before and up to midcentury to include the place of portability in our

20

/

Introduction

understanding of film’s apparatus. Historians of early cinema have plainly demonstrated that the first film cameras and projectors were de facto lacking any kind of permanent home and, hence, were intended to be moved. They grew from and continued a century-long set of practices predicated on itinerant and techno-human hybrid performances using a range of optical devices, illumination sources, and projection practices: phantasmagoria, panoramas, shadow puppetry, lantern shows, illustrated lectures, among many others.25 Yet the specifics of what constituted portability changed as the technologies and institutions of film grew to yield something that is conventionally referred to as “cinema.” Scholars of early cinema tend to identify the evolution of particular qualities like narrative films, stable production practices, regularized exhibition methods and venues, and cultural respectability as key to the evolution of a wily technical innovation into something recognizable, sustainable, and enduring, and with a name: cinema.26 Most film histories presume that portability and the traveling shows it supported preceded such transformations and dwindled as the film industry rose.27 However, this book shows that portability and various forms of itinerancy, informality, and improvisation have endured and indeed grown throughout film history alongside well-charted other forms of settlement. Institutionally, the primary period under investigation is usually considered to be relatively stable in the history of American cinema and is generally known as Hollywood’s classical era.28 During this period, the American film industry matured stylistically and absorbed significant technological change (synchronized sound, color film, gigantic screens). It successfully managed labor unrest, important particularly during the 1930s. The studios had also sparred with persistent regulatory actions that emanated from many sides. This included negotiating with state, municipal, and other groups committed to exercising a degree of moralizing control over American cinema, in other words, “censorship.” It also entailed staving off federal oversight of Hollywood’s anticompetitive business practices.29 With television on the horizon, the American film industry exited the war years strong. Box office was record setting. Its position was further buttressed by a legacy of patriotic service earned through its wartime efforts. The studios had supplied films to the American military, provided talent and resources to military and government filmmaking efforts, and adapted their own commercial films to take clear patriotic stands on American heroism and military might. However, two key postwar tremors complicated Hollywood’s operations. The first was the Paramount Decree of 1948, which broke up the studio oligopolies and ordered the separation of production and distribution of films from their exhibition. In short, studios

Introduction    /    21 were forced to sell off their movie theaters. Second was the aforementioned rise of television, frequently blamed for the decline in film attendance throughout the 1950s.30 The analysis that follows adds a layer to the tectonic reshaping of American cinema by framing the growth of portable projectors as a largely uncharted media substrate, one that demonstrates film’s ascendance rather than decline throughout midcentury. These new and proliferating sites of moving-­image performance were not necessarily architecturally grand or technologically magisterial. They did not immediately benefit from Hollywood’s ballyhoo or the machinations of a big show; they frequently lacked the glamor of stars, the anticipation of a premiere, or the escape of a matinee. They performed the seemingly humble task of enabling the performance of small images during a period when projected film images are best known in the United States as notably large and spectacular. Widescreen wonders like This Is Cinerama (1952) and the epic blockbusters that followed such as Ben Hur (1959), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were big-­budget, technologically advanced films that won countless awards, scored big at the box office, and became markers of industry bravado.31 In contrast, the films that resulted from this other network were comparably small in many senses: simple stories, quotidian subjects, low-­ tech, miniscule budgets, micro-­audiences. While many histories of film technology tend to be undergirded by narratives that chart increased realism and improved, seamless effects, the emergent technologies discussed in Everyday Movies were less fueled by the imperatives of immersion, illusion, or advanced stereophonic sounds. Instead, they thrived on principles of control, programmability, and access, deliberately forgoing those very innovations transforming the big screen.32 The portable apparatus struck another kind of technological bargain. For instance, while some portable projectors were occasionally hidden in consoles and behind walls, they were just as often operated in the space shared with audience and screen, disavowing the deep investments by Hollywood in an invisible or hidden presentation apparatus. Clicking and clacking became a normalized part of the small-­film show, and the diminutive images tended to be comparatively grainy and dim. Poor audio quality remained a persistent complaint. The machines often broke down or ran prints that were damaged or selectively worn. Image degradation was a common occurrence with favorite scenes, which were often played over and over, causing frequent disappointment on the part of subsequent viewers who had to make-­do with extra scratches, breakage, and perhaps warbled sound.33 A kind of imperfect cinema, this was akin to the videos described

22

/

Introduction

by Brian Larkin, for whom degraded images and sounds are not judged to be flaws per se but are seen as familiar and unavoidable features of the viewing experience.34 Similar to what Lucas Hilderbrand has written about home video, these were media forms in which access was prized and for which degradation and imperfection were common characteristics, fully accepted, and incorporated into their aesthetics and the practices that developed around them.35

Conceptualizing Portabilities Compared to the cognate and more contemporary term mobility, with its promises of global networks, cloud storage, and instantaneous digital data, the term portability can seem a bit quaint. Yet its persistence in media history—and in our media present—tells us something about portability’s enduring relevance for thinking through and about our media. I understand media portability firstly in the commonsense way of referring to the quality of being physically moveable, a potential for temporary or changing locations, and not dependent on any singular, stationary architectural structure. In addition, while all of the examples of portable devices that I discuss are considered analogue, arising before digital networks were a widespread reality, portability here also refers to what has been called “signal traffic,” the movement of media content across complex infrastructures and media formats.36 Following this, portable film projection can be conceived of as a set of technologies that enabled the convergence of images and often sounds that traveled along multiple routes, by varied means, and were implicated in a range of performance scenarios long before the affordances of video or digital technologies. Concretely, many portable projectors were highly ported—with input plugs for additional devices (radios, phonographs, microphones)—to complement or augment the films that played. So, in addition to the physical movement of films and projectors, these devices also require grappling with new ways to think about content, which often combined different methods of recording, delivery, and presentation. While a good deal of this content was secured and traveled on film stock, it is also undeniably true that these machines were often made for connectivity and interoperability with cognate machines. Thus, the term portability at times parlays this dual sense, both a thing that moves and adapts, and a port, a site for movement and transference of media signals, a potentially dynamic convergence of sound and image that disavowed any singular commitment to anything that remotely resembled media purity.

Introduction    /    23 Layering onto these technological affordances are also the cultural, imaginative, and ideational dynamics required to comprehend media as historical phenomena. This includes not only what such projectors did, and how these things were understood, but also what they were thought to aspire to, what their capacities were imagined to be. Throughout this book, portability (the capacity to move a thing) and projectability (the capacity to enlarge an image, illuminate a screen, and amplify a sound) are assumed to be historical, enduring, and significant technological facts of film throughout the twentieth century. What follows also asserts that media devices are not only functional things but also a set of powerful capacities. There is a paradigmatic precedent for this historiographical approach in the work of Walter Benjamin. And, to be sure, any serious consideration of portability and specifically projectability as a capacity of film cannot be disentangled from the more familiar and foundational ability to mechanically reproduce images and sounds, so powerfully discussed in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”37 For Benjamin, reproducibility is a formative technological condition, a capacity that existed across many media: photography, print, phonography, and cinema. While Benjamin focused on this immanent capacity of media, he fully recognized that by 1935 this capacity was also a fact, most fully evident in his discussion of lithography, a nineteenth-­century print technology that enabled the mass reproduction of words and images. It forever changed the meaning of traditional concepts of art, particularly those of singularity, uniqueness, and aura.38 That said, reproducibility—rather than reproduction—referenced an immanent capacity, an idea, a potential that itself suggested unique circumstances and media with seismic possibilities. Both fact and immanent capacity worked together to create what Benjamin theorized was a condition of modern life. Building on this basic commitment to thinking about media as sociotechnical capacities as well as historical realities, Everyday Movies charts the place of portable film projection in American cultural life. It maps and discusses particular devices and in doing so traces a particular historical capacity to project—that is, to amplify, perform, enlarge, and illuminate images, transforming spaces with reproducible moving images and sounds. Treating portability and projection as historical categories entails accepting that they are both to a degree relative and somewhat elastic concepts that changed in relation to technological, discursive, and institutional contexts. The dynamics of projection differed dramatically throughout the twentieth century, encompassing notable variations in scale, intensity, and function. Likewise, portability was not an immanent or inevitable technological quality; it evolved unevenly and at different stages of cultural,

24

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Introduction

technological, and political history. In many instances, portability had to be sold to us. For instance, Kodak labored for years, early in the twentieth century, to transform photography into a quotidian practice, partly by celebrating the camera’s portability. Building on the device’s functionality as a professional apparatus and also a special-occasion gadget (to be tucked away in a closet), Kodak normalized picture taking and its cameras through elaborate marketing and public relations efforts, resulting infamously in the idea of photography as a “point-and-shoot” convenience. As early as 1895, the company offered a “Pocket Kodak,” with campaigns rolled out over the subsequent decades encouraging people to think about their cameras whenever they moved about. In 1908 the company implored the American public to: “Take a Kodak with you.” There was no particular destination or event specified. What they were selling was a new kind of disposition in the world, one that entailed carrying a camera wherever you went. Kodak should go too!39 To ease people into this, Kodak designed pink, blue, and leather-bound devices to match handbags and suit jackets, with advertisements that featured boys waiting at train stations and girls shopping in the city holding cameras. These were not just picture-taking devices but little optical-mechanical wonders interwoven with our increasingly mobile, modern selves that in Kodak’s eyes inhabited a world reconceptualized as eminently and perpetually photographable.40 Taking pictures is but one well-known function of a portable media device. Almost half a century after Kodak’s efforts, RCA commissioned studies in the 1940s to pursue what was then a perplexing proposition: would anyone ever want to listen to music while walking? Listening and walking? It seemed to some sheer lunacy. If not, then what would a portable radio look like? How would it be carried? The resulting discussion shifted radio away from the tabletop and console models for living room use and toward a more embodied, personal sound machine that went with us in the world. This became a widespread reality throughout the 1950s with the rise of lightweight transistor radios.41 So some media began as highly stationary or immobile and then grew legs. Still others have been portable in a physical sense for centuries, like most printed books or maps. Of course, these same objects might become categorically unportable as they age and their value transforms over time. Consider the forty-nine remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible, historically important as a powerful consort between Christianity and technology. Hundreds of years ago, a new print industry began to reproduce the Bible using moveable typeface (printing press), making sacred texts and their interpretation available beyond elite church enclaves and purchasable at first by wealthy buyers,

Introduction    /    25 and then eventually by many. Today, the first mechanically reproduced Bible is no longer a living experiment in radical accessibility but is instead a priceless auratic object, housed in rare books collections in libraries, museums, and archives with highly limited access and climate-­controlled protection. It has, in a sense, been re-­sacralized. Or, think about a painting like the Mona Lisa, which is relatively small (thirty by twenty-­one inches) and light in weight yet fundamentally immovable. The diminutive portrait defies known systems of monetary value and as such is encumbered by complex insurance regimes. It is further weighed down by a building (Louvre), an institutional apparatus (museum), and national pride. More concretely, the painting has also been housed in a frame and security box that weighs roughly two hundred pounds. Protocols and practices predicated on scarcity and uniqueness provide an instructive counterpoint to any simple conceptualization of portability as progressive or democratic. Lisa Gitelman argues that to think of media as historical subjects entails tending to their “protocols and practices”—that is, the shifting rules and conventions that shape not only the hardware but also the applications, aesthetics, goals, and rituals of media conceived as cultural and social phenomena.42 Using Gitelman, we can also think about portable media as clusters of technologies, audio and visual content, practices, and also rules and procedures issued by institutions. Most important here is to recognize that portability is not simply a physical property or an immanent feature. It is inescapably historical, made and remade within conditions that are never simply the result of human agency or technologically determinist forces but also the social and cultural factors that make specific media meaningful. This book strives to identify and discuss what protocols and practices enabled and shaped the spread of small portable projectors, attending to the institutional and cultural dynamics in which moving-­image portability became legible across a differentiated field. Addressing portable projectors as separate from lightweight and hand-­ held cameras will seem unorthodox to those familiar with the history of small-­gauge cinema, which by and large has focused on marginalized and minoritarian modes of filmmaking. To be sure, portable cameras have been significant enablers of exceptional and important film movements. Amateur, home movie, experimental, and political filmmaking were each linked in one way or another to the capacities of lightweight cameras as early as the 1920s.43 For decades these gauges have inspired numerous manifestoes, declaring small film machines essential tools in a plethora of urgent social, artistic, and political projects.44 The specific ideals of the 16 mm handheld camera, with its romantic, artisanal connotations of a corporate machine

26

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Introduction

turned into an artist’s tool made a lasting impact and are typified by Alexandre Astruc’s canonical essay “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: A Caméra Stylo,” first published in 1948.45 In this essay, Astruc asserts that in the immediate postwar period, film was becoming a new and important language. Throughout the 1950s, innovative and distinct film languages did emerge, among them movements of nonfictional and documentary cinema, most notably direct cinema and cinéma vérité, which turned lightweight camera and sound recording equipment into a virtue of bottom-up, authentic, and immediate storytelling.46 Small-gauge cameras were also instrumental in the United States for the rise of New American and underground cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, supported by such journals as Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture, multimedia art publications like Aspen, and the art practices of figures like Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol, and Ken Jacobs, as well as the multimedia artists working under the rubric of the Fluxus movement, such as Nam Jun Paik and Yoko Ono.47 For all of these artists and their movements, 16 mm and 8 mm film technologies played indispensible roles. Many additional artists, some of whom can be grouped under the rubric of expanded cinema, a term coined by Gene Youngblood, sought to combine experimental forms with new kinds of environmental film projection, undergirded by new visions of global villages and interconnected, sometimes cosmic, consciousness.48 Collectively, such modes rejected the commercial theater categorically and instead proposed that cinema should come in all shapes and sizes, and be everywhere. The anti-Hollywood ideals of small-gauge film work were further secured with Lenny Lipton’s influential 1972 book Independent Filmmaking, which inspired a generation of would-be filmmakers looking back and ahead to a world torn asunder by what was seen as a radical new means of expression and media making, one that preceded but also paralleled the rise of the camcorder.49 Much like the preceding experimental modes, independent filmmaking forcefully rejected corporate, industrial models. Small technologies of cinema helped to create new ecosystems of film and media art, playing a particularly influential role in the so-called art world. This fact has been addressed in a recent and sizable body of scholarship with key works by Ji-Hoon Kim, Noam Elcott, Pavle Levi, Andrew Uroskie, and Erika Balsom.50 These scholars, among others, have emphasized the ways in which art has served as a disarticulating force, critical of dominant modes of theatrical cinema and a homeostatic, normative apparatus.51 Such work taps into artistic and intellectual avant-gardes as a vital family of ideas and practices that improve our understanding of cinema’s capacities beyond the movie theater.

Introduction    /    27 Everyday Movies similarly pursues histories of an expanded film apparatus. However, it does so by considering a somewhat obscured thread of what visionaries like Astruc were calling forth. In addition to declaring that small-­gauge film technologies were becoming a new kind of art and language, Astruc also predicted that “everyone will possess a projector” and that a vast array of films would be available: literary criticism, history, mathematics, science.52 Astruc’s caméra-­stylo was intimately connected to a correlate and essential viewing apparatus, one that was widely available, multifunctional, and easy to use. Astruc hence not only connected the avant-­garde filmmaker to a radical new language but also to a common sense about affordable, everyday film projection. His was a blossoming cluster of ideas about what projected moving images could do and where they could be found, including the basic assertion that radical films and experimental films also needed to be seen and not only made. Indeed, such calls can be heard throughout film and media history and precede Astruc, populating the writing of film theorists, artists, critics, and cinephiles, as well as community organizers, educators, amateurs, engineers, and industrialists of the 1920s and 1930s. Long before the war, key figures in the documentary movement, such as John Grierson, declared in 1935: “As I see it, the future of the cinema may not be in the cinema at all.”53 Publishing in modernist journals like Close Up, amateur magazines such as Movie Makers, and middlebrow publications such as the American National Board of Review Magazine, poets such as H.D. and socialist activists such as Harry Alan Potamkin, issued similar calls.54 Some were primarily motivated by the desire to experience films that more closely reflected or even stimulated their political or aesthetic avant-­gardism. Some simply wanted to see movies they chose to see and could project under conditions of their own design. Others wanted to diversify filmmaking, rightly reasoning that to stimulate the evolution of an art form or realize better movies, one needed to be able to view them and create an environment conducive to study, discussion, and debate.55 The chapters that follow take up these calls and pursue the implications of portable film projection and its dynamics, demonstrating that this discussion has in fact been central to cinema’s long history as a dispersed cultural form. In doing so, I suggest that what Astruc called “avant-­garde” film in 1948 and what came to be called “experimental,” “underground,” and “expanded” film in subsequent decades were themselves appropriations and reformulations of portability’s growing and widespread functions and capacities across more mundane spheres. As such, this book details parallel and preceding efforts to open up what film and film technologies could be, documenting partly

28

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Introduction

what they have, in fact, undeniably been. Under the banner of experiment and expansion, the chapters in this book explore such phenomena but in more commonplace and broadly influential venues and contexts than those of the avant-garde. Following portable projectors entails recognizing that such machines were easily adapted to multiple purposes and that aspects of their avant-gardist operations are sometimes difficult to disentangle from their innovative but also workaday-functions in highly mainstream and institutional contexts. Self-operation and programmability are fundamental capacities ushered in by portable projectors during the period under examination. But rather than explore the ways in which these new machines fed a romanticized individualism or even countercultural programming ethos radically opposed to the faceless mass commercial Hollywood cinema, Everyday Movies focuses on the ways in which the projector itself was the product of a complex film and technology industry. Projectors were modern machines, intimately connected to the rise of the American military, government propaganda, and industrial media and display practices, as well as to other technologies, including electrical appliances and mantras of convenience and automation. Projectors were quickly put to use by institutions and organizations that effectively normalized the place of moving images in realms of work, business, research, government, national security, and war. This story is not meant to utterly upend the democratic importance of portable media machines and the ways they have been put to alternative artistic and critical ends. But what follows does demonstrate the ways in which principles of adaptability and the apparatus’s elasticity yielded a plethora of uses, including those linked to authoritative, centralized, and powerful organizations and institutions.

Film as Media Thinking about the projector as a performance tool, a display mechanism, a playback machine, a decompressor of content, an image-enlarger, a sound amplifier, a recording device, and an audiovisual interface carries far richer interpretive possibilities than thinking about it as the poor cousin of the movie theater. It also helps us to explain more about why film has long mattered across many realms of cultural and institutional activity. Critically shifting how we conceptualize what a projector is and does opens a window to a wider array of other media devices that performed the work of storing, decompressing, and yielding content, as well as interfacing with users, viewers, and analysts. Drawing on innovations in precision mechanics,

Introduction    /    29 chemistry, optics, and electrical and eventually acoustic and magnetic engineering, projectors catalyzed alternate ways of presenting recorded images and sounds, converting celluloid and its otherwise indecipherable inscriptions into visible and audible content, usable data, productive lessons, and persuasive messaging. In doing so they shaped performance and presentation for audiences of various sizes, replaying prerecorded content but also often transforming that content into hybrid scenarios, including live accompaniment, conversation, and lectures. Many projectors were dynamic media machines. They facilitated new patterns of circulation, programming, borrowing, and showing that could completely rework the logics or intentions of a primary filmmaker, producer, or distributor. Beyond controlling or simply adjusting the speed, brightness, volume, and size of an image, many projectors empowered you to stop a film and watch it again and again, creating the conditions for widespread practices that are common sense today, but then were not.56 Consider the difference between extensive viewing (seeing many titles) and intensive viewing (seeing one title many times). Both were made more possible for moving images with the spread of portable projectors. These functions had analogies in other media devices, in particular books and phonographs, which changed reading and listening respectively. Both led to libraries of content that increased access, enabling repetition and engagement at different intervals and intensities. Contrary to portable film scenarios, the commercial, theatrical conditions of film viewing were largely subordinated to the logics of professional making, distribution, and programming: the latest films, the biggest stars, the largest audiences. Portable projectors created the conditions for a new kind of spectating, permitting repeat, slow, or close-­viewing in ways that were previously impossible for the vast majority of movie watchers.57 Recent scholarship has emphasized the shifting, provisional, and contingent aspects of media history, highlighting the problems created when a historically specific iteration of a medium is taken as an ahistorical or ontological necessity. To illustrate, it no longer makes sense to theorize television as essentially live or broadcast, because television today is nonsynchronous, archival, and increasingly digital.58 This project is built on the assumption that theatrical iterations of cinema were not absolute necessities or inevitable ideals. Rather, they are but one film format—albeit powerful and seductive. Portability groups together film machines that are missed when theaters are normatively presumed to be the primary and de facto setting for cinema. A foundational quality, portability conjoins several formats (16 mm, 8 mm, 9.5 mm) that have shared properties, distinguishing

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them from theatrical forms. Jonathan Sterne suggests that formats are specific iterations of broader media categories and as such can help us to better understand the technological, institutional, and cultural dynamics that convene to create specific technological iterations or coherences in history. 59 In this book, I assert that cinema is a term that could benefit from a little formatting in order to imbue our histories and theories of moving images with greater precision and acuity across time and geopolitical boundaries. In focusing on portable projectors, I am building on arguments about a broadened approach to cinema, treating it not as a singular and unchanging apparatus but rather as one that is iterative and that has achieved degrees of coherence at observable phases in history. That is, I join a growing chorus of scholars of film and media history who have productively disarticulated the seemingly coherent cinematic apparatus, mapping its many iterations across a widening array of social and cultural phenomena.60 Thus, what follows demonstrates another approach to a particularly widespread, enduring but unknown family of dispositifs that persisted across diverse locations, constituted by somewhat shifting assemblages of technologies and techniques. Portable devices were an especially influential confluence of protocols, practices, and specific institutional dynamics. Everyday Movies shows that the paradigms and practices of art have no monopoly on experimentation and innovation. Cinema’s apparatus has been disrupted, played with, and remade in venues that have heretofore gone underexamined and have thrived without art as a primary imperative. Underpinning this project most directly is the increasing body of scholarship that presupposes cinema’s appropriation by a host of institutions, in which it has been made useful in the service of diverse imperatives. A good deal of this work focuses on broader rubrics such as educational, governmental, scientific, medical, or industrial uses of film, examining these areas, their films, and the meanings and uses made of them.61 Everyday Movies contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the shared technical base that linked these seemingly irreconcilable areas and enabled this diversity of film form and function in the first place. More and more work about cinema beyond American borders is revealing multiple articulations, with movies happening in wide-ranging scenarios, aided and abetted by changing technological, cultural, and sociopolitical dynamics. Scholarship addressing Cuba, India, China, Africa, Thailand, and international bodies such as the United Nations, are informing us of the fact that American cinema’s dominant iteration as an industrial, theatrical form has obscured the multiplicity of ways in which moving images, sounds, and audiovisual texts have operated throughout their

Introduction    /    31 long and international history.62 Building on this insight, what follows asserts that the so-­called apparatus of cinema has always been played with, pushed against, and rearticulated on a shifting terrain of steady technological, institutional, and cultural change, even in its most dominant cultural contexts. This book examines the realms wherein cultural, industrial, and military imperatives worked to ensure the fundamental place of moving images in experimenting and expanding with the meaning and function of projected light, malleable images, and screened sounds in the United States. It asserts that the ability to see films, fundamentally changed by portable projectors, paved the ground for and normalized the place of programmable images and sounds in our contemporary everyday media ecosystems.

Key Terms and Methodological Notes As other scholars have observed, the idea that cinema can be understood as a singular apparatus, enshrined in what is referred to as “apparatus theory,” has flattened the historical dynamics of cinema specifically and projected images and sounds more generally. But so too have a whole series of other assumptions that have guided our understanding of the medium and its legacies. Among them and already mentioned is the place of theaters in histories of cinema, a place that was by no means simple.63 Scholarship produced recently has convincingly charted the importance and complexity of the movie theater.64 Yet this does not always serve our fullest assessment of cinema and media history, nor does it helps us to gain distance from the theater’s tenacious hold even on more basic terminology. For instance, consider the semantic slippage of the term cinema, which is often used to name a site, cultural text, and experience. Furthermore, the terms for a theater (the site) and the apparatus (camera, film, and viewing scenario) are frequently the same term: cinema. In North America, one “goes to the movies” as much as one “watches movies.” In the United Kingdom, you “go to the cinema” as much as “watch cinema.” Similar ambiguities exist in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, a point made by scholars as different as Lee Grieveson and Gabriele Pedullà.65 With recent changes in viewing conditions, many identify this as an outdated tendency; moving images today are watched across many locations and on many platforms. Of course, language is sticky. Such slippages persist nonetheless, having taken hold of the most basic terms we use to talk about film and its institutions as well as its histories. This book does not argue against the theater, its importance, its appeals, or its complexities. It does work, however, to

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denaturalize the theater as the de facto, enduring, and natural site of film across history and not just in the early or contemporary periods. Examining film projectors and the ways they have been configured and used requires attention to the limits of received terminology and basic concepts in film and media studies, some of which inevitably embody the biases of what we accept as common knowledge. For example, film exhibition is a foundational term that names a particular arm of the film industry and the site wherein a film-in-a-can turns into a social and often commercial event. Yet the same phrase is frequently used to name all manner of film performance, such that you exhibit films in a basement, on a boat, or at a battlefront, rather than “show” them or “present” them or just “run” them. Other media have their own words to indicate when they are operating: a radio or a television might be “turned on.” You might “play” music on a home stereo unit. In this book, I have worked to devise more precise ways of talking about the running of celluloid through a projector: film performance, film display, or just plain old projection. By and large, I will use the term film exhibition to refer to the commercial or professionalized programming of films in theaters or venues dedicated to showing film, wherein seeing films from beginning to end was part of a commercial transaction or a purposefully conceived show and was the primary purpose for gathering. Here the term film exhibition maintains a degree of formal intentionality. Throughout, I maintain that not all projection is best understood with the term exhibition. One of the interesting problems that results from the privileged place of theaters in film history is the awkward search for terms to name film phenomena that happened everywhere else. The term nontheatrical has persisted and is commonly used to name all manner of film types as well as performance venues that were not theaters. This unfortunate development has the odd effect of taking a term that was used in history by particular people or organizations to name something specific but then elevates it to a metahistorical category, and a confusing one at that. Does it refer to a genre of film? A location? A function? It also frames an overwhelming majoritarian cultural and technological development in the negative (nontheatrical) and as an aberrance, the inverse mirror of the idealized theatrical standard. It marks as an absence or nonentity what is in fact a plenitude. Overreliance on the term nontheatrical also burdens the emergent with the weight of what came before. It would be like calling a radio nonphonographic, or a cellphone nontelephonic, further mistaking a specific institutional and technological iteration for an ontological or transhistorical fact. At the same time, it naturalizes a particular hierarchy. Our language can easily obscure the adaptations and

Introduction    /    33 transformations of the things it seeks to name and thus perpetuate biases we should be critically identifying and assessing rather than simply reaffirming. It is essential that we find more productive terms to capture the diversity and persistence of film’s widespread formal innovations and uses as well as the implications of its iterative forms in a vast number of institutions, organizations, and projects. In this book, I will confine my use of the term non­theatrical to identify historically specific phenomena that were named as such by institutional actors and entities, usually to distinguish location, sponsoring agent, and type of film from Hollywood norms.66 Everyday Movies asserts that film has long been an iterative apparatus with coherences and disruptions that are historical and dynamic and that can be traced well beyond the darkened cave of the movie theater. It argues that as we assess the implications of this changing and shifting apparatus, we have much to gain by setting aside the normative and prescriptive ideal of what cinema could have or should have been. Rather, we can focus on what film actually has been. It takes up calls made by media historians such as Lisa Gitelman, who assert that media-­in-­history are best understood as shifting assemblages of technologies, protocols, and practices for which change is neither linear nor uniform through time and across contexts.67 Echoes can be heard in the writing of such scholars as William Uricchio, Thomas Elsaesser, Lynn Spigel, and Anna McCarthy, who ask us to tend to the multiplicities and hybridity in film and media history and to seek out the things we can learn by veering away from inherited linearities and toward underexamined phenomena that constitute film and media history.68 It does so in the spirit of capturing the complexity and power of film as a medium, as a family of formats, as a shifting assemblage of varying components, and as a technological and cultural form that has exercised significant influence on how meaning is made, how experiences are brokered, and how we see and hear. This book documents the relevance of this approach for both the past and present by examining an enlarged set of institutions and practices. In doing so, I argue that we are not only better able to comprehend the multiple paths that moving-­image technologies have traveled as pur­veyors of realism and immersive experiences, but to accept projectors as flexible tools persistently reimagined and instrumentalized toward a vast range of aesthetic, functional, and experiential modes. Everyday Movies adamantly inserts cinema history into media history, helping us to view the rhetorics of so-­called new media with more nuance and assisting us to better assess media change and settlement across analogue and digital worlds. Rather than foreground improvements in clarity, crispness, brightness, immersion, spectacle, or fidelity, the case studies that follow document

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the grainy, the dull, the dim, the scratchy, and often unpleasant audile distortion. The goal is not to celebrate these things but to demonstrate their determined place in media history, documenting the ways in which other qualities of cinema were deemed far more important than pristine aesthetics: ease of use; adaptability; affordability; access; programmability; durability; and control of speed, size, and volume. This is not a story that emphasizes newness or radical change but rather maps a technology—like many others—that emerged over decades and rose not on a single revolutionary manifesto but most dramatically through industrial and military need. Portable film projectors were devices that, unlike radio and television, you could fill with content and choose to play at a particular time and location. This involved film in a specific kind of programming and performance dynamic distinct from other contemporary so-called mass media. Many of the cases studies that I discuss here were intimately linked to institutions other than Hollywood, and exhibition and performance scenarios that only sometimes had the watching of movies as their primary purpose. More frequently, I analyze projections chosen to demonstrate industrial wonder, to display products, to service military operations, or to facilitate everyday media interfaces. Occasionally, I consider particular kinds of films that were very specific and perhaps short-lived: looped poster films, retail display films, airplane instrumentation records, mapping surveys, industrial exhibition films, interlude and ambient films. Some of these have links to more familiar genres like documentary, industrial and training films, and feature films that will also be addressed. Indeed, sometimes I examine applications of film stock that do not readily fall under the category of “film” and whose viewing would better be called reviewing, scanning, and glimpsing, rather than watching or spectating. Overall, the chapters focus on projectors and their capacities as playback machines, adaptable performance devices, and institutional tools, situating them within a broader film and media history. This project continues recent work documenting and theorizing the place of technologies in transforming the conditions under which films are seen, opening up dialogue about informal, gray, and black media ecologies in the United States before the rise of video. I am asserting alongside scholars of film and media exhibition and distribution that the ways in which films travel, circulate, and appear play an important role in why and how they are important. Expanded viewing apparatuses have not just shaped how audiovisual content moves but have also galvanized the making and circulation of a vast body of content. Such technological dynamics have therefore transfigured the functions and uses of moving images and

Introduction    /    35 sounds as well. That films could be shown and seen is clearly a basic precondition for films to be understood as practical and plausible and perhaps also compelling, expressive, and communicative forms. The printing press would have been significantly diminished as a force if its products could only be read in particular buildings or with the permission of particular institutions; wax cylinders or vinyl disks or magnetic tape became very different phenomena with the spread of affordable ways for people to make them audible. Recording and storage devices have no doubt played significant roles in all manner of historically significant change. Moreover, the ability to play back widely that which has been recorded and stored must equally be acknowledged as fundamental to understanding the aesthetic, social, and cultural impact of film as an expressive form, consumer gadget, or convenient device. The portable projector was an essential element of how moving images became more widely watchable and hence basic to mediated life.

Chapter Overview Everyday Movies focuses on the period from 1916 to 1958, the year that the federal government passed the National Defense Education Act. This legislation marks the point when portable film projectors (among many other small-­media technologies) gained clear recognition as powerful tools and were tasked with an important strategic Cold War function: educating American children in the name of national defense. After this, film and media secured a place as recognized instruments of learning, citizenship, nationalism, and security—all part of a high-­stakes and well-­funded political imperative at midcentury. Akin to contemporary calls to equip all children with their own laptop, enshrining portable projectors in high-­stakes public policy is a profoundly normalizing act. It punctuates decades of growth and catalyzed subsequent developments that no doubt future work will address. To chart this rise, chapter 1 traces the standardization of portability in relation to film projection by the technical wing of the American film industry and examines the debates and dynamics that informed those definitions. Chapter 2 explores the use of portable devices at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, situating film within the broader exhibition environment of the 1930s. Led by a new generation of public relations experts and industrial designers, it documents the evolution of industrial display and business and public relations films, and it unearths experiments with small and expanded film screens. Chapter 3 then addresses the American military and its rapid procurement and use of film projectors in response to its

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vast mobilization effort during World War II, mapping the normalization of filmmaking and film watching within a global, diversified, and notably powerful institution. This chapter demonstrates the plain alignment of film technologies with other industrial and military technologies as indices to advanced technological progress. Under the imperatives of the US military, film projectors became rugged fighting machines, enlisted not just for entertainment but for military needs. Modes of filmmaking and watching diversified and proliferated, many tethered to the exigencies of war and its techno-industrial transformation of everything from the benign, like enabling prayer or healing the sick, to the horrific, like dropping bombs. Chapter 4 then considers the postwar environment in which portable projectors (16  mm and 8  mm) became accessible and omnipresent gadgets, ascending alongside the rise of television and proliferating despite the decline of theatrical movie screens in the United States. In particular, chapter 4 illustrates some of the postwar euphoria that fueled the spread of film technologies in everyday life. The easy imbrications specifically of film projection with the electronic ethos we frequently associate with radio and television also rise to the fore. Lastly, this chapter describes three categories of film projectors, carving up the vast sea of millions that constituted the field of portable projection after the war: mass market projectors, analytic projectors, and magnetic projectors. While mass market projectors continued familiar discourses of convenience, ease of use, lightness of weight, and affordability, these other kinds of projectors embodied very different principles. Analytic projectors were precision machines largely created as time-motion devices, applied to specialized research and presentation scenarios, offering a high degree of control over the speed of image movement. Magnetic projectors afforded a projectionist the opportunity to play and also record synchronous (or nonsynchronous) sound with moving images. Thus, the projector became a tool of making and remaking, augmenting decades of complex sound dynamics that undergird the development of portable projectors. The epilogue provides a summary of the book’s primary arguments and insights, suggesting paths for future work. Everyday Movies unearths the relationships among film technologies and the broader cultural field of activities that made moving images into common components of expression, congregation, and interface with the world. The following chapters assert that portability is a foundational concept for film and media historiography that uncovers an enduring, visible, and formative category of film technology, filmmaking, and film viewing. It also reveals the proliferation, integration, and institutionalization of film into everyday media ecologies.

1. Engineering Portability The Rise of Suitcase Cinema Small wonder that a number of manufacturers, in their eagerness to meet the uncompromising public demand, are supplying portable projectors disguised as sample cases, lunch boxes and violin cases. What cannot be done with safety, according to official requirements, is always accomplished by stealth. Alexander Victor, “The Portable Projector: Its Present Status and Needs,” 1918

Few consider movie theaters as impediments to cinema’s vitality. Quite the contrary, the theater has long been the privileged and often idealized site for understanding the specificities of cinema, whether conceived as a mass medium, a popular commercial form, or as art.1 It occupies an essential place in histories of the growing and powerful film industry, changing leisure patterns, and aesthetic ideals. The centrality of the picture house is further demonstrated by its sometimes quiet but steady presence in theories of film that seek to assess the ways that projected moving images make us think, feel, desire, and experience.2 We often simply assume that throughout the twentieth century, movies happened in theaters. There are many good reasons for this. Movie theaters have long provided a powerful and dominant stage for the encounter between moving images and those who watch them; between an industry and its paying customers; between artists and their interlocutors. Yet I contend that the theater remains a rather curious institution, an unlikely flagship for a cultural form heralded as defiantly mobile, malleable, reproducible, and accessible. When compared to the venues that typify the “fine arts” such as the stately art museum or the grand opera house, movie theaters are indeed relatively affordable and predicated on the far more democratic ideals of an inclusive, polyglot, popular culture. Seen from the perspectives of print or sound cultures, the theater exercises a strangely tenacious restraint on the circulation, access, and use of moving images. It is, after all, an immobile, brick-­and-­mortar, professionalized venue that was precisely designed to direct and otherwise contain the wily logics of easily portable film prints. Theaters operate on 37

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fixed schedules and in specific locations. Management teams decide what will be shown and for how long. In contrast to the innumerable viewing scenarios that offer significant choice over not just when or what we watch but also how we watch, theaters have steadfastly hosted efforts to control or at least delimit the behavior of those watching. From today’s purview, the movie theater can easily seem like a weighty anachronism. Incongruous with the immobility of the movie theater, portability— while largely a neglected term—allows us to see the ways that many technological, legal, and cultural practices have come together to shape a very different kind of cinema. In the most general sense, the term indexes a paradigmatic quality of twentieth century media. Portability refers to a set of foundational capacities that transformed both recording and playback devices and thus affected the ways in which words, sounds, and images have been inscribed, stored, and then circulated and accessed. Portable media have undeniably had an impact on what are variously called reading, looking, listening, playing, and making.3 The case of portable film projection is but one example of this complex history. Focusing on portable projectors specifically enables us to discover cinema’s similarities to other media technologies, particularly those that severed making and inscription from watching and listening. Like the printing press and the distributive function of paper, or the television set and its electronic signals, camera, projector, and celluloid have endured as essential elements of a complex system whereby pictures of the world were made in one place and then traveled to various sites to be brought to life again by viewers, listeners, and often an audience. For films, this entailed special technical processes, including amplification, illumination, and enlargement, as well as techniques of performance, all transpiring somewhere other than the locations of initial recording and independent of the creative intentions of a camera operator or director. Making movies is one thing; showing them and watching them have persistently been part of dedicated presentation and viewing platforms. Highly varied interfaces or performance scenarios have long connected dispersed audiences to a multitude of technologically mediated encounters that might be entertaining, spectacular, wondrous, educational, governmental, or artistic; sometimes, they might be all of these at once. This chapter shows that as movie theaters rose to become the American film industry’s primary retail outpost, the ideals, practices, and technological capacities of a distinct and portable film-viewing apparatus persisted alongside the theater’s centrality and the vertically integrated business model adopted by the studios. Film projection technologies intended for use far beyond the movie theater were not primarily conceived as oppositional

Engineering Portability    /    39 to the theater; they emerged more as distinct and complementary formats. Moreover, the fact of cinema’s portability initially evolved not as part of a renegade, radical, anticorporate impetus or as a technological aberrance to a widely accepted natural technological ideal. Rather, it arose at the behest of a maturing industry, reconceived here not simply as the film studios but more broadly as the family of technological and industrial concerns that collectively supported cinema’s rise. Portability in film history has largely been discussed through the lens of minoritarian filmmaking—in particular, under the category of amateurism.4 Yet the association of small-­gauge technologies with amateur and hobbyist filmmaking has effectively distracted us from a far more important set of phenomena. If we reframe small-­gauge machines to align with a broader imperative to portability—in making and more importantly showing films—then we can see how the drive to create the technological conditions for this other kind of cinema was expansive and taking place in the light of day. Amateurism and hobbyism were but one part of this transformation toward crafting cinema technologies as everyday machines, integral to a new understanding about the use of moving images in business, military, industry, science, and more. In the early decades of the century, Hollywood’s engineers beheld a powerful vision of a dynamic, adaptable apparatus, amply evident in the bulletins and journals documenting their society’s first and subsequent meetings across the ensuing decades. This chapter will map its evolution and institutionalization within the film industry itself. By following the publications of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), we witness that a family of film technologies was not just being debated or manufactured but also imagined as a set of widening capacities, enlarging cinema’s applications and presence in proliferating sites. These technologies were not necessarily driven by— but did often mirror—demands from film theorists, activists, artists, civic or­ganizers, and amateurs, many of whom were also calling for an adaptable, self-­operated, nimble machine. This chapter maps the conditions in which the possibilities of portable projectors in the United States were debated and developed into enduring technological realities. It examines the discourses that shaped portable projectors’ technological and cultural capacities as they became standardized, normalized, and deeply institutionalized within the workings of the film business, capaciously conceived. How the term portable became meaningful and codified within the context of commercial cinema’s rise will be foregrounded. Here the seemingly oppositional model of theatrical film exhibition and the concurrent growth of sizable movie theaters will provide

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key contextual factors. Throughout, qualities such as lightness of weight, ease of use, adaptability, and control of the projected image will be shown to be primary factors in design, engineering, and marketing discourses pertaining to portability. But above all, and perhaps surprisingly, flammability is revealed as the most dangerous and hence instrumental of all variables. That is, “not catching fire” became a primary quality defining and enabling portability’s rise, differentiating it from the commercial movie theater. The long-standing threat of fire in theatrical scenarios also helps to distill cinema’s portable viewing apparatus from the swell of regulations that had evolved to govern the brick-and-mortar film show and to dictate where industry films could be shown: only in safe and sanctioned locations. Subtended not only by factors such as weight and size but also by chemical and electrical innovations, portability proved a powerful workaround for all manner of architectural and regulatory heft. The dangers of flammable nitrate film stock are familiar in film history. Fires feed cinema’s infamy. From its emergence and into the early 1950s, film stock, a type of celluloid, was comprised of volatile chemicals that were highly combustible. Though public and regulatory outcry over these dangers persisted for decades, the industry delayed the transition to nonflammable acetate stock until 1951. Many reasons for this were provided over the years, such as nitrate’s cost efficiencies and its superior quality compared to nonflammable alternatives. Nitrate proponents also frequently claimed it was perfectly safe if properly used: its risk, they argued, was worth its reward. Thus, for more than half a century, film fires posed a threat both to public safety and just about all other operations involving nitrate stock: filmmaking, film storage, film distribution and transport.5 This makes electrochemistry a defining feature not just of film’s technical qualities but also its sociocultural manifestations, as what was termed public safety became one of the primary strategic frameworks for regulating film performance. Theaters were natural settings for the rehearsal of these concerns given their permanent and visible status and their function as places of gathering. With regard to portability specifically, the threat of fire became especially significant as flammability was made more likely when film shows moved about and had to adapt to constantly changing and perhaps unpredictable projection environments that could involve poor ventilation or cramped spaces. An accessible and adaptable apparatus also invited a wider array of untrained operators, who might lack the adequate experience to ensure safety. The design imperative to make the projector smaller also led to the practical challenges of controlling the potential danger of heat inside the lamphouse. That is, the smaller that little metal box was, the

Engineering Portability    /    41 hotter it became. The hotter it ran, the more incendiary it was. Calls to make bigger and brighter images, requiring stronger and hence hotter bulbs, only exacerbated the problem. Demands to still the moving image presented a vexing challenge, given that this required holding a single illuminated film frame steady rather than moving it quickly in and out of the heat created by the process of projection. With nitrate this led quickly to one thing: fire. Movement was a bias of illuminated nitrate film stock, making motion safer than stasis. In order to chart the ways in which portability was defined and became a part of a surprisingly diverse and productive discussion about film technologies, this chapter focuses on the 1910s and 1920s as a critical period for the consolidation of lasting definitions and ideas about portability and projection. It examines the ways in which technical capacities interfaced with industrial, cultural, and aesthetic ones. What follows documents the ways in which portability was defined and standardized by the SMPE, examining the parallel development of small-­gauge, portable equipment alongside the contrasting growth in theater size and complexity. Big and small cinema evolved side by side as complementary products of industry consolidation, rationalization, and expansion. Far from an anti-­Hollywood proposition, portable film projectors, like their seeming opposite—the picture palace—signaled an effort to improve the experience and application of moving image technologies in general, and technologies of projection in particular. Such diversification benefitted Hollywood to a degree but more so the archipelago of companies that constituted its technical base. Portability can be understood here as an organizational principle and a growth imperative, one that would especially help to tap into vast, undiscovered markets. This imperative manifested both in the standardization of particular small-­gauge film systems and as a way of thinking about multiplying uses. Resonating with the fervor that typically accompanies so-­called new media, discourses about portable film projectors crystallized appeals to a diversifying set of purposes for cinema. Indeed, this would lead to more customers and to normalizing a new conception of modern life: moving images and sounds should be everyday, essential media.

The Roots of Portable Cinema Cinema was born portable, moving from showplace to stage to fair. As in many countries around the world, American cinema began as inexpensive public amusements and complements to other presentation and performance modes: educational lectures, industrial display, religious sermons.

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In one sense, it was the PowerPoint of its day. Itinerant showmen, traveling lecturers, and touring entertainment troupes frequently projected films. The machines and movies that constituted cinema’s earliest attractions had no single home and no dedicated architectural element integral to them. In the United States, it took a decade for devoted cinema spaces to open up. By 1905, the first storefront theaters appeared in cities and continued to include a mix of live and recorded shows with numerous sound devices (recorded, instrumental, and live) and varied modes of patron address. Spanning sidewalk barkers, painted posters, and automated announcements, these first theaters were not so much exclusively dedicated to movies as they were wrapped around a business model featuring movies at their core. Seeing a film entailed a broad spectrum of other media and presentational modes; from early on, cinema was an indisputably multimedia event.6 By 1915, movie theaters were proliferating, establishing a recognizable genre of public entertainment, and serving as the retail face of the American film industry. Among their important functions, they provided reliable sales windows for studio products. Stabilizing the theater as the point-ofsale for movies allowed the industry to secure market share in a rising entertainment industry. Theaters ensured an outlet for their products and provided a predictable and appealing site for repeat customers. The larger purpose-built theaters that subsequently emerged gradually formed into the regional and national chains essential to the American film business and its transformation into the powerful conglomerates we name with the umbrella term Hollywood. Equally important to the success of theaters was the standardization and control of film technologies that included the highly flammable 35  mm film stock, secured as the dominant and professional film gauge when the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) formed in 1908. This so-called trust was comprised of key companies such as the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Vitagraph Company of America, and Eastman Kodak. The MPPC secured control of distribution and exhibition largely through its technology patents and aggressive litigation protecting the same. Even as the business of film and its technical base solidified, the place of film in a line of other venues beyond the movie theater persisted. Projectors were, in other words, still made to be moved, but usually by professionals. Through the rubric of itinerancy, such performers continued to nurture cinema as a local rather than centralized phenomenon well beyond the early and silent phases of film’s history.7 Concurrently, at least two dozen alternative portable projectors designed for home and small-group use were marketed between 1896 and 1923.8 Some of these devices operated

Engineering Portability    /    43 with flammable film stock while others relied on nonflammable film stock. Flammable or not, many grand announcements heralded the spread of film technologies to all aspects of contemporary life during this period. Predicting that every home would have a film machine and that moving pictures would be everyday sources of news, information, and familial intercourse, pundits also declared that someday film would convey both sounds and images simultaneously from anywhere to everywhere.9 Some early prognostications regarding film were plainly calling for what we used to call television and now call the World Wide Web and the internet. These early machines index an ongoing dialogue about where moving images would appear, what film technologies and films would be for, and whom they would serve. Such discussions were especially vibrant throughout film’s first twenty years, though of course they have persisted to this day. 10 The dangers of flammability added a perplexing layer to the task of those seeking to show movies beyond the theater’s walls. In response, a number of machines marketed as portable—engineered to be moved—appeared during this period to explicitly address concerns about safety and ease of use. The years 1911–1912 hosted an eruption of such devices, both in Europe and the United States. Prominent among formats specially designed for ­venues outside of the theater was Pathé’s 28 mm, released in 1911 (US availability 1913), and in operation until the mid-­1920s in the United States.11 Also of note was Thomas Edison’s short-­lived 22 mm gauge, launched in 1912, which projected a picture that was 2’ × 2½’.12 Both of these devices used nonflammable film, available as early as 1909. Both formats were also mainly conceived of as display devices for professional titles, reduced in size, available using either rental or subscription services.13 The Edison and the Pathé systems were both marketed as safe, easy to use, and compact. The nonflammable film also made shipping easier, as regulations against mailing volatile nitrate film did not apply. The Pathéscope, in particular, provides an interesting example of the ways that these portable machines benefitted from widespread advertising campaigns, evident in such publications as the New York Times and Saturday Evening Post, as well as National Geographic, the American School Board Journal, and the Sears catalog. In other words, the idea of safe, portable projection was not simply part of a specialist’s discourse, but readily available to American readers and consumers. By 1914, the prominent John Wannamaker’s Department Store in New York City built a model home movie salon in order to demonstrate the device and model its harmonious multifunctionality within the upscale home. The Pathéscope appeared as a “companion entertainer to the Talking Machine,” offering “movies and music (figure 7).” The department

figure 7.  The Pathéscope was sold as a natural companion to the home talking machine (phonograph). It was notably not presented as a miniaturized facsimile of a professionalized movie theater. Note also that its approval as “safe” and unburdened by “insurance restrictions” by the National Board of Fire Underwriters (insurance companies) was singled out in this ad. The Talking Machine World 11, no. 2 (15 February 1915): 30. Thanks to Louis Pelletier for generously sharing this material.

Engineering Portability    /    45 store’s auditorium also showed sample films from the Pathéscope Library, inserting them into its regular musical programming and fashion shows to promote the service. Sold expressly as educational and entertaining, the Pathéscope was a modern multipurpose machine. It was marketed as a natural learning aid, and advertisers celebrated the device’s ability to allow visual material to be studied and watched over and over again. This ability to replay films underscored the pedagogical utility of the instrument, offering wealthy users visual instruction in activities such as dancing and golf. It was thus also a means to other forms of sociality and leisure. Further, in addition to its upscale domestic applications, Pathéscope was sold for use by governments, churches, schools and universities, civic associations, agricultural groups, and business and industrial organizations. Its “light weight” of twenty-­three pounds and “small suitcase” size also made it ostensibly appropriate for “the traveler.” Ad copy claimed that the machine could be used “anywhere,” indoor or out, without need for a licensed projectionist.14 Adaptable performance capacity is a prominent aspect of Pathé’s promotional literature, and affirms the thickening body of scholarship documenting that films were regularly shown in a variety of locations throughout the 1910s and 1920s.15 The importance of the Pathéscope as a device that enabled an alternate and coexisting model of film use to that of the theater was further underscored by the Pathé library of films, which were issued in conjunction with the projector. The company’s film catalogs similarly indicate its notion of a diversified viewership, featuring a sizable scope of titles including comedy, education/instruction, travel, and drama.16 Several years later, in 1922, Pathé’s 9.5 mm gauge appeared, known as the Pathébaby, which was also fed by an international library of titles.17 Pathé’s 9.5  mm gauge proved the most enduring of its small formats and played an important role in home and amateur filmmaking as well. All three of these gauges used nonflammable film, and all played prints reduced from 35 mm, making them highly relevant for histories of film distribution, presentation, and viewing.18

The Picture Palaces Portable devices did not evolve in a remote or renegade chamber of radical activity but as part of a corpulent world of consumption, affluence, and the reshaping of American leisure. Small cinema rose alongside the importance, size, grandeur, and technological complexity of the commercial movie theater. Throughout the teens, while small-­gauge projectors were slowly emerging as still somewhat specialized and elite technologies, commercial

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film exhibition was changing considerably. By 1915, the multireel narrative film had become the centerpiece of the professional film show, accompanied by short films (sing-alongs, newsreels, comedies) that filled out the program. Parallel to this, purpose-built movie theaters spread in number and grew in size from the typical nickelodeon, with two hundred or fewer seats, to urban picture palaces that sat up to two thousand by mid-decade. The trend toward more and larger theaters did not eliminate other models for theatrical or itinerant film presentation, but resituated them as residual within a rapidly expanding industry. Urban environments hosted differently sized theaters. Smaller towns found ways to adapt existing spaces (opera houses, town halls) to accommodate cinema screens. Many small and midsize theaters operated continuously throughout this period. And it should be said that many theaters continued as multiuse venues, hosting live shows, community meetings, and presentations. Nonetheless, the larger and larger theater was clearly understood by the ascending film industry as the most profitable and promising path. Throughout the 1920s, theaters in general became pivotal to the consolidating industry. More and more film producers bought up distribution companies and exhibition venues; increasingly, theater owners merged with or purchased distribution and production interests. By the mid-1920s, the film industry resembled a complicated hybrid: nineteenth-century presentation models of live theater combined with the national retail model established by grocery and department store chains formed to efficiently, reliably, and regularly deliver standardized, factory-made products.19 Trends toward vertical integration became more pronounced as the decade moved on; theaters became part of a tiered exhibition system, with the largest urban venues securing first-run and A-list films and often featuring full orchestras and other live elements. These theaters also charged the highest admissions. Worn film prints and lesser titles appeared down the chain, largely moving away from urban centers and into smaller markets as time passed. This system ensured that the biggest theaters took in a disproportionate share of box office revenue. While the film industry became more vertically integrated, it is worth noting that innovations in sound and amplification technologies in the late 1920s and 1930s required partnerships with cognate entertainment industries such as recorded music, as well as large electrical conglomerates. Synchronized sound and amplification systems also interjected horizontality to film presentation and experience. While sound quality varied and many other differentiating factors remained, the largest orchestras could theoretically be heard in the smallest towns and least glamorous theaters once equipped with electrical reproduction and amplification systems. Of

Engineering Portability    /    47 course, at the same time, sound became less local and less tied to regional performance styles, instrumentation, songs or sounds you might be familiar with, or musicians you might know.20 Before the changes to electroacoustic sound systems in the late 1920s, other slightly earlier shifts were afoot. In 1922, just months before the introduction of the 16 mm format, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel addressed the SMPE, presenting his vision for the movie theater’s future: the gargantuan, technologically sophisticated, “atmospheric theater,” a picture palace of saturated color, deep and dynamic feeling, and all-­encompassing reflective surfaces.21 Rothafel’s vision is fully discussed and contextualized in Ross Melnick’s book, American Showman, which documents the fascinating ways in which Rothafel understood his monumental theaters through a showman’s lens. Roxy’s ideas for cutting-­edge theaters evolved from his career as a radio personality and live entertainer as much as a prophet of big-­box cinema.22 He grounded his visions in a kind of populism, but also frequently likened the movie theater’s future to more traditional and established art forms, such as opera. He imagined these theaters as broad-­scale agents of cultural change, not just elevating the experience of movies but all cultural forms, including music. Rothafel averred that the movie theater would be a catalyst for entirely new forms of entertainment. It would seat ever-­mushrooming crowds, with clear sightlines for all. The new theater was not only bigger but a kind of fantastical lighting box, “made almost entirely of projected rays upon sensitized surfaces,” where an operator could orchestrate by keyboard colored lighting that amplified the orchestra’s music and the screen’s drama.23 At the time of his address to the SMPE, Rothafel ran what Melnick terms “the most lauded theater in the United States,”—the New York Capitol—largely due to the theater’s size, as well as his prudent programming choices.24 For Rothafel, the show did not begin in the camera or even on the screen but on the sidewalk, continuing through the ornate entrance, the grand foyer, and the luxurious lounges. Roxy’s vision for movie theaters grew more elaborate to include attentive service, the finest décor, and an atmosphere that distinguished picture going from other ordinary entertainments. At this point, these grand theaters also featured sizable orchestras and other live stage entertainments that might include singing and dancing. In other words, movie palaces were not just about movies. In addition to hi-­tech luxury, Roxy’s theaters punctuated a decade wherein movie houses continued to get bigger. In New York this included theaters such as the Strand Theater (1914, 3,000 seats), the Rialto (1916, 2,500 seats), and the Rivoli (1917, 2,000 seats). In Chicago the Tivoli, built in

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1921, sat 3,520. Roxy’s Capitol Theater had opened in 1919 with what was then the largest seating capacity in the United States: 5,300 seats.25 In the theatrical world, size itself connoted status. The largest and most expensive theaters were frequently intended for elite cultural forms such as opera. 26 Well aware of this, Rothafel continually advocated to the SMPE and others for theatrical transformation. And, in 1927, his eponymous Roxy Theater opened with 5,920 seats.27 The names given to these and smaller theaters sought to mark them as grand, luxurious, and often exotic: The Bijoux, The Imperial, The Royale. The ascendant film industry worked hard to further present palaces as the highest, most modern, sophisticated, and respected form of moviegoing.28 Lavish add-ons and signature marquees, as well as these aspirational names, all conspired to ensure that projection was but one miniscule element of an elaborate presentational apparatus. William Paul has meticulously shown that movie theaters remained varied throughout the palace phase; no single unbroken line leads from vaudeville to store-front theater to picture palaces.29 Nonetheless, palaces serviced an industry that was seeking to maximize profits in its theatrical outlets, which were differentiated by size, opulence, and geography. As theaters became bigger, accompanied by various technological developments including air conditioning, public address systems, and broadcasting (radio), they became signs of up-to-the-minute prestige. In short, the movie theater became technologically more complex and symbolically charged.30 This grand, hi-tech theatrical model also functioned as a formidable barrier to entry, further making cinema into a corporate, ritualized pageant. While picture palaces were never the most numerous type of theater they still became mastheads for the consolidating Hollywood-based companies that were buying up theaters and theater chains at the end of the 1920s, claiming ownership of what Douglas Gomery indicates was the “vast majority” of first-run movie palaces in American cities across the country.31 This gave Hollywood studios (especially Paramount, Loew’s, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and Warner Bros.) significant control over the bulk of revenue generated by films, helping to maximize their holdings. First-run theaters allowed the major studios to more fully control where and when their films were shown, extracting the most value from their retail life.32 With the picture palace model firmly in place during the 1920s, theaters had transformed into highly technologized and mediated spaces. Film technologies, films, and their presentation serviced gargantuan, immobile, and enduring structures. They set standards that were impossible to emulate without deep capital and friendly relations with those making the shiniest films. Cinema became an industry that efficiently made (theoretically)

Engineering Portability    /    49 infinitely reproducible copies to be distributed and shown widely and, in some instances, globally. This required the circulation of its goods to retail sites (theaters) and was predicated on a consistent flow of new, largely standardized product. However, this product was to be rented: first by the theaters who would temporarily show the film and then by viewers who paid for a seat that gave them a temporary line of sight. Movies were not typical commodities in that they were not owned by theaters or by the great growing mass of consumers. Following this logic, the theater’s screen became a hi-­tech showpiece: a place to glimpse that which would momentarily appear then quickly move on. The theater acted as a kind of bulwark to the possessive impulses, ready-­access, and physical intimacies that we associate with print, phonographs, photography, radios, and eventually living room television sets, video, DVD, and streaming services. Throughout the great bulk of film history, viewers did not own films; they rented an experience. In short, the grand theatrical model for cinema ritualized movies, crafting them as antithetical to the principles of immediate access, adaptability, and appropriation that characterized the use of other modern media. Film theaters may have presented a more democratized model of entertainment when compared to other live and site-­specific cultural forms like opera and orchestras, but they did little that emulated the smaller, more nimble media with which they coexisted. I have gone in depth about picture palaces to illustrate the stark contrast between the forefront of commercial, theatrical exhibition and the low-­tech, affordable, self-­operation that characterized portable projectors. These were two notably distinct, concurrent models for cinema: hi-­tech architectural monument versus inexpensive, workaday machine. The big, formidable version of cinema helps us to more plainly see what was so unusual yet also revealing about the simultaneous emergence of portable devices. While categorically different, both models grew from the technological and visionary developments enabled by Hollywood’s domestic and global success. This centralized filmmaking industry seeded a technological environment that was feeding contrasting, and some might say contradictory, models for what constituted a film show.

Engineering Portability Portable film technologies achieved their fullest impact under the umbrella of activities facilitated by the SMPE.33 Founded in 1916 to support Holly­wood’s intense research and development needs, the SMPE sustained and innovated the technologies and processes that fueled the

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rapidly consolidating American film industry. These entailed—among many others—chemical emulsions, light capture and refraction, illumination, and eventually electroacoustic amplification. Under the sponsorship of the SMPE, engineers working for industries as diverse as Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Bausch and Lomb, and DuPont oversaw technical matters. As SMPE members were not exclusively bound by the specific technical demands of the studios, they also enthusiastically debated broader systemic, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural concerns pertaining to cinema. Simultaneously, they also pursued their own broader business interests. Spanning these activities, portability and projection occupied a clear and coherent place, telling us what these concepts meant in relation to the evolving commercial film apparatus and industry. In short, looking at the history of film technology through the lens of the SMPE introduces a marked degree of horizontality into how we often conceptualize Hollywood at this time; it also reveals a rather fulsome and engaged discussion not just about the applied science of film projection, but about the very basic idea of what cinema was for, where it should appear, and what it could and should do as a cultural form.34 How would the apparatus move? What would that look like? What would it do? Who would it serve? Members of the SMPE were also well aware of the movie theater’s grand aspirational elements and directly addressed the technical ramifications of its outsized growth. The palace’s cavernous spaces demanded increased illumination, better screen reflectivity, expanded viewing angles, and eventually adequate sound amplification. All of these constituted technical challenges that fell within the SMPE’s remit. Nonetheless, not everyone shared Rothafel’s vision, and many rejected the assertion that the picture palace was the inevitable or ideal endpoint of moving picture projection. A chorus of other showmen, engineers, and technology manufacturers scrambled to complement and sometimes counter such visions, advocating instead for the importance of a simple-to-operate, highly adaptable projector notably different from the increasingly expensive, professionalized, and complicated theater. Many felt that the high-tech, permanent theater was a hindrance to cinema, as it restricted the further development of its forms and functions, preventing it from competing with more nimble media such as newspapers, books, and phonographs. With the picture palace as backdrop, the portable projector embodied a form of cinema that was do-it-yourself and bare bones by comparison. Crucially, throughout this phase (the 1920s to 1930s, in particular) this smaller kind of cinema entailed new applications for film. These discussions are readily evident across the growing and multidisciplinary membership of the SMPE.

Engineering Portability    /    51 Freeing the tools of cinema from its already bulky architectural iterations would give it the ability to diversify and specialize, to become more responsive to wide-­ranging needs, and to become as integral as the printed word to human expression and activity.35 The SMPE was an organization for engineers by name and purpose, but it also included a considerable sweep of working professionals: technology designers, manufacturers, and retailers. Members were also theater owners, managers, and projectionists who by necessity were dedicated to the art and science of film presentation. Collectively, members labored toward technical standards that could be identified and shared, and thus serve the entire industry. The rising importance of standardization in American industry and commerce in the broadest sense is nicely marked by the nearly concurrent formation of the American Engineering Standards Committee in 1918 (renamed the American Standards Association [ASA] and again the American National Standards Institute [ANSI]), which organized as an impartial body, largely comprised of engineers, to establish national standards in technical matters. The SMPE was thus not unique but reflective of broader shifts in American business, industry, and military practice. The imperative toward shared industry standards entailed a degree of collaboration between public and private organizations, across a range of disciplines, and within competitive industries. For its part, the SMPE shared knowledge and discussed the direction of technological change, responding to all facets of film, and later television, and eventually elements of the digital media industries.36 Cameras and their many elements, film stock and its emulsions, lighting and its tonal qualities, and projectors and the other technical elements of film presentation were all among the topics addressed during the association’s first ten years.37 Organizations like the SMPE “systemized and guided technological research and development,” which heretofore had been more haphazard and idiosyncratic, helping the American studio system to build an effective infrastructure for its consolidation, and advancing production and presentation procedures.38 One of the important effects of the SMPE is that it brought studio and non-­studio personnel together into discussions about technology. Thus it enabled collaboration within but also beyond the studio system to include electrical and chemical engineers and equipment manufacturers, introducing what Luci Marzola has called a kind of horizontality to the increasingly vertically integrated studio system. In concrete terms, the SMPE called together a range of industries and expertise not singularly devoted to making movies. Yet developments across these industries were utterly essential to the material and technological base upon which the

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film industry relied. The SMPE did not just advocate for innovation, it also regularized, standardized, and stabilized studio operations.39 Like other major American trade groups, the SMPE incorporated research and development into the film industry’s activities, ensuring that discovery became instrumental to the managed processes that supported overall studio vitality.40 Many members of the SMPE belonged to very distinct disciplines and companies with business interests that fell well beyond the purview of the film industry proper. Kodak was a major supplier of film stock to the studios but had built its fortune in still photography.41 Bausch and Lomb made lenses for cameras and projectors but also manufactured optical equipment for eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and searchlights. DuPont began as an explosives manufacturer and, by the 1920s, had morphed into a diversified chemical manufacturer with but one wing of company activity that extended to film. The formation of the SMPE signaled that technology made beyond studio walls would continue to be a “central catalyst” in industry expansion.42 Hollywood was a customer and client as well as a producer of films.43 To be clear, portable projectors were plainly no singular priority for the studios in the late teens or twenties. But the technological infrastructure stabilizing and ensuring the vitality of the studio system was intimately intertwined with developing portable projectors, as well as a fulsome array of other technical innovations. These innovations supported a vast range of American industries and furthered the application of scientific insight. Members of the SMPE, with their own dispersed interests, occasionally articulated interesting models for mapping the whole of industry operations. Through such documents one can observe a sprawling technological ecosystem but also a particular kind of technological imagination, one that thrived in parallel to our received histories of the studio system. Take for example a speech made in 1924 by Lloyd A. Jones, then president of the still-young SMPE. Jones delivered a forward-looking address calling for continual growth and ambitious innovation, while celebrating the many accomplishments of the eight-year-old organization. He reminded the gathered group that the very word engineer had an increasingly capacious and relevant definition: no longer just about operating a machine but about “the practical application of science” to machines as well as to human and industrial systems.44 In this way, members of the SMPE did far more than just discuss hardware; they also mapped, debated, and imagined whole systems constituting a motion picture ecology. Even its vision of the studios suggests a certain displacement of Hollywood proper, resituating the studios within a more complex series of interconnecting entities. For

Engineering Portability    /    53

figure 8.  Members of the SMPE had their own conceptualization of the film industry’s organizational structure, emphasizing here the importance of research and a dispersed social and cultural footprint for its products. Lloyd A. Jones, “Presidential Address,” Transactions of the SMPE 18 (May 1924): 17n.

instance, Jones offered a chart visualizing what he termed “the motion picture organism” (figure 8). According to Jones, this organism was comprised of three major areas: (1) component materials, (2) production and distribution, and (3) exhibition. Note on this diagram the ways in which the studios were but one partial element of a much broader system, which here includes technical innovation, ongoing research, specific applications, and eventually social and cultural interfaces, with vectors of influence mapped complexly across spheres and often in dialogical direction. Thinking about the American studio system as divided by the categories of production, distribution, and exhibition is foundational to our ways of understanding the film industry in general. Yet Jones proposed a significantly more complex and inclusive chart, one that situated categories like artistry (music, stage properties, costumes, literary and dramatic art materials) on an equal footing with chemistry (emulsions, celluloid, and processing chemicals) and physics (illumination, optical and electrical apparatus). The engineer’s

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“laboratory” is mapped alongside “the studio” and the “exchanges” (distribution entities), asserting clearly the creative role of research and development in Hollywood’s culture industry. It is perhaps not surprising that a group of engineers would amplify the importance of technical elements of the motion picture business in an industry organization chart. However, this sketch illuminates a multidisciplinary, cross-industries point of view. The business of film included its technical base and by association the myriad cognate industries that fed into and also benefitted from Hollywood’s voracious need for effective and efficient systems. Also rather telling is a more open approach to categories like film exhibition, which did not just entail technologies of theatrical presentation but also those that serviced school, church, social centers, and sales rooms—venues the studios themselves expressed little interest in but that held great promise for other members of the industry.45 The experts gathered under the canopy of the SMPE had a particular view of industry structure, one considerably less vertical than what we use to understand the American film industry. The organization easily saw beyond the productive forces, technologies, and systems associated primarily with Hollywood movies. Clearly implied here are new kinds of films, serving multiple functions, and feeding dispersed venues. For the SMPE, cinema was concretely and plainly an evolving, flexible, and iterative apparatus. Looking at what the engineers had to say about film technology provides a whole other view to not just technical innovation but innovation in several senses. First, it meant that new applications for scientific knowledge gleaned from one of the several areas subtending moving pictures— chemistry, optics, and electrical engineering—might easily evolve out of or feed into changes in a variety of other fields. For instance, innovations in camera lenses might result from or later influence changes in telescopy or microscopy. Thus, tracking technological change and moving pictures can easily lead one to a plethora of related developments far beyond the studios. Film emulsion innovations might easily bleed over into the lucrative retail, medical, or industrial photography industry, for example. Second, when the SMPE talked about technology they did so in a reasonably capacious way, engaged in broader discussions about precisely what cinema was and how it related to a complex social and cultural apparatus that included topics that sometimes had little to do with entertainment or movies. Portability and projection as dynamic elements of a seemingly settled apparatus become easily legible within this wider lens of technological development, evident in the organization’s earliest meetings and published documents. In fact, it was only a little more than a year after the fledgling society formed

Engineering Portability    /    55 that its members began lobbying to standardize a definition of portability. Crucially, the purpose of a portable projection machine was presented as complementary to the increasingly sizable and complex professional theatre. As such, portability entailed a discussion about lightness of weight, reliability, and sufficient image quality and size, but these issues were ultimately subordinate to the challenge of flammability.

Capitalizing on Combustibility The idea of a portable projection booth, required for film shows in spaces not equipped for projection, neatly embodies the complexities of any simple definition of the term portability.46 Flammability raised questions about basic considerations. Is it safe to use? Easy to use? Under what conditions? Answers to these questions led to a myriad of solutions, among them portable projection booths (figure 9). These were either temporary or semi-­permanent structures used to house projectors that ran flam­ mable film. Such booths were often required in addition to but sometimes instead of projection licenses, and were compulsory in many municipalities and states to operate projectors. Nonflammable film gauges were exempt from such booths and often advertised with the feature “enclosing booth not required,” a certified indicator of safety offered by insurance under­ writers.47 The ongoing calls from SMPE members to standardize definitions of portability as nonflammable further confirms that the use of flammable film was prevalent in portable machines. Alexander Victor, who owned Victor Animatograph, a manufacturer of projectors and related equipment, tethered portability to functions and venues beyond the movie theater. He proposed in 1918 that the SMPE adopt a definition for the term portable projector, adding it to the small but growing list of shared, industry-­wide motion picture nomenclature. Nonflammability was the overriding quality of portability.48 In his address to the society, he joked: “No user could consistently arrive at the place of entertainment, carrying in one hand a truly portable projector, weighing about twenty-­five pounds; but in the other hand, a fire-­proof booth, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds.”49 It should also be pointed out that flammability here was not only about fire but also the resulting heft—physical and regulatory—designed to reduce its threat. In other words, Victor implored members of the SMPE to recognize that making film shows safe necessitated an impractical trade-­ off on weight: in this instance fireproof booths required by law negated any commonsense idea about easy conveyance. Emphasizing the inevitable clandestine tendencies of would-­be projectionists seeking to evade

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Figure 9. Fireproof portable booth. “Fireproof Booths,” Motion Picture News (May 17, 1919): 3253.

regulatory encumbrances, Victor mused that the rise of projectors disguised as sample cases, lunch boxes, and violin cases was emblematic. The intense demand for portable devices would persist through clever concealment and “stealth,” even at continued risk.50 Knowing his audience, Victor identified the clandestine projectionist as “a menace to public safety and the good repute of the industry.” He asserted a simple solution: nonflammable film.51 With fear of fire mitigated, projectionist and device would be free. Victor clearly understood the portable projector as a unique and relatively autonomous element of the apparatus crucial for opening up and expanding film viewing. According to him, portable projectors constituted a specific kind of viewing platform, one largely conceived of to show reduced 35 mm prints and to build on the relative success of the 28 mm Pathéscope as a distribution and exhibition format. Portable projectors were thus also partly conversion machines, transforming a professional gauge and predominantly theatrical experience into another kind of showing and watching. As a viewing apparatus, projectors were also strategically addressed to a persistent and also proliferating set of scenarios for film viewing beyond industry-controlled theaters.52 In the eyes of equipment manufacturers, it was a potentially limitless market-in-waiting. The flammability of celluloid had long been a factor shaping the ways in which cinema became regulated as a public phenomenon. Professionalization and licensing requirements for projectionists and regulation of theatrical spaces (projection booths in particular) had worked to contain the dangers posed to film audiences. Studios also took elaborate precautions to guard against production fires.53 Distribution regulations governing film required lead-lined shipping containers. Before that, the regular US mail was for decades deemed unsafe and illegal for film circulation.54 Likewise, film exchanges underwent regular inspections for safety violations and to ensure precautions such as sprinkler systems, sand buckets, and metal furniture.55 Theatrical projection booths themselves were the site of constant

Engineering Portability    /    57 inspection and debate as to how they should be built, what materials they should use, and what degree of air ventilation was required.56 These very same conditions that made the commercial theatrical film show so entangled with established regulatory bodies posed acute challenges to other kinds of film presentations, which by their irregular, itinerant, or simply unadvertised nature were significantly harder to control. Largely because of the flammability of the standard professional 35 mm nitrate stock, and the temptation to simply use flammable film in unlicensed scenarios, powerful entities such as the Underwriters Laboratories (insurance industry) and the National Association of Fire Prevention adopted specific guidelines. Among them was this: “Approved miniature projectors must be so constructed that they cannot be used with films employed on the full sized commercial moving picture machine.”57 Such edicts made projecting 35 mm films on portable devices into a violation of public safety codes, an inherently dangerous activity. Thus, such regulations also served to secure the controlled ecosystem of commercial film and the place of theaters as their primary, safe, and sanctioned site for showing and watching movies. Professional films were crafted as dangerous encounters when unsupervised by a complex array of regulations. This made commercial films more difficult to bootleg, steal, and otherwise show in unauthorized scenarios, as one risked not only violating copyright but also public safety regulations. Flammability proved a convenient and power­ful barrier to easy film use. This barrier was ultimately good for the commercial film business, since it thwarted gray-­and black-­market economies made possible by film’s reproducibility and the portable capacities of projectors using 35 mm. It is noteworthy that preceding and concurrent with discussions about safety, a wide contingent of moral reformers also weighed in on the matter of cinema’s safety, expressing concerns about the effects that images had on impressionable minds, leading, they feared, to vice and sexual corruption.58 The concept of safety itself bore a weight constituted by modern chemistry and modern moralizing alike. Throughout the development of regulations governing public film performance during the teens and 1920s, professional or standard film meant 35 mm nitrate-­based film, which was regularly simply called “flammable” film. It is hard to imagine the equivalent today. A combustible television? Or, perhaps a desktop extinguisher for that fiery computer? Yet these were the basic conditions in which film technology operated. The subsequent regulations strained the apparatus in significant ways. Combined with the prospect of unlicensed film shows, wherein profit did not accrue to officially recognized elements of the film economy, there was a clear business

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imperative for manufacturers to develop an entirely new film gauge that would sidestep fire threat and mitigate against the easy interchangeability of professional film prints showing in unapproved performance scenarios. These two qualities—a specific, smaller format with a different film base—rendered portability less threatening to the growing film industry. It is also worth noting that the issue of what amounts to institutionalized and sanctioned flammability was reasonably unique to film technology. While some media certainly have the capacity to combust or cause fire, few can claim to have been so shaped by its threat. This demonstrates the prominent and enduring importance of chemistry, light, and heat in cultural as well as technical histories of film. In 1918, when Alexander Victor (owner of Victor Animatograph) implored the SMPE to formalize the conditions in which portability would thrive, that is, to standardize a definition of it, he asked that the SMPE adopt what was effectively Pathé’s 28 mm nonflammable stock as the portable standard. This was convenient for him, especially as he had licensed the gauge and had been actively promoting it for several years.59 Months after Victor’s request, speaking after the successful vote to approve this standard, W. B. Cook (Pathé’s American representative at the time) elaborated on the crucial role of nonflammable, or what he termed “slow-burning” film. Cook concurred that safety was a precondition for a viable portable market. Similar to Victor, he also extolled the virtues of reducing overall film stock use, which lowered costs. Unsurprisingly, he offered Pathé’s total cooperation with all other manufacturers in sharing technical standards. It looked to be a French triumph, partly because of the company’s clear head start in establishing market share.60

The Business of Film Gauges Progress through SMPE committees was slow. By 1921, the SMPE’s Nomenclature Committee, which was charged with establishing industrywide names and definitions for key terms, was still sorting out the precise wording for the different film gauges. It recommended that 35  mm film should be called “standard film” and that 28  mm should be known as “safety standard film.”61 At the same time, the Committee on Standards rejected a proposal to attach the words “professional” to the “standard film” (35 mm), deeming it too limiting, likely out of regard for the extant use of 35 mm beyond theaters.62 Such discussions continued and in 1922 Pathé introduced the smaller, nonflammable 9.5 mm gauge. Shortly after, Victor abandoned his loyalties to Pathé and joined Eastman Kodak

Engineering Portability    /    59 and Bell and Howell to introduce 16 mm as an American nonflammable alternative to the French 28 mm and 9.5 mm gauges. Announced in 1923, 16 mm was also officially recognized by the SMPE’s Standards Committee in 1924, soon overtaking 28 mm as the dominant portable or “safety standard” gauge.63 The success of long-­standing efforts to standardize a portable, nonflammable system (comprised of compatible film stock, cameras, and projectors) served to focus the technological innovation of portable projectors and to speed development of a more rationalized and expansive market. Established histories have documented the industry agreements among Eastman Kodak, Bell and Howell, and Victor Animatograph to forge ahead with 16 mm equipment, using nonflammable film stock as a new standard format. They have also emphasized the importance of 16 mm for amateur and home filmmaking, which Kodak actively targeted through its public relations and marketing campaigns.64 Such campaigns built on the company’s highly developed photography empire. The bias of 16 mm toward creating an amateur filmmaking market was initially deeply inscribed in the new format itself. Kodak distinguished its products from previous small-­ gauge systems partly by the camera’s use of reversal film stock, which allowed a positive print to be made directly from the same footage that had been exposed when running through the camera. This reduced the overall costs of film stock. Yet it mitigated against making multiple film copies.65 ­Scholars of amateur film identify reversal stock and its reduced costs as a key innovation and catalyst enabling small-­gauge filmmaking and securing the success of the gauge.66 Although this factor clearly played a role in the growth of amateur filmmaking, it is worth pointing out that Kodak had no devout loyalty to amateur or hobbyist filmmaking per se. It was also the single largest supplier of film stock to the commercial film industry at the time, providing the basic materials for Hollywood filmmaking as well as the tens of thousands of exhibition prints it required to disperse those movies.67 While the scope of Kodak’s business eventually encompassed amateur, hobbyist, and many other small-­scale modes of filmmaking, it also entailed untold millions of feet of film stock for striking small-­gauge film prints. Content spanned all genres and served manifold purposes. In short, the more widespread the infrastructure for small projectors, the more film stock would be needed for film prints.68 Kodak was content agnostic. It was also equally as interested in film viewing as filmmaking. Evidence of this plainly resides in the company’s plans to build an international system of film rental libraries comprised of 16  mm reduction prints of professionally made (35 mm) movies. No afterthought, this rental system, dubbed

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Kodascope Libraries, was announced simultaneously with the unveiling of the new 16 mm system in 1923.69 This makes 16 mm not only a rebuke to Pathé’s 28 mm and 9.5 mm filmmaking systems, but also to Pathé’s library system established years earlier. Sixteen millimeter was a whole moving image system that grew to support a broad span of film applications.70 Together with the 8 mm standard established in 1932, these two formats spread nationally and internationally, holding significant market share for more than fifty years. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that portability as an idea and as a field of technological development can be reduced to the introduction of 16 mm film. Indeed, 1923—the year Kodak announced 16 mm—was an especially fertile one for portable presentation devices more generally, with the SMPE devoting sustained attention to new display mechanisms at its meetings. For instance, concurrent with the 16  mm standard’s announcement, the Transactions of the SMPE featured a special “Symposium on Portable Projectors” outlining six devices that embodied the principles of portability. Two longer essays devoted to the topic also appeared.71 Importantly, the discussion about portability in this symposium was largely reserved for projectors or devices that displayed films—rather than made films—testifying to the ways in which cameras and projectors early on were shaped by differentiated logics and imperatives. It was in this dossier that officials from Eastman Kodak laid out their specifications for the new 16 mm or “substandard,” “slow-burning” film stock.72 In a separate announcement published in the same issue of the SMPE’s transactions, the company presented its new camera and projector that worked with the new stock.73 Bell and Howell and Victor Animatograph also introduced compatible new equipment, issuing notices in 1923 and presenting their new products to the SMPE in 1924.74 Kodak’s projector, the Kodascope, was designed initially to throw an image that was anywhere between 30” × 40” and 40” × 54”, depending on the distance between the projector and screen. The base model was intended to “work in the home,” but Kodak also created an extra lamp-house in order to allow for adequate projection onto a seven-foot screen, which was deemed adequate for audiences of up to one hundred.75 The projector weighed twenty pounds. Far beyond the domestic, Kodak envisioned a diversification and proliferation of motion picture viewing into “every field of human activity”: “schools, institutions, and homes” and even those “that are at present undreamt of.”76 The projector could play films recorded in 16 mm; more importantly, it could also play films originally recorded in 35 mm but then reduced to 16 mm.

Engineering Portability    /    61 Furthering the richness and significance of an industry-­based discussion of portability were other devices announced in tandem with the introduction of the 16  mm format. C. Francis Jenkins, an early inventor of film projectors and eventually “wireless cinema” (television), espoused the virtues of a device dubbed the Discrola, which he presented to the association as a home projector. The Discrola used light and mirrors to transform rotating paper discs (struck from motion picture film) into moving pictures housed in a console resembling fine furniture. Jenkins likened the machine to the Victrola (a record player): simple to use with no threading, or other “technicalities.” The “record” is dropped on the rotating table; a button is pushed: “Instead of music we have a picture.”77 Jenkins stressed the absence of “fire risk” and the feasibility of national library networks for borrowing image-­disks.78 Similar to Jenkins, Charles Urban, a pioneer of early cinema—particularly as a producer of travelogues, actuality (i.e., brief nonfiction), and educational films—presented the Spirograph to the SMPE: a viewing device based on a patent he had acquired in 1907.79 It used a spinning disc that turned past a light source and allowed mounted, celluloid images to appear on a small screen. The device afforded “the inexpensive production of moving pictures in miniature, in the home, school, office or elsewhere,” and played a series of images equivalent in duration to a seventy-­five-­foot 35 mm reel of film, likely well under two minutes.80 It reportedly weighed three and a half pounds.81 The operation of the device included the ability to fully stop on single images. It was also convertible for use in scenarios of full light or daylight, with an invertible mechanism that enabled the normal projection function to be transformed into a single-­ viewer “animated microscope.”82 The device was thus adaptable; it functioned as a regular or as a self-­contained tabletop projector that operated from close-­range behind the screen, rather than in front. Such devices were fairly common, reorienting projection away from its spatial implications and interdependencies with ambient light and toward a more controlled and contained box, eliminating variabilities of environmental light, natural or artificial. Evolved from their peepshow origins and Edison’s early Kinetoscope, these devices took on different names: daylight cinema, projection boxes, or rear-­projection machines. They worked to reduce some of the most basic challenges of portable and adaptable projection devices whose operation was frequently challenged by inconsistent environmental light. Other features of portability cohered across the devices discussed, including the persistent impulse to imbue projectors with more control over the speed and size of the projected form. For instance, in 1923, Pathé announced improvements to its Pathéscope 28  mm portable projector.

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These ameliorations mostly addressed the machine’s ability to supply smooth and steady images at speeds slower than normal in order to aid use in educational and “other fields where analysis of the movement illustrated” is frequently desirable.83 Other articles from the same year held forth on the general principles shaping both the technical properties of portable projection as well as its social function. SMPE member J. R. Mitchell averred that portable projectors should largely be articulated to the “practical” sphere, distinct from the professional theatrical one. He asserted that portability was an “essential element in the great expansion of the motion picture industry.” Key properties included: simplicity of operation, safety, ease of care and operation, ability to stop and show a still, and a degree of reliability.84 Others agreed, identifying devices of varying weight, size, and function, yet espousing shared properties of “compactness, simplicity, lightness, practicability and economy.”85 These technical qualities were deemed essential not only to the relevance of motion pictures in the home but also to their “greater general use in industry, science and education.”86 Advocates declared the portable projector was no longer a “supertoy” and that the format had irrefutably turned serious. The ideals of adaptability and utility persisted.87 The rise of projection across venues, implicitly indexing the quality of adaptability is evident in the growing number of formal “how-to” manuals that became available to assist working and fledgling projectionists in their chosen craft. Starting in 1918 and continuing for decades, SMPE-member James R. Cameron began publishing Motion Picture Projection and Sound Pictures, a guidebook and technical manual for working projectionists.88 In print for decades, Cameron’s manual began as assistance for projectionists servicing film activities carried on by the American Red Cross, Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare League, and the YMCA. The manual expanded in scope to primarily support conventional theatrical projection needs. Yet throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the manual also stands as a sign of the interrelated elements of projection bridging formal and informal fields: commercial and noncommercial, standard and small gauges, theater and beyond. By 1928, the manual housed a sizable chapter on 16 mm as well as slide projectors, slide film projectors, and automatic and continuous rearprojection boxes used for business and advertising, show window displays, and units “sometimes placed on the top of a building located at a point in high traffic circulation.”89 Safety was a primary feature of such manuals, with protocols governing permanent and portable projection booths also making sustained appearances in its pages. Projection in such manuals, not defined exclusively as theatrical, had a much more ecumenical flair. Similar

Engineering Portability    /    63 to the discussions underway at the SMPE, these manuals addressed a broad scope of devices, procedures, and venues that did not simply reify or reflect an absolute dichotomy between “theaters” and “everywhere else,” but rather mapped a whole field of complementary practices. By examining industry discourses and trajectories we can see a fuller portrait of portable film presentation emerging. Some elements of this picture indicate technical limitations and others invoke imaginative future-­oriented ideals of projected images everywhere. In technical terms, nonflammability was a primary quality. Also crucial were factors such as ease of use, reliability, low cost, lightness of weight, control over the appearance of the projected image, and adaptability both in size as well as speed of image. Location of performance was also regularly considered. The home, school, industry, lab, and church arose as coequal venues for projection and film performance, an unlikely agglomeration of venues in which film shows might grow roots and serve existing and new functions. This linking of cinema to portability also included discs, mirrors, rear projection devices, consoles, and stand-­alone projectors. These devices were small and big, and they ran films at varied speeds. Most proclaimed control over the speed as well as the direction of film movement. In other words, they introduced performance variability and user control into the motion of motion pictures. This includes outright stopping a film, holding a single frame in illuminated stasis on the screen. Different institutions asserted very different needs. The military wanted projectors that would work on ship decks to resist the deterioration caused by salty sea air. They expected the devices to remain small enough to pass through a ship’s hatch for use above and below deck. The navy developed screens that were translucent so that sailors could see the film from both sides, maximizing lines of sight while watching from limited deck space.90 Specific needs were also voiced by experts in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, architecture, business, government, and industry; members from each of these constituencies presented to the SMPE. Regular speeches at society meetings made specialized needs known while also announcing varied and ongoing uses.91 Histories of 16 mm and 8 mm are frequently found attached to the growing literature devoted to amateur and home filmmaking, which has made significant contributions to expanding our understanding of film practice and representation.92 Yet the emphasis on the categories of amateur and home filmmaking have somewhat obscured the other salient features of these formats both in terms of the context in which these technologies emerged and also with regard to their longer-­term impact. In the same

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1923 issue of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers that features a wave of attention directed at portable devices, articles appeared promulgating the use of motion pictures in education and the plain request for a safe “simple, portable” device for showing in partially lit classrooms.93 The need for such devices in the military also recurred throughout these years. Members of the visual education community and representatives of museums, government, community groups, and amateur associations presented position papers to the society about the place of portable projection and motion pictures within their organizations.94 Oddities abound and the precise qualities that comprised portability differed from device to device. Some were articulated to a portability that was simple in function, playing two-minute films on a gadget that could be carried in a shirt pocket—a device “no bigger than a cigarette case.” There were also projectors designed into trucks, promoted as “theaters on wheels.” Some were used for political, publicity, and advertising campaigns, still others for mobile news outlets and showing educational and entertainment films where theaters were not practical.95 One such unit allowed a 6’ × 7’ image, with a speaker raised up through the roof.96 Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the discussion of portable projectors appeared across the emerging committees that reflected the diverse activities of the SMPE. During the 1920s, specifically, this included the Progress Committee and the Standards and Nomenclature Committee. Additional committees emerged as the organization grew. In 1931, the Projection Screens Committee formed and was dedicated to all kinds of screens, permanent and collapsible. In 1932, the Non-Theatrical Equipment Committee was established, charged with “matters relating to 16 millimeter film cameras and projectors, accessories such as screens, film splicers, etc. film slide projectors, glass slide projectors, and 35 millimeter portable and semi-portable projectors.”97 This committee welcomed members representing companies with clear interests in equipment manufacturing and sat alongside the Standards Committee, the Projection Practice Committee, and the Historical and Museum Committee, among others. Collectively, such committees fully and formally institutionalized portability as a normalized element of the industry’s technological apparatus. By 1932, not only had 16 mm become coterminous with portability, so too had portability acquired an enduring industry association with the term nontheatrical, rhetorically shifting away from an open-ended concept to one that was often cast as the theater’s other. With no observable constraints placed on committee activities and discussion, the term nontheatrical was likely used as a kind of tactic to make portability seem less threatening to the

Engineering Portability    /    65 studios and to theater owners, still mighty lynch pins in the film ecology. Crucially, this term did not mute portability’s growth, its diversity, or the power of its immanent capacities. It is worth revisiting one of the basic goals of the SMPE: technological innovation and its management. Portability occupied but one place among an ever-­expanding discussion and spiraling imperatives. The “Progress Committee” regularly reported on new developments in film use. During the late 1920s, this included film applications in universities, hospitals, sports, and business. The society also consistently announced developments in specialized equipment, including micro-­photography, high-­speed photography and cinematography, X-­rays, irregular picture ratios, and telephoto lenses.98 By the end of the decade, unfolding discussions about screen technology, television, stereoscopy, color, and, of course, sound had all transpired at association meetings. Looking at the pages of the SMPE journal throughout the 1920s, portability provides a window into an entirely different apparatus, one that was highly specialized, conscripted by a group of disciplines, and adapted to paradigmatically unique functions compared to those of Hollywood. Film projection was a modern, multipurpose family of operations. Throughout the 1920s, portable moving-­image projection devices worked primarily with film stock, although occasionally with glass slides and paper. The discussions on portability littering the journal’s pages included calls for machines that could run without special training and in a slew of spaces with varying conditions. Projected images appeared in sizes from five inches to eight feet across. New or residual, institutional or individual, portability manifested in many machines and espoused multiple properties and uses. This expanded horizon for cinema was quite at home within and also beyond the industry’s core technical organization.99

Cultures of Technology and Technologists Moving beyond the activities of the SMPE, many other shifts were underway that shored up and secured the longevity of portable cinema. Shortly after establishing the 16 mm standard, Kodak publicly launched the Kodascope Libraries in 1925, to distribute 16 mm film prints internationally to the general public. This initiative relied on Kodak’s preexisting and international retail network of camera shops, as well as drug stores and department stores, all serving as distribution and rental outlets.100 In addition to Kodascope Libraries, by 1928 rental library services in the United States numbered twenty-­two and included Bell and Howell’s Filmo Library, Pathé’s

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Pathéscope Library, the Ganz Home Film Library, and the Film of the Month Club.101 Hollywood also entered into the reduction-print market with the opening of Universal Studios’ Show-at-Home Movie Library.102 In the often boosterish marketing literature for these endeavors, films were likened to books and promoted as standard holdings in any home library. Select film titles were released in a way similar to the promotion of middlebrow literature, wherein, like books, films would be issued in limited editions targeted to “particular tastes.” Available titles were numerous, including those from defunct production companies, as well as films grouped under such categories as family, sports, comedy, instructionals, history, and news.103 Some members of the industry objected to technologies that loosened the theater’s hold on film projection. Yet advocates of portable projectors persisted in maintaining that interest in movies at home or school would only buttress theatrical attendance, creating greater appreciation for the commercial show.104 Phonographs and radio were invoked as analogous technologies that benefitted the traditional modes they were feared to be replacing. These media forms, it was claimed, had not harmed opera halls or concert venues. Instead, the new had in fact revitalized the old.105 Within the history of film, Patricia Zimmerman has shown that the availability of new small-gauge film cameras catalyzed a similar discourse that worked to position affordable cameras less as an affront to extant film practice than as an inferior and perhaps playful aspiration to it.106 Companies like Kodak adopted what we might consider a system of accommodation wherein new film technologies were tethered to home filmmaking and film showing, and were consistently framed as hobbyist approximations of Hollywood style and skill. Advice columns, articles, and advertising collaborated to contain the threat of new affordable consumer film technologies by circumscribing their potential. This fortified a seemingly vast and unbridgeable gap not just between amateur and professional craft but also between home and theatrical viewing spaces. Sometimes the theater loomed particularly large in the discourses of the amateur and home film show, appearing in the form of advice columns helping the budding home projectionist climb the impossible mountain toward professional polish, for instance. Yet this kind of discursive asymmetry was not uniformly the case for the vast majority of discussions about portable projectors. Amateurism and hobbyism represent a small subset of the ways in which the technology industry was shaping film’s expanding apparatus. This also means that the Main Street movie theater did not always loom as the workaday projectionist’s opposite. Across a wide discussion, the theater was just as often construed as incidental to cinema’s vast and unmined capacities.

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Cultures of Portability Beyond the realms of the home and the amateur, portable devices fed many other cultural activities. While those I will discuss in subsequent chapters were apposite to Hollywood, some were more radical, opposed to, or expressly seeking to shape the film industry. These developments were also regularly deliberated by the SMPE. Articles on film appreciation, film education, little theaters, art film, and the rise of film as an instrument of state appeared in its journal throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Representatives of the amateur film movement also had a voice with the organization.107 Of note was the SMPE’s full view to developments in the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein attended a society meeting, and L. I. Monos­son of Amkino, a company that primarily distributed Soviet films in the United States, provided the society with a lengthy overview of the nationalized plan for “cinemafication” of the country. This presentation included a glimpse of film training and education, production infrastructure, and the extensive efforts to expand film viewing, almost half of which, Monosson claimed, was constituted by traveling cinema outfits.108 Eisenstein also presented to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) during the same California visit, addressing film technology directly. Eisenstein explored the virtues of what he called “the dynamic square,” a new screen shape that he deemed more dynamic and conducive to proper machine aesthetics.109 He rejected the old horizontal screen as being nostalgic, likening it to the dated myths of the frontier and fantasies of bucolic landscapes. Favoring instead verticality, Eisenstein celebrated its capacity to encompass the power of technology, engineering, and industry. He ultimately settled on the square as the shape that best showcased dynamic and dialectical clashes of all manner: optical, spatial, emotional, psychological. Playfully chiding industry members, he teased that point-­and-­shoot photographs and even postcards were more dynamic than motion pictures. What is interesting about this for our purposes is that these encounters occurred during an intense period of technological change, first and foremost the transition to synchronized sound. Eisenstein provoked the industry to think broadly about its apparatus, defamiliarizing things like screen ratio and theater dimensions to industry members. He did so by inserting a healthy dose of dialectical thinking into his presentations, encouraging disruption. His reception at the MPPDA is unknown. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s playful needling would have been perfectly at home at the SMPE, where both the science and the exploratory fictions of film and technology found fertile ground.

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The technological imagination supporting an expanded presentational apparatus appeared in other instances as well. Just before moving back to England to help build what would become a highly influential documentary film movement, John Grierson addressed the SMPE. In 1927, he implored members to consider the film industry’s responsibilities to popular, democratic principles and to recognize the audience as a thinking and engaged one. His speech included favorable discussions of documentary films, as well as British, German, and Soviet films.110 Grierson is well known to have spent a lifetime building film networks beyond the commercial theater, which was where he felt cinema’s most important contribution would ultimately manifest.111 Striking a different chord, Symon Gould spoke to the organization about the importance of Little Theaters, a contemporaneous if fledgling movement of independent theaters that showed foreign, repertory, and art cinema.112 Roy Winton also attended an SMPE meeting, outlining the workings of the Amateur Cinema League— an international association committed to amateur filmmaking and showing, broadly defined.113 The logics motivating each of these presentations tacitly or explicitly entailed a loosening of the American studio’s hold on filmmaking, but more so on film exhibition. Each plainly invoked the desirability of expanding the cultural functions of film performance, requiring venues and technologies to ease themselves from Hollywood’s grip. Indeed, throughout the United States and internationally, a diverse cultural movement grew in tandem with these industry discussions. Well-known activists and artists identified the “self-operated projector” as crucial to early film theory and criticism as well as the movement to diversify film as an intellectual, political, and aesthetic pursuit. Members of the avant-garde, theorists, writers, and critics extending from communist to fascist had started to integrate thinking about, making, watching, and, importantly, writing about cinema into their activities. This included the development of film societies—groups of people usually in major cities that sought to watch films selected for their artistic, historical, aesthetic, political, or educational potential, and other films not available on commercial film screens. Growing the means by which films could be seen outside of the logics dictated by the commercial industry was increasingly considered essential to a significant engagement with this new, vital cultural form. In other words, the means by which films could be seen had to be separated from the dominant institutions of film and their methods that constrained the form and prevented it from evolving.114 Many of these groups called for increased access to films and the means by which to project them. Portable projectors throughout the 1920s are

Engineering Portability    /    69 plainly and clearly linked to the growth of film theory, evident in the pages of journals such as Close Up, wherein its contributors advocated for forming film societies and called for “little projectors” and a way to liberate film exhibition from extant constraints (commercial and regulatory), many of which were focused on movie theaters.115 Parallel to this, key modernist figures like Lazlo Moholy-­Nagy integrated projection into an avant-­garde, multimedia art practice, freeing projection from its role in commercial cinema and using it to refashion light as kinetic sculptures.116 In the United States, the emergence of a sustainable portable projector or “small screen” movement, based on simple operation, takes on its fullest meaning with the magisterial palace as backdrop. “Small Theater,” “Midget Cinema,” “Portable Film Show”: each of these terms can be seen throughout industry literature of the period to describe various kinds of film projection. Some, such as Little Theaters, had limited seating capacity and offered specialized programming. Many others operated beyond the theater proper. The ferment of the Soviet project fed the uptake of film and photography by the Worker’s Film and Photo League in the United States, which relied on portable, adaptable film presentations in unions halls, barns, and other locations. A film society movement grew, mostly in major cities. Including engaged modernists and worker-­activists alike, this movement called for the diversification of film form and function away from Hollywood’s conventions. This entailed efforts to overtly politicize, aesthetically innovate, and also serve the broad family of needs grouped under the term civil society.117 Such shifts were not only about adapting film technologies but also placing them in dialogue with other media, sometimes emulating their functions or even replacing them: newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, canvas. A related, and in a sense more fundamental, call for a suitable apparatus to function in ways that these other media could was inseparable from calls for film’s specific technological and political diversification. Film historians have recognized that particularly in film’s earliest years the direction the technology and its institutionalization would take remained unclear. These discussions have been framed frequently around the struggle to establish legitimacy as a middle-­class, respectable cultural form. Many other questions remained to be determined, including those pertaining to film form. Would film become a storytelling medium? Or might it remain a more sensationalist, attractions-­based phenomenon? Yet another enduring set of questions pertained to where cinema would happen. While the rise of Hollywood’s institutions clearly amount to a certain kind of settling of such matters, the discussion about homes, schools, store windows, business and industrial uses, civic and social clubs, unions,

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museums, and transportations hubs continued. It is essential to differentiate specific sites from the institutions that undergirded them, the technologies and functions they served, and their evolving forms and meanings. The portability of projection was fundamental to a diversification of film form and function, an expanding number of institutions, and a proliferation of the sites of film performance. Persistent discussions recorded on the pages of the SMPE transactions and journals demonstrate that technical deliberations were foundational for these wider and widely evident considerations. Moreover, through examining these discussions, we can also trace negotiations and settlements, observing a coherent cluster of qualities that came to shape the meaning of portability as it pertained to film presentation. Over and over again, portable film projectors responded to appeals for a device that was easy to use, adaptable, programmable, and able to maximize image control. Most important of all, portable projectors came to be safe—that is, not flammable. It was this collective understanding that would catalyze subsequent developments. Portable projection requires thinking about film performance as an assemblage of devices, institutions, events, and purposes. Most importantly, these discussions and performance parameters grew in close proximity to the evolving film industry and thrived within the emerging and increasingly organized technical base that supported it. Portability as a technical capacity arose in response to the evermore high-tech and architecturally grand theater, espousing advanced technical principles while also plainly embodying Hollywood’s ambition and its corporate ideals. The imperative to expand the apparatus was not a simple story of ceaseless emergence or avant-gardism. It is also one demonstrating that members of the film industry (SMPE) were striving toward an ideal of portability underpinned by shared standards and the capital investments supplied by powerful industries. New markets were paramount. While amateurs, artists, and activists gained access to the technologies that were responding to demands for a self-operated and flexible machine, portable projectors were also serving governmental and industrial authorities in need of efficient and effective persuasion techniques. Thus, while portability addressed demands to diversify the cultural functions of film, it did not function in ways that only celebrated new modes of experimentation or marginalized, authentic expression. Portable projectors also decidedly fueled the very same asymmetries that artist, amateur, and activist projects sought to upend.

2. Spectacular Portability Cinema’s Exhibitory Complex, American Industry, and the 1939 World’s Fair

The 1939 New York World’s Fair is often recalled as the setting for television’s debut. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) inaugurated the country’s first regular television service with live coverage of the fair’s opening ceremonies, broadcast throughout the New York area on an estimated two hundred television screens.1 Building on his legacy as the “radio president” with his now famous Fireside Chats, President Roosevelt also played a key role in television’s history, delivering the first televised presidential address while speaking at the fair’s opening-­day celebration. This seemingly small speech efficiently combined a new technology with the symbolic power of a presidential address, supported by a grand exposition, funded by America’s largest and most powerful industries and corporations. Roosevelt’s words were an auspicious victory for the fair’s public relations team, which aggressively promoted the event across media and with all manner of triumphalism. This anecdote also reminds us of the place that public relations experts and strategies have long played in our media histories, selling us on dreams of connectivity, abundance, power, and convenience. All of this was gathered under the fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” declaring an immanent utopia fueled by technology, voracious consumerism, and benevolent corporations intent only on American well-­being and prosperity. Despite its distortions and outright absurdities, any reasonable observer would have to agree that it was a pretty good day for television. At the fair, RCA, General Electric (GE), and Westinghouse each demonstrated television technology, less as a domestic broadcast technology than a series of interactive exhibits. Intrepid fairgoers could stand and speak in front of a camera, a performance that simultaneously appeared elsewhere on the fairgrounds displayed on television screens that measured nine by 71

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eleven inches. Images instantaneously traveled by air.2 The technological transformation and transmission of the human body fit well within the fair’s broader commitment not just to heralding the newest industrial and technological advances, but also to exhibiting them in the newest and most engaging ways. These mediated and participant-based forms of exhibition echoed other exhibits nearby. AT&T invited visitors to make free longdistance calls, allowing them to instantly connect by voice to loved ones or strangers across the country. The communications behemoth also offered visitors the chance to make audio recordings of their own voices on discs, which they could then take home.3 Westinghouse urged visitors to talk, sing, or whistle into a microphone, which then translated the sounds into electromagnetic waves appearing on a nearby screen as moving, wavy lines. Television was but one among many modern technologies reshaping how American media corporations were displaying and presenting the future in 1939. In retrospect, it is easy to see the prescience of, in particular, television’s integration into fair exhibits. The phantom tele-ceiver, as it was called, signaled the postwar ascendancy of the electronic frontier that was soon to follow. The fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” boldly declared as much; though, to be sure, television was still an unpredictable technology in 1939. Its business models, institutions, and programming formats were not firmly set, and there was limited, mostly live, content. Screens were small, and image quality was uneven and uniformly poor compared to the familiar film images of the time. Indeed, in a telling and prophetic technological sleight of hand, RCA set up a 16 mm film projector and a small local transmitter on the fair site that could feed television receivers throughout the grounds by cable with reliable, constant, prerecorded film content for fear that its transmitters based at Radio City Music Hall would fail to supply steady and clear signals.4 The ten-minute movie played on a loop and featured current events to increase the illusion of liveness; film supplied roughly one-third of the images that appeared on television screens at the RCA exhibit. While television can be seen as a wondrous indicator of the near future, evolving small technologies of cinema prove—upon more careful inspection—to have played a more prominent role in a whole range of fair exhibits, including those of television itself. Contrary to the common refrain that television was the demise of cinema, the fair tells a different story. Television was a popular but ultimately minor element of fair exhibits and exhibition techniques. Cinema on the other hand made a lasting and significant impact on exhibition techniques and visitor experience. The display and

Spectacular Portability    /    73 performance scenarios created by a notable assemblage of film screens and projectors varied. Some were small, others big. Some hosted seated spectators and others worked to catch the eye of fairgoers who were simply walking by. Some projectors showed feature-­length films; many more played a mix of industrial, advertising, and business films. Still others provided information about and schedules of fair-­wide events. Some showed loops and extracts. The World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 in New York City was a historically rich event for its use of film and its technologies.5 The fair boasted over thirty-­four purpose-­built, dedicated movie theaters, amounting to an unusually dense clustering of films, technologies, and spaces. These theaters, widely varying in size and sophistication, showed hundreds of films, often continuously from morning until night. Yet what may seem at first to be an impressive if conventional iteration of cinema’s apparatus—film, projection, dark room, seated audience—was actually an opportunity to enrich our understanding of film exhibition beyond what we tend to think of as discrete theaters and toward lasting changes in film performance and projection scenarios. At the fair, many more moving images appeared in venues that could in no way be deemed theatrical. Instead, exhibitors made use of walls, floors, ceilings, small booths, and boxes.6 Such film display devices played in large halls, small galleries, and walkways designed expressly to facilitate steady human traffic. Moving images addressed a number of spectatorial dispositions—focused, bedazzled, delighted, d­ istracted—with varied duration. Importantly, film performance unfolded within or nearby elaborate multimedia exhibits wherein a visitor’s eye ambled over texts, still-­images, objects, maps, diagrams, working machines, and perhaps eventually a projected piece of film. Many fair exhibits embodied corporate image and aspiration, employed a range of expressive tools, and espoused the virtues of technological progress: streamlined architecture, moving sidewalks, rocket launches, frozen forests, talking cars, and wise-­cracking robots! Portable film technologies were a regularized element of this vast and captivating event. Considering the whole of the fair’s expansive context for film performance, a dynamic tapestry was put forth of celluloid formats, techniques, and processes: silent, sound, Technicolor, Kodachrome, black and white, 3D, animation, live action, 35  mm, 16  mm, and 8  mm. Film projectors were concealed and some foregrounded; others worked by front or rear projection. Select films showed as automated loops; some ran by the push of a button or as parts of unique hybrid performances that combined live and prerecorded elements. Some were designed and featured as sizable,

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spectacular augmentations of a purpose-built environment, while others were more ambient, blending in with other whirling, winding, flashing, and buzzing attractions. Moving-image technologies at the fair should not be understood merely as a body of films but as elements within a particular and sometimes experimental alignment of words, images, and sounds enabled by projection machines situated within a whole display ecology. Critically, while the fair’s rhetoric emphasized the future, its exhibition practices and elaborate media strategies also served to punctuate a decade of developments in which portable film technologies had been gradually transforming into business machines. Film use at the fair indexes a paradigmatic expansion of film display, exhibition, and culture. This consumer-driven and wondrous “World of Tomorrow” was immense, with no shortage of creative applications for portable projection technologies, from bottles of antacid to panoramic colorscapes. They served multiple purposes, from directing the eye to directing pedestrian traffic: This way, please! Indeed, the fair provides a glimpse of a blossoming film economy and a view to a very different film culture from the one implied by Hollywood’s Main Street marquee. This other film culture was predicated on ease of use, automation, and adaptability, on electrical display and push-button playback systems. It was, in part, a culture of gadgetry and consumerism that fed a demand for small moving-image machines both on the part of those who made and sold things and those seeking to buy them. In other words, we can see at the fair symptomatic evidence that film technologies fully participated in an everyday consumer ecology, one that shows the easy merging of film projectors and films with a culture of buying and selling, individual ownership, self-operated display, and spectacular corporate entertainment. At the level of merchandising, retailing, and managing public relations, film became a standard tool of a business culture rooted in the need to master the new art of telling compelling stories—about itself and to itself—with moving images and sounds and to harness new methods of placing products in motion-bound, malleable dreamworlds of mechanically reproduced sound and light. With the rise of this adaptable film apparatus, children and adults alike were routinely invited into an ascendant form of audiovisual address. They were offered often magical, rhythmic, mediated consumer experiences that extended well beyond the temporary fair and became standard elements of American media culture in the broadest sense. Amusing animated films made factory work seem like fun. Self-assembling cars were made of parts that flew through the air as they performed gravity-defying acrobatics. Futurist tales about highways assured us that soon fast roads would free us

Spectacular Portability    /    75 from urban drudgery. Magical electrical appliances automated chores and liberated housewives. All of these promises and more were made on film screens big and small with the assistance of an unfolding family of portable technologies. All worked in concert to normalize the rise of corporate-­ industrial languages seeking to increase buying, decrease worker dissent, and normalize a foundational modern ideal: new technologies are good. Recent writing by film and media scholars multiplies the kinds of films we examine and the methods we use to consider their importance.7 It also presupposes that we must be equally adept at assessing the complex sce­ narios in which these films appeared and the devices that made them audible and visible.8 Here portable film technologies are presented as components of an exhibition event, one irretrievably linked to industrial and corporate practice. As such, what follows augments recent writing on expositions and exhibitions that tends to focus on art, interactivity, immersion, and the progressive humanist ideals of connection and citizenship.9 Instead, I use the fair as a case study for mapping the ways in which film technologies and techniques were appropriated by a new generation of advertising, public relations experts, and industrial designers interested in exploring what they deemed a productive interface between moving images and sounds, using the languages of entertainment, didacticism, and persuasion.10 Film technologies created a dreamworld that developed parallel to and in dialogue with Hollywood, one fully invested in practices of industrial showmanship and the unbridled consumerism its promulgators hoped would follow. During the late 1920s and 1930s, American cinema underwent significant changes, with technological transformation playing a prominent role. Key here is the shift to synchronized sound film, which affected how films were made, who made them, how they were presented, and what watching sounded like (or what listening looked like, depending on your frame of reference). The shift to synchronized sound was also undergirded by corporate realignment, fortifying links among the telephone, radio, recorded music, publishing, and film industries. As the primary innovators of synchronized sound technologies and the amplification systems required to make these sounds heard, the electrical utilities served as important players in the corporate reorganization underway, necessarily enlarging what we think of when we think of the film industry proper.11 East Coast banks also acquired a larger stake in the American entertainment industry as part of these shifts.12 During these realignments, movie theaters became more complex, incorporating new technologies that electronically reproduced and amplified sounds that filled cavernous palaces and modest halls alike.13 Live radio broadcasts from movie theaters during the 1930s promoted

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made-in-Hollywood wares, and further instituted select flagship theaters as epicenters for unique occasions that also operated as dispersed, broadcast events. This period plainly indicates dedicated investment in theaters, further consolidating a particular architectural model as constitutive of cinema’s apparatus and its industry. Yet these technological and industrial shifts also facilitated another concurrent technological and industrial transformation, one that is preeminent for understanding the march of portable film technologies. Determined efforts to promote film as an architectural spectacle and experience—which survived robustly through to the opening of Radio City Music Hall late in 1932, one of the last grand picture palaces—were somewhat muted by the effects of the Great Depression. Shrinking audiences gave way to lower ticket prices, double features, cheap snacks (popcorn), and also to new and less ornate and ostentatious theater designs.14 Throughout the teens and into the early 1930s, the ideals enshrined in the portable apparatus persisted. The same year that the six-thousand-seat Radio City theater opened, an even smaller portable film format emerged. Eight millimeter was a new American gauge, even smaller, lighter, and less expensive than its 16 mm predecessor established in 1923. Quietly and slowly, another kind of cinema continued to take root: lightweight, easy-to-use, affordable, and highly adaptable. Over the course of these decades, dozens of such projectors and screens were designed, sold, and used, fortifying this other kind of cinema. This portable apparatus continued to assert that moving images need not be confined to Hollywood, theaters, feature films, stars, or big budgets. Cinema could serve a longer slate of purposes, affording a shifting assemblage of production, distribution, display, and performance techniques that were highly adaptive to an evolving media ecology and the growing number of institutions that shaped them. This kind of cinema was poised directly against the institutional and structural monumentality of the Hollywoodsanctioned movie theater and the regulatory structures that controlled what could appear there. It also sparked a degree of rearrangement, experiment, provisionality, and hybridity, as well as a series of additional uses for celluloid and projector. Included among these were the ascendant communications and public relations needs of American industry. Cinema’s expanded apparatus facilitated and accelerated the use of moving images and sounds by American corporations (and foreign industries operating in the United States). By the late 1930s, such companies included Bell Telephone, John Deere, International Harvester, General Mills, Shell Oil, Renault, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler Motor Corporation, Consolidated Edison, Westinghouse, Radio Corporation of

Spectacular Portability    /    77 America, Coty Cosmetics, United States Steel, and Republic Steel.15 To be sure, some of the films made by these companies showed on conventional theatrical movie screens, but many more showed in multipurpose spaces and in provisional venues carved out on factory floors, lunchrooms and boardrooms, in retail outlets, social clubs, and at industrial fairs and exhibitions throughout the 1930s. People gathered in temporary and repurposed spaces to watch public relations, advertising, and training films, among others. The World’s Fair built on these practices; however, it also amplified them using an event-­based logic that had long permeated large-­scale industrial exhibitions and fairs, as well as other exhibition techniques that employed small-­scale adaptable displays. The discussion that follows maps the differences between the exceptional monumentality of the fair and the more prosaic modes by which media and messages circulated. It also notes the ways in which film and other media fostered traffic across these categories. In other words, the use of film technologies at the fair is inextricably linked to quotidian manifestations of portable cinema as well those that are spectacular, immersive, and experimental.

Film and Its Dreamworlds The history of moving images has a long and deep relationship to cultures of exhibition, performance, and display that preexisted film per se and constituted the practices and traditions from which cinema grew: expositions and fairs, vaudeville and theater, magic shows, penny arcades, museums. That film and fair found early consort is not surprising. One of the key functions of fairs was to promote the wonders of the industrial age and celebrate its products. Some of the first films, wondrous in their own way, were those dedicated to advertising.16 Previous scholarship has documented the early uses of film technologies at turn-­of-­the-­century World’s Fairs.17 Fairs and exhibitions sought to command attention, and the biggest of them invested significant resources to harness new and innovative display techniques to explain, normalize, and celebrate industry and its often global and colonial ambitions. As such, fairs are important venues for analyzing cinema’s place in geopolitical and economic injustice. Throughout the twentieth century—at international, national, and regional fairs—cameras, films, projectors, and screens coalesced as an exhibition form that became regular tools in social and economic life and all of its asymmetries. 18 While only a few projections transpired at turn-­of-­the-­century fairs, as many as three thousand films were shown by the time Montreal hosted the World Exposition of 1967, with its gigantic screens and advanced

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audiovisual installations.19 The history of fairs and cinema is a complicated one wherein new technologies of film, corporatism and industrialism, experimentation, art, and geopolitics converge upon all manner of exhibitory genres, from the highly didactic to the intensely abstract, from unidirectional address to multidirectional and immersive experience.20 Fairs are therefore important for thinking about film and film technology for a number of reasons. Clearly, fairs entail an inordinate amount of capital, alerting us to how those who possess and control that capital elect to perform its powers for those without. Fairs often came with the full endorsement of governments and were frequently dressed up in the newest practices of presentation and display, setting technological and performance standards that directed subsequent exhibitions for years to come. The use of films at fairs should be included in any serious history of film, as it was at these fairs that new film technologies were often featured, showcased, and put to use. It was also at these events that film serviced corporate and industrial interests, taking root as regularized and standard elements of business practice that continues today in the form of websites, immersive event sponsorships, and overtly promotional audiovisual content. If exhibitory uses of film are to be considered seriously, then industrial, governmental, and corporate communications practices must be taken into account. For instance, the well-known and innovative work of Charles and Ray Eames of the 1950s and 1960s cannot be understood without considering the crucial role that IBM and the State Department played in sponsoring their art.21 For decades, large American companies had already operated extensive internal and external communications programs that involved print, photography, and in some instances film, albeit with less direct engagement with what we might conventionally call art.22 Many companies printed internal bulletins and newsletters. Advertising in newspapers and magazines and increasingly on radio provided American industry and its products a steady presence in public life. Film was but one part in this rising media reality. Roland Marchand documents the undertaking of a specific kind of media use across a broad swath of American businesses during the 1930s. DuPont, United States Steel, AT&T, General Electric, and the major car manufacturers began to think anew about how to conduct and control public perception of company activity and impact, or what was termed “public relations.” In part as a rebuke to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and a fear that his government’s liberal policies would erode the autonomy granted private industry, corporations began to augment previous communication practices. Moving away from direct or didactic statements about particular

Spectacular Portability    /    79 products or processes, the new public relations strategy produced messages proclaiming industry (unbridled by government regulation) was an essential agent in building prosperous, inclusive, and moral ways of living.23 Increasingly, one could find on the pages of popular magazines, and across many other outlets, public relations campaigns extolling the importance of steel for building safe school buses and resilient bridges. Chemistry left behind the esoterica of the lab and became essential for bettering everyday life for all.24 Historian William Bird notes that a key part of this communications shift entailed where and in what form such messages appeared. American companies actively embraced popular media and its techniques, increasing their use of drama, personal narratives, and colloquial language. The tropes of entertainment combined with messages of how corporations—and not just their products—improved daily life for average people. Building on previous display practices that had long included dioramas, working models, photomurals, and actual re-­creations of factory processes, American industry increasingly made use of magazines, radio, traveling exhibits, national and regional fairs, comics, and film to proclaim its benevolence and positive power to ensure prosperity.25 Employing film to tell generalizable stories (e.g., why oil is good for everybody), and also to sell specific products across a growing display infrastructure, appealed to a mushrooming number of manufacturers and retailers. This was true in part because this infrastructure gave them access to groups of people willing to gather attentively for a sustained show (audiences) but also because it allowed for new and sometimes automated ways of forwarding sales messages through narrative, movement, sounds, rhythm, visual effects, and projected light. In short, through many of the formal properties of cinema—understood by some as particularly effective at securing favorable consumer attention—films might change minds and behaviors. Expanded and adaptable cinema enabled the site-­specific targeting of messages capable of addressing both attentive and distracted con­sumers wherever a projection device might be set up. These properties replaced what were previously live demonstrations or stage shows and offered the benefit of scaled economies supplied by centralized production, recording, and simplified performance requirements. Think of film projection as a kind of presentation software. Portable projectors also likely offered the basic appeal of novelty; they were purveyors of modern, illuminated messages that could appear on a wall, in a display window, on an office desk, or at a train or bus station! In addition to its use as an outward-­facing public relations tool, film had long been appropriated by American industry for other purposes as

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well. This included improving worker morale and training.26 The electrical companies and automobile manufacturers were early adaptors and often blessed with deeper pockets than American educators, who were also interested in the pedagogical capacities of cinema. Partly because of the expense, educational film and media enthusiasts struggled throughout the decade.27 Industrial and business use, however, developed comparatively rapidly. A new chorus of advocates began to herald film’s ability to reach and influence millions of people effectively and efficiently. A slowly burgeoning network of screening venues and distribution and display infrastructures became valuable resources, creating access to audiences trained to sit through the whole of a given show (rather than walk by a poster or billboard or turn a page in a magazine). This growing platform combined with often unelaborated and thinly supported claims such as that cinematic language and address possessed “rare immediacy,” “force,” and “shades of meaning.” These declarations were likely more powerful because of the still-recent innovation of portable synch-sound projection.28 Tailor-made films supported carefully scripted sales pitches and standardized company platforms. They were decorated with music and a degree of professionalism that regional and local sales teams might lack or be incapable of replicating.29 Further, new modes of dissemination and display—such as the slowly growing network of 16 mm portable projectors—promised to strengthen existing circuits and operate as a cost-effective workaround of theater owners’ resistance to showing such films. Besides these impromptu and provisional projection scenarios at fairs or traveling shows, this film infrastructure also galvanized brick-and-mortar venues comprised of schools, civic clubs, and religious groups.30 These also became venues for industrial films. Finally, the use of film by American businesses throughout the 1930s is efficiently punctuated by the 1938 inaugural issue of the magazine Business Screen, a publication that was in print for decades thereafter. Largely funded by advertising from film technology firms and their close relations, Business Screen documented and advocated for thinking about film and a family of visual technologies as business machines. America’s most powerful corporations integrated film into multimedia public relations campaigns. Take but one example: General Motors (GM) had overtaken Ford as the leading American car manufacturer in 1929. The company had been especially active in public relations efforts during the 1930s, frequently not electing to trumpet cars or even to promote its brand, but to market the very idea of private enterprise itself as an engine of progress and a service to America.31 GM consistently promulgated “free opportunity, free initiative, free competition,” often independent from

Spectacular Portability    /    81 any particular car or manufacturing process.32 The company voraciously consumed film services during this decade. They issued contracts to both Audio Productions and Jam Handy to make its films, which at this time generally recorded in 35  mm but then issued prints in both 35  mm and 16 mm. It is estimated that Jam Handy completed as many as forty films for GM in 1937 alone.33 To be sure, GM had a well-­developed film program with intraorganizational applications for film directed at worker training, morale, and loyalty. It also utilized films for its extended constituencies. For instance, GM had forty-­two regional motor clubs equipped with 16 mm projectors. Managers, car dealers, and employees frequented club meetings, where films were shown.34 GM was also well known for its “Caravan of Progress” that evolved out of earlier fairs and began touring the United States in 1936, featuring glimpses of future and sometimes futurist products, including streamlined cars and buses, devices that emitted stereophonic sound, early televisions, and microwave oven prototypes.35 Films were a persistent element of such exhibits. Parallel to GM’s progress caravan, it commissioned A Car Is Born (Jam Handy, 1937), a film clearly and playfully titled to gesture toward Hollywood’s contemporaneous feature film, A Star Is Born (William Wellman, 1937), starring Janet Gaynor and Frederick March. A Car Is Born traveled the country with reportedly fifty different front men who worked to get the film seen in select venues; a team of projectionists trailed them to orchestrate booked shows.36 One estimate suggests that millions of people saw these films, which were plainly part of a more elaborate and cross-­ media address orchestrated by GM.37 Between film and caravan, the company brokered in popular, often futurist, presentations and displays that drew crowds in large cities and small towns alike. Technological innovation became an attraction and a virtue, one supported by a proudly muscular industrial research and development program. Such activities build on what Ariel Rogers has sketched during the decade as a spreading network of moving screens, connected to trains, cars, buses, and occasionally airplanes.38 GM carried these practices and commitments into its fair activities, finding a comfortable home in New York’s “World of Tomorrow.” By 1939 when the fair doors opened, ongoing industrial display and performance practices further merged with a burgeoning American industrial film scene, one that was benefitting from a growing national viewing infrastructure for film presentation that made use of but also exceeded movie theaters. It also included the ascendant logics of public relations, which were not so much replacing but complementing industrial-­process films and the folksy parables of modernization that had long been made

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and circulated by American car companies.39 The evolving language of public relations increasingly positioned American corporations at the center of American identity and favored terms like progress, research and development, science, technology, innovation, as well as safety, freedom, and prosperity. With this shift in corporate and industrial address firmly in place, the fair presented opportunities to interpret and express these terms by using the tools and techniques of grand industrial expositions. Growing and unprecedented expenditures on promotional displays and exhibits throughout the decade reached a climax in New York City, prompting the design and construction of signature buildings and monumental exhibits. 40 The optimistic, technocratic, and futurist fair stood in stark defiance of the preceding decade of economic strife and New Deal government assistance. Eager to assert the capacities of unbridled corporate capitalism, the fair became a staging ground to prop up not only abundant products and the processes that made them but also to advance the worldviews fueling them. Cultural historian Warren Sussman shows that the 1939 World’s Fair in New York boldly continued the convention of all modern fairs: to display the triumphs of state, science, and industry. Initially conceived as a way to counter the lingering effects of the Great Depression in New York City, the fair was incorporated by individuals constituting an audacious display of wealth and power, including the heads of twenty-three banking and trust companies, fifteen Wall Street firms, and eight insurance companies. Presidents of such corporate behemoths as Standard Oil, General Electric, General Motors, CBS, and NBC, also served.41 Additionally, fifteen elected politicians joined the fair’s forty-six-member board of directors, including New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. During this tumultuous period of American and indeed world history, the fair corporation and its administrators, as well as exhibitors, reassured visitors that after almost a decade of economic hardship and rising European conflict, government and industry were successfully building a new world. Industrial pavilions repeatedly extolled the virtues of technological innovation, corporate benevolence, abundance, and consumerism.42 Certainly, the event’s vast size meant that exhibits and concessions pursued this broad imperative in many ways, each differently shaping common cultural refrains. Robert Rydell and Christina Cogdell have shown that the fair inflected its utopianism with normative ideals of the body and the family, some of which were subtended specifically by eugenics and more generally by the racism that permeated the culture at large. The politics of gender in this future world yielded two very different kinds of women. One appeared as a kind of commodified spectacle enshrouded virtuously in a sanitized

Spectacular Portability    /    83 world of home appliances, convenience foods, and beauty products. The other was offered up as a kind of progressive and sexually liberated figure in the numerous nudie and peep shows that populated fair concessions.43 The “World of the Future” was predictably complex, inevitably burdened by contemporaneous prejudices and asymmetries. Despite the contradictions, general trends can be identified, including the prominent strategies of address employed by American corporations. Historian Roland Marchand argues that while fairs had, up until New York, regularly served as sites for businesses to sell their wares, the 1939 fair marked a clear shift away from an exclusive emphasis on the selling of things and toward the forwarding of a particular and carefully crafted corporate image.44 Resonating with the rising logics of public relations, companies such as General Motors, Ford, Westinghouse, RCA, and AT&T each commissioned monumental if temporary signature buildings that embodied their respective corporate visions. These structures employed the latest practices of industrial architecture: modern, streamlined, and efficient. In addition to architecture, contemporary techniques of exhibition design inside and outside of these buildings completed the vision. Whole building interiors and surrounding grounds became blank canvasses upon which to pursue the ideal of persuasive corporate communication. Film was but one part of this whole exhibition environment, one that didn’t just feature moving images but all manner of moving things. One study of this fair’s exhibition techniques indicates that 77 percent of exhibits utilized moving parts of some sort.45 Suitably, then, motion pictures, ever-­changing projection slides, and vibrant lighting (particularly at night) appeared throughout the grounds. Buildings constructed of glass, exterior and interior moving platforms and ramps, and electrical staircases underscored the perpetual, controlled movement of all things at the fair: progress.

Industrial Showmanship Trained as an architect, Donald Deskey served as a prominent industrial designer who, alongside others, created the art deco interiors for Radio City Music Hall, which also held the largest movie theater in the world upon its opening late in 1932. Deskey worked on the prestige buildings and exhibits that populated the fairgrounds, including the Communications Building (figure 10). Film suited what he dubbed “industrial showmanship.” In 1938 he wrote: “Every device for the dramatic presentation of products and ideas is being probed. The motion picture is being used in many cases as an important part of the display. However, the use of the sound film alone in

figure10.  Image of design for the interior of the Communications Building at the New York World’s Fair by Donald Deskey. Here a projector, housed inside the eye of a gigantic modernist sculpture of a human head, throws images onto an adjacent wall in a windowless exhibition hall. Evidence suggests that this hall was built using this design, but that the film screen was ultimately a rear-­projection setup. Business Screen 1, no. 2 (1938): front cover.

Spectacular Portability    /    85 a standard theater setting is nothing new to the visitor from the crossroads. But as an instrument for the visualization of ideas, it is being incorporated into more elaborate mechanical devices; stage presentations for industry with the motion picture as an integral part.”46 Freed from the constraints of a theater, Deskey understood film as an important creative tool harnessed, along with others, to a sophisticated exhibitory environment. In this, he joined several other designers who held prominent fair commissions in New York. In addition to Norman Bel Geddes, discussed later, Walter Dorwin Teague is perhaps the most prolific, with seven major New York fair exhibits to his name. His commissions included work for Ford, Du Pont, United States Steel, Kodak, Texaco, and Consolidated Edison. Films and various moving projections were integrated into each of these pavilions. Teague himself called his exhibits “hit shows.” Anticipating phenomena like Disneyland, which would not follow for another sixteen years, these ideas envisioned not single media but whole environments, comprised of architecture, industrial design, exhibition design, and new and old media. A range of film technologies and techniques shaped the rising importance and imperative for American corporations to increasingly adopt the tools and techniques of showmanship.47

Films and Fairs Three World’s Fairs were held in the United States during the 1930s: Chicago World’s Fair “World of Progress” (1933), the San Francisco “Pageant of the Pacific” (1939), and the better known and much larger fair held in Queens, New York City, “The World of Tomorrow” (1939). Films and film screens played a role at each of these fairs. A few words about the Chicago fair helps to set an instructive stage for screen use in New York, demonstrating both continuity and change. The Chicago fair boasted a multitude of moving picture applications, extending to the use of film to record and monitor the movement of crowds around particular exhibits, an example of early consumer observation research.48 Nonetheless, the largest single use of film at the fair was advertising. The bulk of films shown at the fair promoted products spanning automobiles, pocket flashlights, alloy metals, radios, radio batteries, dentistry, travel, safety glass for cars, refrigerators, stoves, tires, newspapers, pianos, shoes, paint, tractors, canned food, bread, yeast, and steel. The advertising industry even conscripted film to promote itself. In 1933, the Advertising Federation of America and the American Association of Advertising Agencies made a film called “Golden Years of

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Progress,” shown at the Chicago World Fair (1933–34). The film extolled the virtues of advertising as an industry, contributing—so it was claimed— to a higher standard of living for all.49 Motion pictures were also purposed to implore fairgoers to see motion pictures.50 That is, Hollywood advertised at the fair in the best way it knew how. Portable projectors were amply dispersed throughout the grounds. Advantages included their light weight, the lower cost of prints and machinery, decreased fire hazard, ease of operation, and adaptability. Some of these projectors required an ever-present operator; many others did not, running continuously without intervention (figure 11). Ten projectors operated by direct audience intervention: push-button cinema. Of the one-hundred or so portable projectors at the Chicago fair, only six serviced conventional theatrical setups.51 On the whole, projector and screen placement varied considerably. Roughly one-third were hidden behind a wall, one-sixth were concealed by purpose-built cabinets, and one-sixth were placed in the open for all to see. Just over half of the small projectors utilized rear-projection technology—what were often called daylight film screens—in order to save space and to allow projection in full light, natural or artificial. Some other projection environments relied on mirrors or featured projectors mounted above the ceiling or beneath floors, in order to accommodate projection in very small spaces.52 Screen size also varied dramatically. Twenty percent of film screens at the fair were no more than twenty inches across; roughly half were smaller than forty inches. Only two screens were as wide as eight feet across.53 The small, portable projector and screen loomed large over the Chicago fair film scene. The largely nonfiction films shown served multiple functions. Many told stories about particular manufacturers and how their goods were made; others instructed salesmen or showed products in use. Thus advertising was pitched as education. Still others attracted passers-by to a specific exhibit, mimicking automated circus barkers. Two-thirds played to standing or moving people, while roughly a third of the projectors at the fair played to seated audiences, where seating capacity ran as low as 24 and as high as 224.54 Clearly the Chicago fair creates a quick portrait of a diversified film environment. Viewers walked by a screen far more often than they sat in front of one. The mystical beam of light that spans the screening space back-to-front was frequently resituated to come from below, above, or behind the screen. And the idea of a big, main attraction here is clearly incidental to a cinema that was small, provisional, and sometimes supplemental to other attractions.

figure 11.  Beginning in 1938 and extending to 1940, portable projector manufacturers frequently paired their products with grand industrial exhibitions, regularly invoking fair iconography and rhetoric in advertising campaigns. Here a portable projector is pictured in a console to attract passersby. Its continuous operation in silent or sound mode is presented here as a reliable and essential tool for sales displays and exhibits. Its successful use at the Chicago Fair is offered as incentive for future use in New York. [Advertisement], Business Screen 1, no. 3 (1939): 47.

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While the San Francisco Fair of the same year did have several dedicated theaters and over one hundred 16 mm projectors in use, the New York fair was simply bigger and featured a cornucopia of moving-image technologies and related practices.55 By 1939, a well-established network of production companies emerged to create publicity and advertising films (Jam Handy and Audio Productions being key examples). By the end of the decade, advertising agencies had begun to open film divisions.56 The basic fact of film’s prominence at the fair featured in fair publicity. A press release just over a month before the fair’s opening day averred: “The wide-eyed movie fan might spend his entire time wandering from theater to theater at the New York World’s Fair 1939 and see everything from a full-length Hollywood feature to a foreign travelogue short without once opening his purse. The Fair corporation itself, the United States government, a number of states, a score of foreign nations and uncounted commercial exhibitors will utilize the moving image and the silver screen to an unprecedented extent to tell the story of their significance and amuse their admirers.”57 Grover Whalen, the fair’s president and public figurehead, exulted that at the fair a “new high mark in the use of motion pictures for educational purposes, for the betterment of living conditions, for the advancement of science, for the improvement of health, and for the distribution of the products of industry, will be reached.”58 Film, according to Whalen, worked in perfect harmony with the new frontier that the fair itself sought to realize: modern, moving, efficient, automatic, and electric.59 Film’s suitability to the fair’s themes manifested at multiple levels, from specific on-site event planning to generic, nationally circulated publicity. For instance, events at the fair were choreographed to facilitate recording by newsreel teams; crews were accommodated with special parking passes, advance notice of events and parade routes, suggested staging areas and shooting angles, and on-site lighting.60 Collins reports that “several thousand feet” of floor space were given over to newsreel crews in the Press Building.61 In addition to regular appearances in nationally distributed newsreels, fair administrators also made promotional movies. According to Collins, head of the fair’s film activities, the NY Fair was the first fair to do this.62 The fair’s official publicity film “Let’s Go to the Fair” (World Fair Corporation, 1939, 16 mm, sound, color) was disseminated nationally. Early in 1940, sixty-two prints of the film were in active circulation, facilitated by so-called nontheatrical powerhouses such as the YMCA (fifteen prints) and by regional distribution and projection services that supplied the film to clubs, schools, and civic groups. The tourism industry confirmed keen interest in the fair; the National Trailways bus company featured the official fair film daily in

Spectacular Portability    /    89 its Chicago hub.63 Two railroad companies paraded the film regularly at rail station theaters. It was also commonly shown at Grand Central Station (New York City).64 Besides making and distributing this widely seen film, the fair also maintained its own official movie theater that played select titles continuously throughout the fair’s operating hours. The schedule for the so-­called “Little Theatre” appeared in the special fair supplement published by the New York Times daily. It was primarily at this theater that the fair established a reputation for its unprecedented, sustained, and concentrated display of educational, industrial, and documentary film. News of the fair’s nonfiction film offerings was also available in publications like Film News, which celebrated the “largest assemblage of nontheatrical films ever shown in one place at one time.”65 Local papers also published screening schedules and offered further comment.66 The Little Theatre, located in the Science and Education Building, sat 253 audience members. It ran a slate of some forty-­ three films, among them the well-­known film made specifically for the fair, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s 1939 The City (35 mm sound; shown twice daily, four days a week). Much heralded documentaries such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 35 mm, 1936) and The River (Pare Lorentz, 35 mm, 1938) also played. Hollywood expressed little interest in the fair.67 Though the film industry’s trade group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), did commission Cecil B. DeMille to create a film about American history, drawing excerpts from Hollywood films. It could be viewed in the U.S. Federal Government Pavilion.68 At a glance, it seems that all manner of small and large, local and international exhibitors screened at least one film in theaters and exhibition spaces of varied sizes. This included local colleges and various representatives of the New York municipal system, such as the Fire Department and the Department of Sanitation. At least nineteen foreign governments also screened films. Among governments operating a theater were Britain, Brazil, France, Russia, and the United States. Each had large theaters with regular film screenings planned throughout the day. The British Pavilion featured 141 different films, Brazil 82, and France 72. Of the thirty-­six commercial exhibitors using conventional theatrical settings, the largest theater by far was that constructed by General Motors, with a seating capacity of 612. Coca-­Cola sat 350 in front of a ten-­foot screen. Coty Inc. featured a 16 mm Kodachrome sound film with seating for 77. Fair authorities estimated that attendance for film screenings at all theatrical venues during the first year of the fair’s operation ran in excess of twenty million.69

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Well over five hundred films were shown on the grounds in the fair’s first year alone.70 Some of these films were commissioned specifically for the event, and many others were culled from growing industrial and state film libraries. Some used flashy techniques or enacted experiments on a grand scale in order to garner attention. For instance, Chrysler commissioned what became a popular 3D film entitled In Tune with Tomorrow, featuring a self-assembling car using stop-motion animation, discussed further below.71 Kodak’s Cavalcade of Color exhibit, also called Kodak’s “World of Color,” was dubbed “a quasi-motion picture technique,” and gained frequent mention in fair literature.72 It used eleven screens mounted side by side on a curved wall. Constantly changing Kodachrome slides emanated from an armada of synchronized, dissolving-slide projectors, yielding an automated, moving panorama measuring 180 feet wide and 20 feet high.73 A notched sound film ran the show automatically, dimming the lights, bringing them up, and coordinating everything in between, including the varied timing for each slide. The elaborate show was synchronized with music and a voiceover and made use of more than two thousand unique slides that at times displayed individual objects in isolation from other images, and at others combined to display integrated panoramas. The presentation resembled that of an illustrated lecture film: a script was delivered in an earnest, friendly baritone, supplemented with music at appropriate pauses. No seats were provided. Despite that, people came and stayed for the whole of the show, a fact that commentators considered a further tribute to its healthy appeal.74 Color film, a moving automated display, and a large-screen format combined to create an unusual and extremely popular attraction at the fair.75 Fred Waller oversaw the Kodak exhibit and at the same time developed Vitarama, a similar multiscreen system that employed moving rather than still images. Planned for installation inside the Petroleum Building, Vitarama did not ultimately appear at the fair though the idea of it was widely discussed and persisted for decades after.76 The curved Vitarama screen was intended to capture projections emanating from multiple, linked 16  mm projectors. Simultaneous to his Vitarama, Waller also helped to orchestrate a multiscreen installation in the fair’s signature Perisphere building, consisting of figures marching to the fair’s theme song. Waller’s fair work, some of which relied on portable projectors, underpinned his later work on the wide, curved, multiscreen exhibition environment that eventually became Cinerama in the 1950s, a development that led to a permanent change in the size and shape of commercial film screens.77 Experimentations in the World of Tomorrow employed multiple film technologies that

Spectacular Portability    /    91 recombined cinema’s expanding technical apparatus. Big and small, temporary and enduring, architectural and portable elements of that apparatus converged to shape moving images and their sounds for decades.

Films, Fairs, and Cars From multi-­and widescreen installations to ad hoc, small, and incidental screens, many films played automatically and continuously without human intervention or other accompaniment. Beyond the more spectacular examples discussed above, film projections became small parts of shows and demonstrations otherwise comprised of live and partly automated elements. As noted in a contemporaneous report by Richard Griffith, several exhibitions featured films projected onto walls, atop maps, and as elements in multimedia live shows.78 The American automobile industry provides an exceptionally interesting and telling cross-­section of the many ways in which film technologies were being put to use at the fair. These uses offer a compelling case for arguing that both small-­and large-­screened projections need to be examined side by side in order to reveal that logics of sales and persuasion wove many cinematic or exhibitory modes together into an intricate media ecology deployed by powerful interests. Orchestrated by Ford, GM, and Chrysler, film use ran the gamut from small and incidental to big and spectacular, shaping elaborate exhibits that, as Alice Goldfarb Marquis has claimed, “flamboyantly reflected the car’s central role in American life.”79 Long before the fair, Ford Motor Company began an in-­house film program in 1914; General Motors began making sales and promotional films in 1924. During the 1920s and 1930s, all three auto companies utilized film in multifaceted ways: screen magazines, training films, worker education, publicity, exhibitions, and advertising. Some of these titles enjoyed broad release and appeared in commercial theaters. Some showed primarily in factories, car dealerships, or company social clubs; still others traveled to churches, men’s or women’s clubs, YMCAs, and schools. In addition to detailing the Ford program’s diverse approach to film use, Lee Grieveson demonstrates that the company’s films were among the most widely seen of the silent era.80 “Car movies” were a familiar genre to Americans who, during the 1920s and 1930s, saw the national highway program connect more and more communities, witnessed the first trends toward suburbanization, and drove to the first “car cinemas” (the first drive-­in opened for business in New Jersey in 1933). Ford, Chrysler, and GM each projected films in theaters at the fair. They also employed film technologies to explore acoustic

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and spatially multidimensional exhibition techniques. Indeed, a family of technologies operated in a kind of partial and para-cinematic way, linking still and moving displays, flashing lights, and electrically amplifying sound in vast display environments. Collectively, this amounted to a corporate experiment, a new kind of interface between industrial and consumer desire. Cinema was a modern machine, creatively and imaginatively put in the service of other machines—in this case, automobiles—to induce both wonder and desire. Often the grandest of fair installations bore either direct or indirect relations to moving-image technologies and techniques. Consider Futurama: General Motors commissioned the prominent industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes to fashion what would become one of the most heralded exhibits yielded by the fair. Bel Geddes began his career as a stage and theater designer, crafting sets for several films as well.81 He was an advocate of new theatrical design, wherein American designers adapted aspects of the European avant-garde, working toward dissolving stark boundaries between audience and stage. Key features included the simplification of stage scenery and theater interiors and the use of inventive lighting and sound to create all-encompassing experiences. The latter of these plainly echoed the designs of avant-garde movie theaters more than a decade earlier.82 Through his theatrical work, Bel Geddes used dynamic lighting and moveable walls. He disregarded the proscenium arch. Such innovations carried over to his later work on shop windows and industrial and exhibition designs. Donald Albrecht described Bel Geddes’s designs as “theatricalized architecture” because of his attention to movement around and within spaces and for his attempts to dynamically engage people within those spaces.83 Futurama embodied many of Bel Geddes’s design principles, and then some. It featured a moving 1,586-foot “chair train” that mobilized thousands of seated spectators daily, carrying them through hundreds of connected and elaborately designed dioramas. The exhibit illustrated the highway-saturated future of 1960. Riders enjoyed aerial views of miniature highways and fifty thousand tiny cars, ten thousand of which zipped around the expansive installation. As the future was air-conditioned, riders enjoyed the fifteen-minute attraction in relative comfort, an especially welcome respite during New York’s hot summers. Futurama dynamically spatialized the relationship between spectator and spectacle, moving viewers through a stage whose beginning and end could not be easily framed or enclosed. Its use of moving miniatures created a streamlined future that positioned the car and its motorways as the primary organizing principle of American

Spectacular Portability    /    93 life. A dramatic voiceover helped to contain this roaming view, linking part to whole, traveler to journey, and diorama to event. This recording was secured optically on 150 unique filmstrips, and played from a nearby control room in accordance with where each group of four riders was in relation to the unfolding show.84 The ride combined the latest sound inscription, reproduction, and amplification technologies, the very ones being used in film theaters as well as in the new portable sound film projectors scattered across the fairgrounds.85 While Futurama was not the conventional apparatus we have long prized as film historians, technologies of cinema undeniably shaped the ride experience at its core. It embraced highly coordinated mechanical movement and reproduced sounds; its iconography echoed that of the much older ride films like Hale’s tours, and its emphasis on horizontality presaged the rollout of Cinerama’s widescreen, whose proprietary screen and films likened theatrical movie-­watching to panoramic travel. Celluloid strips with recorded sound ran continuously throughout the ride. The soft, intimate, synched voiceover directed viewers in timed segments to look at relevant parts of the diorama on choreographed cue. It helped to contain and control where and for how long people looked, functioning to limit a potentially sprawling and expansive view. Futurama also literally became cinematic, as the exhibition was central to the subsequent General Motors film called To New Horizons (Jam Handy, 1940). The twenty-­three minute futurist documentary fashioned the automobile and its highways-­to-­come as the peak of an evolutionary model of human transportation. The on-­site fair exhibit was integral to the film, which included footage of the building’s entrance and relied heavily on the diorama, operationalizing its working models in the second half of the film. The film’s scripted narration was largely borrowed from the exhibit’s voiceover, itself mirrored in the souvenir pamphlet handed out at the fair.86 To New Horizons showed at the fair in its second year and was afterward subsumed by GM’s media library and public relations program. Distributed widely in 35 mm and 16 mm prints, at its core, this film was consonant with the logics of the GM exhibit. Also a public relations film, it was part of a campaign to normalize a particularly corporate form of urban planning. Importantly, calling for efficient, accessible, and elaborate highway systems implied that automobiles were necessary consumer goods and that observable socioeconomic disparity was inconsequential to infrastructural transformation. The displacement of poor, working, and minority families, a well-­known consequence of highway construction, was nowhere to be seen.

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Beyond Futurama, GM also boasted the largest conventional theater at the fair with 650 seats, which provided the venue for several films as well as other kinds of performances. For instance, an animated short called A Coach for Cinderella (Jam Handy, 1936) was shown here. In this film, a GM car (rather than a horse-drawn carriage) is assembled by woodland creatures in order to rush Cinderella to the ball (figure 12). GM also showed ’Round and ’Round (1939), which used stop-action animation to tell the story of a business that made not cars but widgets. The film documented all phases of industrial production, from the sourcing of raw materials grown by happy farmers to the safe and steady manufacture of widgets by diligent workers and machines to the eager purchasing of the very same widgets by workers with their earned wages. All laborers were played by wooden toys. The film opens with a close-up of a spinning toy top, a telling and ostensibly innocent index to the industrial cycle depicted in the film. Upbeat music emulates a series of ringing bells and xylophones. Modern business is likened to child’s play and to benevolent, closed systems that please all.87 It is in this context that To New Horizons acquires poignant value within a diversified industrial film program that employed among its modes of address one that was clearly directed to children. Drawing on a number of animation techniques, miniature models, puppets, fairy tales and toys, many other films also invoked the whimsical tropes of family entertainment. Industrial work became fun, associated with happy play and bountiful wonderment. In other words, while some films and exhibits at the fair were addressed to adults, almost half were made to appeal to children.88 This was by no means incidental; capturing young audiences and gaining access to schools was a tactic aggressively encouraged in public relations literature of the time. 89 While the address to children may have been relatively new for the burgeoning genre of industrial film, the role of film in invoking wonder was relatively common. For instance, Ford Motor Company featured a film entitled Symphony in F (Audio Productions, 1940), which depicted everyday scenes in a Ford factory enlivened by an animated sequence of marching purchase orders and happy toy-workers. The film includes a stop-motion animation segment of its most recent model car self-assembling without human or factory assistance. As with Futurama, the diorama built for the Ford exhibit became the setting for a prolonged segment of the film: the diorama’s miniature moving parts performed for the camera, constituting vignettes of a field laborer picking cotton, a man riveting a car part, an executive standing behind a desk, and a secretary powdering her nose. The film closes with a view to the whole of the mountain-shaped diorama, slowly turning in the Ford exhibit hall. Depicting an evolutionary narrative, the

figure 12.  This add for Jam Handy, one of the leading industrial filmmakers, featured “A Coach for Cinderella” shot in Technicolor. The recent color process was not yet a regular aspect of feature filmmaking and was a “new” and novel aspect of all filmmaking during this period. The ad appeared on the back cover of Business Screen magazine claiming an audience of fourteen million. This was only the third issue of the new magazine. Its very formation indexes the growing field of industrial and business films. Business Screen 1, no. 3 (1938): back cover.

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story begins at the base. It enacts the procurement of raw materials (mostly from exoticized foreign locations with indigenous workers). The display then spirals upward toward the highly civilized industrial logics (and white workers) that directly result in the assembly of a finished car. The exaltation of global capital and its hierarchies of injustice were made compelling through technologies of miniaturization and cinema working in concert. Symphony in F functioned both as a stand-alone media text and as one integrally linked to a site-specific exhibit, extending that exhibit’s reach beyond the event itself. After New York industrial film libraries grew and continued to make such films available for free to civic associations, factories, schools, libraries, and labor and community groups. Magical cars were also commonplace at the fair. Each auto company— whether by animation or stop-motion—showed films in which automobiles miraculously became whole from parts. The theme of the magical automobile with the powers of self-construction resonates with the insight of Marchand, who has suggested that such magic was a common element of fair attractions.90 Perhaps nowhere was this industrial magic more fully evident than in Chrysler’s 3D film, which became known as the most popular and most spectacular film at the fair. In Tune with Tomorrow (John Norling, 1939), billed as “10 Minutes of Magic,” was one part of a five-part exhibit or, as Chrysler called it, a “Five Star Show.” The show featured a “Rocket Port of the Future,” which itself contained a fifteen-minute sound film entitled “History and Romance of Transportation” (figure 13). The film appeared on a large silhouetted map of the world. A live on-stage rocket launch served as a finale for the film. Richard Griffith notes that as the film was incomplete without the live launch, it was essentially useless for post-fair viewing.91 Yet, it remains a compelling example of the ways that “incomplete” films formed smaller elements of whole hybrid industrial performances. It is also worth noting that live sound effects were also used. Another section of Chrysler’s five-part exhibit featured a “Miracle Plymouth,” billed as a “talking car” that responded to questions and claimed to perform “amazing feats of magic.” Chrysler’s 3D film, In Tune with Tomorrow, ran for a total of seventeen minutes and began with a 2D, seven-minute didactic introduction by Major Bowes, a popular radio host who explained how the 3D effect was achieved. The 3D portion of the film begins with a shot of the half-mile-long assembly line at a Detroit-based Plymouth plant. It then quickly carries viewers to the story’s main stage, where each part of the soon-to-be car is animated by stop-motion. For roughly ten minutes, viewers watch as the various elements of the car fly toward the screen and then seemingly beyond it, eventually

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figure 13.  Postcard from the 1939 World’s Fair. An on-stage rocket launch completes a short film on the history of transportation, projected onto a giant, wall-sized map. Author’s collection.

settling into a completed on-­screen vehicle. The bits and pieces zoom through the air to upbeat, peppy music written specifically for the film.92 Visitors to the exhibit donned bi-­colored glasses, shaped like the front grill of a car, with lenses where the headlights would normally be. The eyewear doubled as a souvenir; viewers were encouraged to take the glasses home. Apparently, the stereoscopic effect succeeded, though the appeal was often described with a familiar if contradictory pull between pleasure and pain. One viewer reported: “You [still] hear the howls of delight when a cam shaft hits you in the eye.”93 According to statistics issued by the fair, the Chrysler theater was the busiest of all exhibits, with a frequently filled auditorium. Several sources describe a “waiting line for every performance,” and the theater was in continuous operation from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. An estimated twelve thousand per day watched the seventeen-­foot-­wide screen.94 In Tune with Tomorrow clearly furthered the fair-­wide appeal to magic and wonder through its use of novel display technologies and techniques; car and screen were mutually enchanted. It should also be pointed out that this film, along with the other car films discussed, presented a vision of laborless production and fantastical, automatic assembly. Sidestepping a decade of labor strife, these films celebrated showy cinematic techniques likely appealing more to management than to workers, who were no doubt less charmed.

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figure 14. Souvenir glasses for Chrysler’s 3D film show were handed out at the screening. Text on the reverse side celebrated the “greatest thrill in movies” and the “greatest thrill in motor cars.” Author’s collection.

Small Screens and Worlds of Wonder The notable increase in film use over that of previous fairs was aided by the proliferation of 16 mm portable projectors. Contemporaneous reports vary on precisely how many, and where, projectors were located across the fairgrounds. Available evidence indicates that 16 mm projection equipment outnumbered 35 mm by ratios of 10:1 to as much as 20:1.95 This discrepancy aside, portable film projectors undoubtedly increased and also ushered in diverse scenarios in which a broad spectrum of films and film extracts were shown. Thus, beyond the more spectacular environments addressing fairgoers as bedazzled consumers resides a somewhat humbler iteration of cinema’s selling machine: the small film screen. Despite the thirty-four different dedicated auditoria that showed films throughout the fair’s typical day, many more small portable projectors operated throughout the fairground, animating small theaters, restaurants, outdoor gardens, open-air theaters, and individual projection rooms, as well as “various other unique locations.”96 According to Business Screen, one hundred thirty-odd small projectors operated on a near-continuous basis ten to twelve hours per day, seven days a week. Still another source indicates that roughly 75 percent of these small projectors operated not just continuously but automatically, without the intervention of an ever-present projectionist.97 Some of these diminutive screens measured no more than twelve inches wide. Some worked as rear-projection devices. For instance, at the Chicago fair, twenty such rear-projection units appeared throughout the fairgrounds promoting

Spectacular Portability    /    99 current fair events and showing fairgoers at one location what was happening at another.98 In New York, while some spectators sat, many stood or simply walked by moving images. A panoply of projection technologies illuminated mannequins, multiscreen installations, and large improvised screens such as ceilings. One exhibit placed a small screen underneath a thin sheet of water in order to create the illusion of viewing magnified cells in water.99 To be sure, portable film projectors predictably showed old American silents in the concession area, but they also performed other more surprising functions such as providing a rolling text panel to accompany exhibits, replacing conventional didactic labels.100 The broader context for the use of these smaller devices is elaborated throughout the pages of Business Screen, which began publication in 1938, less than a year before the fair opened its gates. The magazine normalized new purposes for portable film, projectors, and screens in the context of day-­to-­day business and retail operations. In the first issue of the magazine, Gilbert Rohde, a regular contributor, rather accurately predicted: “I think that the motion picture will be taken as a matter of course in selling in the future. No one will think of planning an office without a projection screen in comfortable view of the executive’s desk.” For the business world, he declared, film is on the “threshold of discovery as a new medium.”101 Many of the articles possessed a noteworthy technological zeal, celebrating the many virtues of small-­film technologies largely construed as business machines. Advertising for small and portable film technologies, as well as editorials and feature articles, filled the magazine, crafting cinema as a natural salesman. Phrases such as “salesmanship in a can,” “sells with the pace of today,” and “dynamic messaging,” appear throughout its pages, proclaiming the supremely effective expression afforded by this so-­called new medium. Portable projectors, marketed specifically to salesmen, were also declared a magical modern aid to selling. For instance, the 16 mm DeVry “Challenger” harnessed the might of a “machine-­powered salesforce.” Using the tagline “momentum,” the projector was likened to a rushing locomotive forcing its directed light beam—wherever you willed it to appear—to blast through a potential buyer’s inertia the same way a train bursts through a static landscape (figure 15).102 It should be no surprise that the magazine took great interest in the fair and devoted its second full issue to the event. Business Screen hosted a range of advertisements and articles about machines that sell: some featured motion pictures with and without sound; others featured film slides with sound. A conventional sound projector, the 16 mm Victor Animatograph “All in One,” also known as the Victor 33, invited “industrial and commercial users to more profitably employ the

figure 15.  The DeVry Challenger promised to imbue all tactics of selling with the precision and focus of a powerful locomotive slicing through space and time. Business Screen 1, no. 5 (1938): 29.

Spectacular Portability    /    101 greatest of all modern sales tools.” A sound projector, the “All in One” announced that it was compact and self-­contained during operation. It came with a “small handy microphone” providing “loud speaker facilities for sales talks, announcements, comments and demonstration spiels.” It also included a “phono-­record turntable” to provide musical background for silent films or “for entertainment during reel changes, banquets, etc.” This device, reissued as the Victor 40 and renamed the “Add a Unit,” espoused an enhanced modularity and adaptability that responded to growing needs. A projector marketed to salesmen, it was created to perform multiple functions, including serving as a stand-­alone sound machine. Showing a film was but one manifestation of the machine’s utility to the more general task of modern multimedia selling. Similar products such as the “Explainette,” the “Illustravox” (figure 16), and the “Automotion” machine were sold to retailers and merchandisers as in-­ store display devices. These were automatic image machines intended to enhance on-­site selling techniques. Some of these required the constant control of an operator; others were fully automatic. The Flolite (figure 16), for instance, was a stand-­alone unit that claimed to be a “miniature theater,” allowing “brilliant pictures even in broad daylight.” It was a rear-­projection console system operating with a looping mechanism that allowed the device to repeat a film as many times as desired. The screen was quite small at twelve by fifteen inches.103 The unit weighed eighty-­five pounds and was sold as suitable for “retail, food, drug and cigar stores, department stores, car depots, window and store displays, hotel, theater and club lobbies, conventions, public buildings and numerous other similar places.”104 One of the more interesting and less understood aspects of portable film devices is the use of rear projection. Such machines proliferated at the fair and elsewhere during this period precisely to overcome the challenges of daylight projection—that is, to use in spaces with variable or uncontrollable light. Conventional projector and screen relations dictated a projector on one side of the room and a screen on the other; they also required spaces that were free of visual impediments such as columns. Rear-­projection units promised to operate regardless of environmental variables. A projector fixed behind the screen was contained by a console to prevent environmental light or any other obstructions from negatively affecting a viewer’s ability to discern and easily see an image. While this limited audience size, it also effectively enabled unit operation anywhere the box could be placed and powered.

figure 16.  Flolite (left) and Illustravox (right). Stylish and modern, the Flolite was a rear-­projection console device, designed to allow for projected moving images anywhere they were desired without the pesky interference of ambient light or structural impediments. Business Screen 1, no. 1 (1938): 8. The Illustravox was a desktop and tabletop sales device which could either work as a rear projection or regular projection device. With a plug-in phonograph player, it could provide a silent or sound presentation. Business Screen 1, no.8 (1939): 5.

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