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Moving Images

Portable Histories of Film Exhibition

Haidee Wasson

From the perspective of the film historian, cinema's past is far less certain than its future. This familiar if slightly amended aphorism takes on particular meaning in our contemporary context wherein death knells for cinema (or at least celluloid) are common. To be sure, mobile screens, digital cameras, and YouTube indicate the technological conditions for a moving-image culture currently undergoing rapid change. The formal qualities of moving images are being transformed by tiny displays and low resolution. The surfaces of cinema seem to be multiplying, from one's lap to the exteriors of decayed industrial complexes. Digital technologies have globalized the production of single films, with US blockbusters conceivably shot in China, edited in London, and post-production effects completed in Montreal. But far from presuming cinema's celluloid past to be quaint and unsophisticated by comparison, changes in the contemporary moment are directing and enlivening the questions being brought to bear on film's historical landscape.

Take, for instance, a seemingly simple question: Where and how have people seen movies? The conventional answer has long been movie theaters. Yet, recent scholarship is showing that a range of technologies and venues provide an expanded scenario for the presentation and performance of film. Far beyond the picture palace or main-street's marquee, educational movie vans, county fair film tents, product display screens in department stores, classroom AV carts, and YMCA film nights have all proven themselves to be recognizable aspects of US film culture by mid-century. In other words, the more that is being learned about cinema's past, the more some of our deeply held assumptions about how cinema has long been seen – as a rich image projected in a dark purpose-built large space – are inadequate for a full understanding of the power and place of film in our cultural histories.

This chapter surveys the ways in which the history of film exhibition has been conceptualized and elaborated by film historians, with special attention paid to the possibilities that an expanded historiographical approach – which includes portable film technologies – holds for future scholarship. Recent work on the showing and viewing of movies has included a wider selection of film types, locations, and technologies, multiplying our ideas about where and when cinema happens. This scholarship assumes the significance of the movie theater as an enduring film institution and a dominant iteration of film display. Yet, this work also takes a broad and non-normative view of film performance, expanding the conditions in which cinema became a commonsense element of our past and present media ecologies. This chapter argues that while the movie theater is an enduring and constitutive aspect of seeing movies, there is much to gain from examining the full range of technologies and institutions that have long made use of films. This entails a notable increase of the films deemed significant for inclusion in film history (industrial, educational, governmental, amateur), a broader set of salient sociocultural dynamics beyond art and entertainment toward what some have termed “useful cinema” (citizenship, worker productivity, corporate communications, piety, efficient learning), and a more nuanced and complex understanding of the many technologies that in fact have made spaces and screens into contexts of cinematic display (small gauges, public address systems, portable screens) (Acland, 2009; Acland & Wasson, 2011; Greene, 2005; Griffiths, 2008; Hediger & Vonderau, 2009; Lester, 2008; Orgeron, Orgeron, & Streible, 2011; Smoodin, 2011; Wasson, 2005).¹ Like theatrical exhibition, the portable projector exemplifies the nineteenth-century marriage of mechanical movement, chemistry, and projected light. Yet, the portable projector is a distinct iteration of these technological foundations, leaving behind the theatrical armature of the movie house and emulating more the other small, audiovisual technologies that together reshaped cultural life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Charting this tendency in film history, this chapter considers the dynamics of portability for a history of seeing movies, concluding with some larger research questions, posed as directions for future work.

While the field of film studies has long been largely focused on understanding the languages of cinema, there is a small but important body of work that has assessed the peculiar institutions of film display that are foundational to cinema's aesthetic, social, and cultural significance. Scholars of film exhibition presume several essential things about cinema and its history. Movies don't just appear, they are presented and made visible by a particular kind of display logic, one often predicated on sizable, seated, and repeat audiences that rent, among other things, a line of sight to the screen. The magic of the movies does indeed rely on magicians. But among the filmmakers, stars, and effects wizards are also a host of architects and designers, theatrical technicians, electrical engineers, ambitious entrepreneurs, masters of publicity, and event-planners who have long conspired to shape the experience of watching movies. Some are earnest programmers of the artistic or obscure, and others spokespeople for centralized global entertainment. Together, and with a host of other players, they create what we might call the backstage drama, the “behind the screen” dynamics of film presentation. These dramas and the situations they yield constitute the primary interface between films and the large and small publics upon which cinema's fortunes have long rested. These interfaces provide the sites wherein our experience of films and other spectators unfolds and the social, embodied dynamics of seeing play out. Scholars of film exhibition assert that cinema does not primarily happen on a celluloid strip, in front of a camera, or in a film can, but on a screen. This screen is where minute chemical and optical inscriptions become legible through projected light and amplified sounds, framed by geometries of display and theatrical architecture alike. Many scholars of film presentation understand that showing movies implicates the institutions of cinema in a range of technologies. Even taking movie theaters among the many moving image platforms, such theaters themselves have never been simply boxes made of celluloid but hybrid venues where a range of technical innovations contribute to the darkness, the comfort, the spectacle, and the other attractions of the theater (amplified sound, conditioned air, cavernous lobbies). Yet, the multi-mediated movie house retains a special place in thinking about cinema's specificity as a modern medium and mode of expression.

The touchstone for work on film exhibition remains Douglas Gomery's (1992) survey text Shared Pleasures, which examines the history of movie presentation – largely but not exclusively – focusing on the movie theater, considering both the business of the film show as well as the popular and specialized or niche manifestations of the theatrical enterprise (from populist movie palaces to small ethnic and arthouse cinemas). Subsequent work has been more focused, providing rigorous histories of exhibition in particular locations and in particular types of theaters (Allen, 1996; Belton, 1992; Fuller-Seely, 2008; Jones, 2003; Singer, 1996; Waller, 1995; Willinsky, 2001). More recently, scholars have examined exhibition in a radically changing technological and industrial context, where theaters are less stand-alone outposts for singular film events and more like monitors networked to global entertainment flows (Acland, 2003). Collectively, such work has yielded excellent assessments of the place of movie theaters in the business of film. This literature has also investigated the industrial and social regulation of cinema, the dynamics of public leisure, and cinema's links to other public modes of entertainment and leisure. Blending social and cultural histories, incorporating considerations of class, race, and gender, this work assures us that there is nothing simple about going to the movies (Grieveson, 2004; Hansen, 1991; Maltby, Stokes, & Allen, 2007; Stamp, 2000). While a good deal of this work has concentrated on movie theaters before the rise of television, there is also important research documenting and theorizing the place of other technologies for transforming the conditions in which films are seen, and the stylistic conventions of films affected. The rise of video and then digital playback devices such as DVD in the 1980s and 1990s, which proved to be paradigmatic for how films were made, marketed, and eventually seen, definitively poses a challenge to the singular dominance of the movie house for thinking about film presentation and film viewing (Klinger, 2006; Wasser, 2001). Building on this work, what follows presumes these interdependencies of film presentation, with a range of visual and audio technologies, to be continuous throughout its history, long before the rise of video but also before and alongside television.

So, what do we know about film exhibition before home video? We know that movie theaters and indeed film exhibition more generally changed considerably during cinema's first 60 or so years. From the first storefront theaters, which emerged around 1905, to the picture palaces of the teens, 1920s, and early 1930s, from singlescreen sites of mainstreet congregation to the panoramic screens of Cinerama, the appeal and power of the darkened, audience-filled theater have proved resilient. In the United States, the showing of films grew from peep shows and penny arcades, as well as fairgrounds, itinerant showmen, and traveling lecturers. Early on, films were small parts of other live multi-format entertainments, prominent among them vaudeville (Allen, 1991). In a sense, moving pictures grew as but one element of the rising leisure industries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding their own specific business mode a decade or so after their initial appearance.

Nickelodeons or what Gomery (1992) has called “movie-only theaters” (p. 17) emerged in the United States around 1905, and quickly became a prominent part of the amusement economy. Nickelodeons were often converted retail sites, with hand-painted signs indicating the day's fare. But, in truth, nickelodeons were not “movie-only theaters.” As Gomery himself and many others have documented since, nickelodeons were lively, variety based sites. They often included a mix of live and recorded performances, a mix of sound devices (recorded, mediated, instrumental, and live) and varied modes of patron address, including sidewalk barkers, painted posters, and automated announcements. The “movie-only” theater was not so much exclusively dedicated to movies, but organized itself around a business model that had movies at its core, and was fully dependent on a wide range of other media and presentational modes to round-out a theater's offerings, making “the movies” into a distinct kind of mediated, entertainment event. Scholars of early and silent cinema have dutifully reminded us that conventions of viewing films long included the rituals of other popular public entertainments, including audience participation, a mix of recorded and live presentations, and the less seemly politics of segregated seating and regulated behavioral codes (Abel & Altman, 2001; Lastra, 2000). Indeed, movie theaters have long been highly codified and controlled spaces. Religious groups, civic reformers, and a motley assortment of moral crusaders have persistently espoused the dangers of theaters, films, or both.

As these theaters proliferated, they helped to establish a recognizable genre of public entertainment, and the retail face of the US film industry, providing a reliable sales window for film product. Stabilizing the theater as the point-of-sale for movies allowed the industry to establish market share in a growing entertainment industry. Theaters ensured an outlet for their products and provided a predictable and appealing site for repeat visitors. Nickelodeons and the large purpose-built theaters and regional and national chains that followed were key to the US film business transforming into the powerful conglomerates we name with the umbrella term “Hollywood.”

The story of the movie theater's growth parallels the consolidation of the film industry more generally. By the mid-teens, filmmakers had established the basic model for its primary and most profitable product: the feature-length, narrative fiction film. Many other film types were made and seen, including a variety of short film genres (sing-along films, animated, newsreel, comic, travel, and novelty films). Yet, the feature-length narrative became the centerpiece for these other products. During this same decade, purpose-built movie theaters appeared, seating 500 and 1,000 patrons rather than the 200 or less of the nickelodeon. The trend toward larger theaters did not eliminate other models for theatrical film presentation, but resituated them as residual within a rapidly expanding industry.

Urban environments hosted a range of differently sized theaters. Smaller towns found ways to adapt extant spaces (opera houses, town halls) to accommodate cinema screens. Yet, the larger and larger theater was clearly understood by the rising industrial power as the most profitable and therefore appealing path. Throughout the 1920s, theaters in general became inextricably linked to a vertically integrating industry. More and more film producers bought up distribution and exhibition venues; more and more theater owners merged or bought up distribution and production interests. By the early 1920s, the film industry resembled a complicated hybrid: nineteenth-century presentation models of live theater and the national retail model established by grocery and department store chains designed to efficiently, reliably, and regularly deliver standardized products (Abel, 1999; Gomery, 1992). Trends toward vertical and horizontal integration became more pronounced as the decade moved on; innovations in sound and amplification technologies led to corporate partnerships between film industry, cognate entertainment industries such as recorded music, and the large electrical conglomerates (Crafton, 1997).

As the movie theater evolved, its foundational appeal was further augmented partly by reconceiving of it as a high-tech, architecturally grand and glamorous site for an evening out. By the mid-1920s, what were previously small theaters with 10-12 feet screens grew to gargantuan proportions. At their biggest, theaters such as the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall built in the early 1930s, even as the Depression took hold, sat 6,000 people. While their 25–30 feet screens must have been somewhat dwarfed by their cavernous halls and grand proscenium arches, the exotic palaces served as opulent symbols of the global juggernaut cinema had become. The larger-and-larger paying audience – its very size constituting part of the appeal of the movies – became the industry ideal. Service was high yet the populist rhetoric of even the most grand palaces was supported by a common consumerist ethos: luxury that anybody could afford (Melnick, 2005).

Recent scholarship has emphasized the modernity of cinema, examining its formal capacities for compressing and refiguring space and time as well as its corollary capacities for distributing and displaying those images efficiently from one side of the earth to another. As a global system for spreading words and images at rapid speeds and great distances, cinema – at one level – was a formidable modern machine. Yet, the palace was an interesting outpost for these typically modern proclivities. William Leach (1993) notes that like picture palaces, department stores during this period often used deeply historical and exotic tropes in their architecture and displays while simultaneously averring the virtues of the modern through their products and merchandising practices. Leach suggests that the exoticism of the department stores served in a way to soften and sanction the arrival of machines and their systems. Similarly, while palaces often invoked the historical and exotic in their Egyptian, Romanesque, and Greek stylings, they also featured the most up-to-date technologies of sound and image throughout. Air conditioning, theater-wide sound amplification, public address systems, live radio broadcasts, elaborate electrical lighting, and significant ballyhoo all helped to make the movie theater into a kind of modern masthead for the industry's imperial and technologically sophisticated ambitions (Melnick, 2005; Thompson, 2002; Wurtzler, 2007).

Yet the emphasis on the movie theater and the ways in which it was a highly technologized and mediated space, connecting the theater by recorded sound, radio, and sometimes television to all manner of ethereal and actual spaces, fails to remind us that palaces were gargantuan, immobile, and permanent. Cinema was a mass medium in the sense that it enabled an industry that made products for the many. It fostered a distribution system that facilitated the efficient circulation of its goods to retail sites (theaters) and was predicated on a consistent flow of new, largely standardized product. But this product was designed to be rented, first by the theaters who would temporarily show the film, and by viewers who temporarily rented a seat in order to gain a 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 becomes both the showpiece for cinema's circulatory ambitions, and the endpoint for the same. The movement and circulation of films in a sense stopped at the theater's screen. Yes, things cinematic existed beyond the films themselves and moved more nimbly. Film merchandising, fan magazines, endless talk about films in newspapers, all allowed for a kind of extra-theatrical life to moving images, implicating cinema in dispersed networks of media technologies and institutions. Nonetheless, the theater acted as a kind of bulwark to the possessive impulses and physical intimacies being accorded to cinema that we readily associate with novels, phonographs, and even living-room television sets.

The movie theater remains a rather curious institution, an unlikely outpost for a cultural form heralded as defiantly mobile, malleable, reproducible, and accessible. Plainly, the basic idea of a theater long predates cinema, pulling forward the significance of dedicated or specially demarcated spaces for traditions and practices of live drama, performed music, public oration, and even the circus barker, the side-show magician, or middlebrow occultist. Theaters frame sites of performative possibility, marking off a pedestrian or prosaic sound or gesture from the potentially profound. Theaters generally depend on people performing for other people who gather to watch, listen, and possibly respond to or interact with the show. Building on the appeal of events and temporary gatherings, the permanence of the movie theater has long been further assured by its technological complexity, making it difficult to precisely reproduce its attractions in ad hoc or impromptu fashion. In part, this has long served as a barrier to entry into the business of film.

Yet, isn't it odd that a medium heralded as powerful in part because of its basic reproducibility – its ability to be copied, to multiply and thus refigure previous limits on circulation and performance, a mobile show-in-a-can – could for so long be so constrained by the comparatively immobile, bricks-'n'-mortar, professionalized apparatus of the theater? Books had long before demonstrated the power of cheap reproductions, small formats, and widespread circulation. Music had been turned into small, reproducible, commodity forms in the case of wax cylinders and vinyl phonographs, turning music into a private, automated device. Lithography liberated the original artwork and photography created a world of small, inexpensive, handheld images widely circulated and seen. But films themselves resisted – for a time anyhow – the impulse of a media form whose content and playback devices were fully accommodated to consumerism and a constant physical intimacy with the consumer.

For film scholars, the movie theater has rarely been seen as an impediment to cinema. Quite to the contrary, the movie 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 a modernist art (Andrew, 2002; Barthes, 1979). The significance of the movie theater undergirds histories of a growing and powerful industry, changing leisure patterns, and enduring theories of cinema that seek to assess the specific language of film and its relationships to subjectivity, identity, and experience, many of which often presuppose the theatrical display of film. To be sure, its place is rightfully central in film and media studies, as the movie theater has 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, the theater seems less odd, its dominance less puzzling, when one accepts recent challenges to the idea of its singular hold on the history of film. In other words, it is becoming clearer that the movie theater is but one iteration of film presentation throughout the twentieth century. This insight is being catalyzed in part by bringing film history into dialogue with media history. An archaeology of small film technologies demonstrates that celluloid, projectors, and screens share long and enduring parallels with other consumer media technologies, providing an alternative history to film performance than that suggested by the movie theater and its core ideal of large audiences, controlled performance, and standardized projection.

Non-Theatrical: The Other History of Showing and Seeing Films

This chapter now turns to consider another way of thinking about a history of film performance by examining the dynamics of portable projectors. In contrast to the movie theater, this other history is characterized less by majestic spaces, large audiences, or the special event and more by the technological transformation of everyday spaces and activities, small audiences, and a panoply of consumer gadgets. The history of portable film projectors offers a quick view to another kind of cinema, providing insights into an enduring technological infrastructure for a distinct mode of moving image circulation and display, one that challenges the singularity of the movie theater in our received histories of film. The history of portable projectors includes large but mostly small technologies of cinema. It requires charting and assessing not just the expanded technologies of cinema (projectors, screen, microphones, turntables, amplifiers) but the expanded spaces or sites of cinema. In what remains of this essay, I will focus on several prominent aspects of the discussion about portable film projection technology during the 1920s and 1930s. As the purpose-built movie theater secured its place in the dominant business model of the US film industry throughout the teens, punctuated in many ways by its resolutely oversized iteration in the form of the “picture palace,” another kind of cinema was also emergent. In the shadow of a resolutely big and physically enduring idea of the movie theater, there was a parallel and equally determined movement toward a small, nimble, self-operated cinema of the most portable, temporary type.

In our current media environment saturated with the language of mobility, the concept of portability sounds both familiar but also rather quaint. In the context of film history, the concept of portability holds particular meaning. It indexes a particular kind of movement, one less tied to invisible networks, unlimited content, and instantaneous, omnivorous connectivity, and one more linked to the physicality of bodies, things, and places. To be sure, portability was a foundational characteristic from cinema's earliest days, as Charlie Musser and others have shown. Yet, as the film industry developed, itinerant showmen and traveling lecturers gradually decreased in significance as movie theaters rose to the fore of the rationalizing film business. The purpose-built, permanent movie theater quickly became linked to the dominant and anti-competitive behaviors of film production and distribution interests. Part of this control was through film technology itself; through the highly flammable, 35 mm nitrate-based film standard. The high heat of projection bulbs, exacerbated by their enclosure in the metal housings of the projector, ensured that film projection was a risky business. Movie theaters were heavily regulated spaces, requiring formidable safety codes (fire-proof booths, proper ventilation, flame resistant materials) and licensed projector operators. All of these factors forged a regulatory environment influencing who could and could not show movies. The development of a sustained network of self-operated portable projectors took an identifiable turn in 1918, when technology manufacturers began actively lobbying the Society for Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) – the primary organization for establishing technological standards and directing innovation in the US motion picture industry – to formalize a definition of and therefore expressly give license to the portable projector, one that would be free of the strictures associated with the movie house (Jenkins, 1918).²

At this time, portability in film culture entailed an idea about lightness of weight and sufficient image size. But, for the growing industry, parts of which were invested in securing an expanded circuit for cinema technologies, non-flammability was a primary concern. A non-flammable projection set-up would in theory release projectors and projectionists from some of the heavy regulations imposed on film shows by the insurance industry, municipal fire codes, public safety regulators, and labor unions which collectively shaped the politics of theatrical film culture. The impediments to widespread portability were indeed numerous, but they were easily crystallized in the figure of the simple and brute physicality of the fire-proof projection booth. In 1918 when Alexander Victor, head of the Victor Animatograph Company, implored the SMPE to formalize the conditions in which portability would thrive, he joked: “No user could consistently arrive at the place of entertainment, carrying in one hand a truly portable projector, weighing about 25 pounds; but in the other hand, a fire-proof booth, weighing 550 pounds” (Alexander, 1918). Looking at the history of cinema, then, the concept of portability was irretrievably tethered to flammability, and the desirability of a projection machine that would not cause celluloid to ignite upon use.³

Technicians worked to design cooling systems, improve air ventilation, and reduce bulb heat in projectors to diminish the chances of both igniting and also damaging film. But, those little machines ran hot. And, the smaller they became, the more difficult a cooling system was, as hot air tended to get trapped inside the projector's various compartments. Focus on adapting celluloid to withstand the heat of the projector was one obvious element of any step toward portability. Standardizing a non-flammable film gauge served to focus the technological innovation of portable projectors as it helped to consolidate the development and creation of a market. While the first official non-flammable gauge was forwarded by Pathe (28 mm – widely used since 1912) the history of portable projection took a notable turn in 1923 when Eastman Kodak introduced a 16 mm system, which soon thereafter became the dominant North American – though not the only – standard, non-flammable, portable gauge.⁴

Concurrent to the standardization of the small 16 mm film, camera, and projector, the ideal of the purpose-built movie theater had taken on grand, fantastical, and even epic proportions. It was only months before Kodak's announcement that Sam Rothafel presented a paper to the SMPE which outlined his vision of the movie theater of the future, transferring the wonders of the screen to the whole of the gargantuan, technologically sophisticated, atmospheric theater – a place, he declared, of saturated color, deep and dynamic feeling, and all-encompassing reflective surfaces where thousands would sit to be both entertained and enlightened (Rothafel, 1922). As picture palaces became the crown jewels of the growing film industry, the calls for a small, adaptable cinema only became more pronounced. Following Rothafel's futuristic, atmospheric theaters, a chorus of other showmen, engineers, and technology manufacturers chimed in on the importance of a simple-to-operate, highly adaptable apparatus, freed from the constraints of the increasingly expensive, professionalized, complicated, and formidable theater.

The emergence of a sustainable “small screen” movement, based on simple operation, takes on its fullest meaning with the majestic palace as backdrop. The “small theater,” the “little theater,” “midget cinema”: each of these terms can be seen throughout industry literature of the period. These terms described specialized theaters with limited seating capacity, as well as motion picture projection beyond the theater proper. Partly this vocabulary was linked to a call for a different kind of motion picture dominance than we usually think of as endemic to this period. In addition to gaining a hold on the world's theatrical film screens, all manner of industry pundit called for motion pictures to take their rightful place, serving an ambitious field of functions then performed by other media: newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, canvas (Smith, 1932). The call for a small cinema, then, was also linked to a kind of resistance to the limits of the entertainment model for celluloid promulgated by Hollywood. So, for instance, the call for portable projectors was also a form of advocacy for small audiences. This includes those invested in cinema as erotica, as art (as erotic art), as news, as personal and familial hobby, as industrial and retail aid, as fair spectacle, and mid-way barker, as well as the small audiences that would constitute the first determined to study cinema, which we know emerged only a few years later (Grieveson & Wasson, 2008; Polan, 2007).

What could these little machines do? With the picture palace as backdrop, the portable projector announced a form of cinema that was do-it-yourself and bare-bones by comparison. It fit in a box and could be carried like a brief case, easily handed off from one person to another. Portable projectors were consistently sold with claims that they were “light in weight” and compatible with people on the move. These small projectors took on names like the “Envoy” or the “Lite-Weight” and “The Escort.” In truth, early 16 mm portable projectors ranged in weight. The first 16 mm Kodascope weighed 20 lbs (Mees, 1923). Bell and Howell's Filmo weighed 9 lbs (McNabb, 1924). Some projectors were said to be as light as 6 lbs (de Tartas, 1923).⁵ One report indicated that as early as 1926 a French inventor had announced a projector no bigger than a cigarette case which, it was reported, could “project pictures as large and clear as ordinary ones!” (Report of Progress Committee 1926–27, 1927).

In these cases, adding the term “portable” to the term “projector” meant that the theater was not the de facto point of articulation or source for moving image display, but rather the individual human body instead. The projector's capacity to be moved from one location to another, one room to another, was consistently linked in advertising, but also design and engineering discourses, to the scale of the human body and its capacity to bear weight, to move, and to master things. The projector was a machine that could be carried with you, in a suitcase, by a handle; it could be operated by leaning over or into it, staring closely at it to thread the film or turn a focus knob. Or, you could – or so the advertising promised – simply stand nearby as it worked its automatic magic.

This ideal of human mastery of the little motion picture machine served multiple functions, including an industrial, business, and sales force constantly in search of new efficiencies and modes of persuasion. For instance, in the late 1920s, Kodak marketed the Business Kodascope, designed to be carried by the hand of a traveling salesman. The Business Kodascope turned any desk or small table into a site of moving image display. Many projectors marketed during the 1930s and 1940s were designed so that the projector and carrying case were indistinguishable, designed not just to look good in operation but also when not in operation. Some cases were designed in streamlined metal, accentuating efficiency. Others were leather bound to look good sitting on a living-room sidetable or a book shelf. Cases also served additional functional purposes. Some could be removed and turned upside down, transformed into projector stands; others served the effort to mask the mechanical sounds these projectors persistently emitted. Lastly, signaling not only portability but also adaptability, many cases coordinated to match other compatible components such as encased amplifiers, turntables and even film cans.⁶

Portability did lead naturally to the need for adaptability. What good would a portable projector be if the places you were carrying it to could not be turned into adequate sites for projector performance? Multiple lenses and different bulb wattages allowed for use in bigger or smaller rooms, and also allowed for some degree of flexibility in projector placement, closer and further away from the screen, deeper into the audience or further away from it. Stronger or weaker light throw designed for differently sized rooms and audiences also entailed a surprising range of screen sizes, in part building on screen practices linked to earlier optical devices. Screens could be placed on table tops and free-standing tripods or mounted on walls, and hung from ceilings. They could be more permanent and concealed by tapestries or they could be collapsible, rolled up and stored away discretely in a closet. Some screens could be retracted and housed by furniture. These portable screens ranged in size from less than 12 inches to as large as 12 feet. One Chicago-based company called Da-Lite Screen Company, still in operation, marketed 15 distinct and separate models in the “portable screen family.” They claimed 50 standard sizes as early as 1934 (Educational Screen, 1934, p. 89).⁷ Screens were selected according to the room they were to occupy, the power of the projector used, the shape of the seating area likely occupied by the audience, and sometimes by storage requirements. In other words, screen size was determined by the needs of the whole display system, scaled for context and contour.⁸

Wurtzler (2007) shows us that the basic technological innovations of electromechanical inscription and amplification were the same across the film, radio, and recorded music industries during the 1920s, linking these industries and forms to a common technical base. The result for cinema, as is well documented, is a rather complex shift from so-called silent to so-called sound cinema. And, by the early 1930s, the majority of movie theaters had converted to recorded film sound and amplification systems suited to large spaces (Crafton, 1997). The close connections among the technologies of cinema and other media of this period are further illustrated by our look at 16 mm projectors. The transition of the portable projector to sound happened concurrently with the better-known theatrical transition. Like the theatrical shift, several systems operated in parallel, including sound-on-disk and sound-on-film systems. Eventually, the sound-on-film system predominated. But, there is another story to tell here that complicates the simple idea of a synchronized sound dynamic, as is often told of film's technological past.

Aspects of the small projector's relationship to sound can be productively understood by resort to the machine's basic incorporation of principles of adaptability. A simple example illustrates this. In 1939, the Victor Animatograph Company announced a new projector called the Victor 40, also known as the “Add-a-Unit.” The machine was designed with modularity at its core; a prospective buyer could build the whole system he or she required piece by piece. By the late 1930s, projectors increasingly came with a series of plugs, dials, and buttons so that a user could select desired accessories, in part to accommodate variations in use. The Victor 40 literalized this multiuse concept. The Victor 40 was sold with a choice of compatible devices such as a range of lenses, but also a series of sound playback and amplification devices: a record player, a radio, a microphone, a sound recording unit, multiple speakers, and an auxiliary amplifying unit. When it comes to the portable projector, sound was a dynamic option. It could be live and amplified in the sense of a simultaneous voice-over. It could be pre-recorded and then played alongside a projected image. It could be recorded for another purpose but repurposed as part of a multimedia film show. It could be recorded as the film played, and then used again at a later date. With the Add-a-Unit the possibilities are numerous and extend far beyond the idea of cinema as a simple playback device for prearranged images and synchronized sound.

The addition of sound components is worth some consideration in the context of the small projector. The Add-a-Unit invited users to create their own soundtrack. It invited them to turn up the sound or to make the image bigger, or conversely to make the image smaller and quieter. From a design perspective, these add-on sound units alleviated some of the challenges of synchronized sound. With all of the possible component parts (microphones, phonographs), mechanical and amplified sound reproduction could operate independently of film speed, bulb brightness, and screen reflectivity, lending a high degree of performativity to what we think of as film projection. Moreover, the user could control the speed of the image, to the point of stopping it, exercising a significant amount of control over all vectors of viewing – size, speed, and volume.

Furthering the idea of adaptability to different performance needs, the Add-a-Unit projector, like numerous prewar units, had the ability to play at different speeds and to be stilled, or stopped, in order to project a single film frame in suspended form. Clearly, the Victor 40 and projectors like it enable a distinct kind of film show, one that at the most simple technical level embraces a relationship to other portable devices, themselves with their own life as distinct and separate commodities, themselves undergoing significant innovation, particularly when it comes to lightweight and portable sound amplification. Lastly, it is worth underscoring a simple poetic fact of the Add-a-Unit. The film projector was sold as a unit that was incomplete unto itself. In other words, automatic, simple operation of a celluloid projection machine was seen as only one small part of an immanent ideal of modular entertainment, illustration, performance, and presentational devices.

So, what larger lessons can be drawn for future scholarship from this brief discussion of the small film projector? First, an obvious question: How significant was the portable or small projector? Was it truly paradigmatic, indicative of a wholly different kind of cinema? Or, was it simply a technological oddity, a stutter toward what we now understand as the age of self-operation, digital fluidity, and consumer control? How can we understand its significance in relation to theatrical and other large-screen display formats for the development of film language, business, and art? Some of these questions can't be answered by resort to numbers. But, here are a few.

We know that the number of movie theaters in the United States gradually increased throughout the 1920s, decreased during the Depression of the 1930s, increased to a peak in 1945, and then rapidly reduced by almost 50% in the 20 years that followed. They numbered 19,096 in 1945 and fell to the lows of the 1960s (9,150 in 1963). So, we have received wisdom that at mid-century cinema declines as a public form and television ascends. And ascend it did. Yet, so too did this other kind of small cinema. Sales of small-gauge portable equipment roughly tripled during the decade of the 1950s (Wolfman, 1960).⁹ To take just one year (1959), the SMPE estimated a total of 4,195,000 portable projectors in use and 11,335 movie theaters in operation. This equates to a per capita projector ratio of 1:42. Compare this to the per capita theater ratio of 1:15,703. In raw, crude figures, portable projectors outnumbered movie theaters by a factor of 370.

There are many ways in which we could complicate these figures. I have not included drive-ins. Movie theaters were in regular, predictable operation with multiple screenings daily. Portable projectors were likely not. Some viewing contexts would use two small projectors to allow continuous projection onto a single screen, thus indicating that two or more projectors might actually only constitute a single viewing venue. But, the basic and indisputable fact remains: small cinema built on the technological infrastructure of the portable projector must be seen as resolutely ascendant throughout mid-century, complementary to a range of other consumer technologies, and a basic element of an everyday media culture, a culture in which film technologies had a recognizable, commonsense role. The small projector proliferates along with television and despite the decline of its cognate theatrical forms. The common presence of the projector also gives us a clearer picture of the everyday context in which we might think more fully about the emergence of activist, alternative, and experimental viewing which required a qualitatively different viewing network to thrive. We might also think differently about the pre-text for paracinema and avant gardist expanded cinema in the 1960s,¹⁰ as well as earlier collecting cultures, cinephilia, and the growth of film as a mode of university-level study. Certainly, it is the portable projector which speeds along the institutional uses of cinema in libraries, schools, YMCAs, and in business, providing the technical means for a very particular use of moving pictures, or what has been called the technical grounds for making cinema “useful” to a variety of cultural, industrial, and civic authorities.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, portable and miniaturized cinema was a sizable rebuke to industry largesse and professed permanence. Rather than build spaces around an atmospheric and transcendental idea of cinema, engineers and technology manufacturers advocated for a projector that adapted to extant, usually nondescript, even banal spaces: homes, offices, classrooms (rather than manufacturing spaces that adapted to it). Different from today's trend toward miniaturization and personalization of portable moving technologies, the projector and its cognate devices were geared toward the small audience, to be distinguished on the one hand from the audience of one and from the mass audience so crucial to how we think of radio, film, and television audiences more generally.

In the context of film culture even before World War II, one can see that portability was a highly spatialized concept. On the one hand it was defined by a negative space: portability meant not in movie theaters. But, it was also spatial in the sense that the portable projector and screen were two parts of a technology that were especially sensitive to the size, shape, and illumination of a given space. As Anne Friedberg reminds us in her book The Virtual Window (2006), screens are resolutely architectural, transforming our sense of space and our experience of the built environment, harnessing a dialectic of light to enact a particular drama of attention and movement. Extending this basic insight to the portable projector, we can begin to see a whole range of possibilities for thinking about portability and everyday spaces, well beyond movie theaters. We can also begin to break apart the seeming uniformity of cinema. Long before the VCR and the digital, cinema technologies espoused the ability to arrest motion, to reform spaces, and to either appropriate or utterly disregard the powers of professionalized, industrialized, standardized film performance, challenging steadfast ideas about the coherence of the cinematic apparatus, and augmenting our ideas about technological portability.

The question of how one writes the history of film's public life, its sites of presentation and interfaces with audiences, viewers, customers, and citizens, will continue to benefit from scholars seeking to understand film as part of a family of technologies with deep mutually constitutive relations with other media forms. Breaking apart the long-assumed coherence of “cinema” allows us as scholars to more critically engage with the ways in which cinema itself has long depended on a very partial rendering as magical, seductive, and pure – and heroically resistant to change. But, it also allows us to better understand the many ways that film historians are best served by considering media history, as cognate, parallel, or comparative grist for the historiographic mill. Working with ideas basic to media history (transformations to public and private life, consumerism, and commodity culture; the cultures of automation and gadgetry; contests over cultural authority and control over cultural forms), one can see the way that the sites of film performance have a complex and varied relationship to these dynamics, relationships that we must continue to explore. A history of portable film projectors also writes cinema into media history, a place it rightly occupies.

NOTES

1 For touchstones on non-theatrical films, see Streible, Roepke, & Mebold, (2007).

2 The SMPE was founded in 1916 with its explicit aim to provide “unselfish service to the Industry.” Any person engaged in designing, developing, or manufacturing materials, mechanisms, or processes used in the motion picture or allied arts could become a member and was eligible for invitation. For more on the founding, see Jenkins (1918). Jenkins announced that the setting of standards for the industry was of primary importance, in part to ensure not just a national but an international hold on motion picture technology.

3 The Bureau of Fire Prevention of the City of New York (1915) issued a pamphlet stipulating the safety requirements for “Private or Non-Professional Exhibitions of Motion Pictures.” These regulations applied to shows that did or did not charge admission, that were educational, religious in nature, and that were held in private homes or clubs. These regulations did not apply to projectors using “slow-burning” film or to “a size or perforations differing from the standard as used in theatrical machines.” These guidelines effectively understood “portable” as any showing beyond a movie theater of 35 mm nitrate film, requiring either a permanent fire-proof booth or a portable fire-proof booth. The portable fire-proof booth had to be at least 6 feet high and the floor area at least 20 square feet, say 4 × 5 ft. The guidelines were detailed and elaborate, and entailed clear requirements pertaining to the material used to frame the booth, to cover it (completely in metal or asbestos!), to affix all coverings, and minimal openings for the projector's light and the projectionist's air supply.

4 Coincident with the introduction of 16 mm, Pathe introduced an even smaller nonflammable gauge (9.5 mm).

5 De Tartas (1923, p. 244) announced a 6 lb camera and projector unit, which also had full capability for still projection without fear of overheating.

6 One of these was a new beaded screen fabric “in beautiful leatherette covered, fine wood case with nickel trimmings and solid leather carrying handle” (1934 advertisement, Educational Screen, 14, 80).

7 See also “a time-saving screen!” Screens promised “amazing sharpness, depth and brilliance to movies and still. Light in weight, the Challenger may be carried easily from room to room.” The Challenger line comes in six sizes, from 30 × 40 inches up to 70 × 94 inches. It is one of a complete line of Da-Lite portable screens (1935 Da-Lite advertisement, Educational Screen, 14, 243).

8 I have shown elsewhere the significance of the home for early iterations of the 16 mm projector (Wasson, 2009). This idea of 16 mm's early domestic articulations is also linked to the then relatively recent success of 28 mm. Both Kodak and Victor Animatograph initially described 16 mm as precisely a solution to the demand for home use. See, for instance, Victor (1923). At this same meeting wherein 16 mm is introduced, Willard B. Cook of Pathe also delivered a paper on the 28 mm Pathescope projector. There was no real sense at this moment that 16 mm would overtake or replace 28 mm. See Cook (1923).

9 All numbers are from the US Department of Commerce, reprinted in Wolfman (1960). In 1958 the Department of Commerce calculated that the value of 8 mm and 16 mm equipment shipped in the United States totaled $132,116,000, whereas 35 mm equipment was pegged at $15,164,000, a differential of 8.

10 For a poetic and impassioned discussion of these expanded practices, see Eros (2005).

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