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Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture is the first and only book to position what are called “Soundies” within the broader cultural and technological milieu of the 1940s. From 1940 to 1946, these musical films circulated in everyday venues, including bars, bowling alleys, train stations, hospitals, and even military bases. Viewers would pay a dime to watch them playing on the small screens of the Panoram jukebox. This book expands U.S. film history beyond both Hollywood and institutional film practices. Examining the dynamics between Soundies’ short musical films, the Panoram’s film-jukebox technology, their screening spaces and their popular discourse, Andrea J. Kelley provides an integrative approach to historic media exhibition. She situates the material conditions of Soundies’ screening sites alongside formal considerations of the films and their unique politics of representation to illuminate a formative moment in the history of the small screen.  

Though often taken for granted, everyday objects influence how people experience moving images. Andrea J. Kelley uses bedsheets and inflatables as cultural media tools to explore the powerful ways familiar things shape audience perceptions and reactions.

Kelley expands film history into homes, parks, and outdoor spaces to reveal that ordinary screen materials bring with them long histories tied to labor, race, gender, and industry. As she shows, when people project films onto these surfaces, their histories impact the meaning of the viewing experience. Kelley draws on archival research, film analysis, and examples like backyard movie nights and COVID-era outdoor screenings to focus on how overlooked elements affect our understanding of spectatorship, exhibition, and media culture.

An evocative look at a popular experience, Surface Encounters shows that movie screens matter because of what they are made of and the ways people encounter them in everyday places.