The Prelinger Archives is a collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history , the evolution of the American landscape , everyday life , and social history . Originally based in New York City from 1982 through 2002, it is now based in San Francisco .
11-608: The Archives were founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982 to preserve what he calls " ephemeral " films: films sponsored by corporations and organizations, educational films, and amateur and home movies. Typically, ephemeral films were produced to fulfill specific purposes at specific times, and many exist today only by chance or accident. About 65% of the Archive's holdings are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired, or because they were U.S. productions that were published without proper copyright notice. The stated goal of
22-642: A fourth and fifth, Yesterday and Tomorrow in Detroit , 2014 and 2015) and All-Is-Well (2016). He received the Creative Capital Award in 2012 to make the home movie compilation film No More Road Trips? , which premiered in Austin, Texas , at South by Southwest in March 2013. A summary of his 2019 film Useful Prophecies states that: "While the distance between cinema and truth
33-403: A prophetic portrait of futures to come as proposed by filmmakers who let these visions speak through them." He wrote The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (2007) which "describes 452 historically or culturally significant motion pictures commissioned by businesses, charities, advocacy groups, and state or local government units between 1897 and 1980." It is available as a book and as a free PDF from
44-789: Is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives , a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make over 6,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the Voyager Company , a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen LaserDiscs and CD-ROMs with material from his archives, including Ephemeral Films ,
55-481: Is often impossible to bridge, some films reveal more than we might think any films could. Such is the case with the long-neglected body of useful cinema —films produced because they had jobs to do, like sponsored, educational, and industrial films— and home movies, sometimes revelatory works that seem to spring from the unconscious. Built from the collections of Prelinger Archives, one of the world’s largest collections of nonfiction films and home movies, this program builds
66-811: The Internet Archive and a professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz . With spouse Megan Prelinger he is co-founder of the Prelinger Library , a reference library located in San Francisco , California. His feature-length film Panorama Ephemera , consisting of 64 self-contained segments from various ephemeral films, opened in Summer 2004. He has also produced such archival home movie compilation films Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (15 annual films, 2006–2020), Lost Landscapes of Detroit (three films, 2010–2012 and
77-489: The Internet Archive . All the films in the archives can be licensed for production use through Getty Images . Prelinger Archives currently focuses principally on collecting home movies and amateur film, and has approximately 30,000 items as of Fall 2023. Rick Prelinger Rick Prelinger is an American archivist , writer, and filmmaker. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz , Prelinger
88-677: The MFA design program at New York's School of Visual Arts and lectures widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access. He sat (2001–2004) on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists , was Board President of the San Francisco Cinematheque (2002–2007), and is a board member of
99-550: The Our Secret Century series and Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning (co-produced with architect Keller Easterling). For Prelinger, "archives are a primary weapon against amnesia." Prelinger worked at The Comedy Channel from its startup in 1989 until it merged with the comedy network HA! to become Comedy Central . He then worked at Home Box Office until 1995. Prelinger has taught in
110-514: The Archives holds about 8,000 films in videotape and digital form, approximately 14,000 home movies, and 1,000 industrial and sponsored films acquired since 2002. Compared to many other moving-image archives, Prelinger Archives provides a relatively high level of public access to its collections. Over 8,500 public domain films are available for download and unrestricted reuse on the Internet at
121-588: The Prelinger Archives is to "collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere". By 2001, it had acquired 60,000 completed films of varying lengths and over 30,000 cans of unedited film. In 2002, the Library of Congress acquired the physical films held in the Archives as of that date. The Archives made two subsequent donations to Library of Congress totalling some 65,000 cans of film, primarily industrial and educational titles. As of spring 2015,
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