Archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger examines the value in archiving home movies and outtakes of found footage while presenting Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 3.
Bio
Rick Prelinger
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and 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.
Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 1,970 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," 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).
He worked at the Comedy Channel from its startup in 1989 until it was merged into the comedy network HA!, and then worked at Home Box Office until 1995. Rick has taught in 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 currently Board President of the Internet Archive.His feature-length film "Panorama Ephemera," depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library (with spouse Megan Shaw Prelinger), an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco.
Alexander Rose
As the director of the Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Rose shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.
Hired as the first employee of the foundation in February of 1997, Rose has been an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., a project manager for Shamrock Communications, and a founding partner of Inertia Labs. Rose attended the Art Center College of Design and graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 1995.
Archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger discusses the unforeseen value in archiving film, images, and other media.
He believes archival media may help predict and shape the future, though he also highlights the unintended consequences of technologies like Google Street View.
City (pop., 2000: 776,733) and port, northern California, U.S. San Francisco lies on the northern end of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. The Golden Gate Bridge spans the strait to the north that separates San Francisco from Marin county. Founded in the 18th century by the Spanish, it came under Mexican control after Mexican independence in 1821. Occupied by U.S. forces in 1846, it grew rapidly after the discovery of gold in nearby areas (seegold rush). San Francisco suffered extensive damage from the earthquake and fire of 1906 and from an earthquake in 1989. The city was prominent in the American cultural revolution of the 1960s. It is a commercial, cultural, educational, and financial centre and one of the country's most cosmopolitan cities.
Amazing footage throughout the whole presentation.
I've recently become the Datacine Operator at the Library of Congress facility
in Culpeper, VA., and I lived in San Francisco for 10 years as a kid. Really enjoyed watching.
I love that this is a video of spliced film as it's being viewed live.
You hear a bunch of comic historians adding peppering current events over old history - citing dates & places from 1938 & cackling at the endless construction on 280. We should do this more often!