Prelinger Archives

Abstract

In the field of cultural production there exist always—beside what may be considered mainstream works for popular consumption—examples specialized for a narrower audience. Where print media presents, on one hand, its iconic novels, heavy reference tomes, and slim volumes of romantic verse, there exist on the other those tractates, broadsides, advertisements, and ’zines which might easily be overlooked, and so lost to history. In the world of film, too, exist many specialized, commercial, educational, and propagandist productions, “nontheatrical” films, which—but for compulsive collecting by a few enthusiasts—might easily vanish into landfill. The Grand-Guignol of drivers’ education; positive-thinking sales motivation; slapstick industrial safety training; even—as America became increasingly urban, electrified and socialized—personal hygiene and best-practices dating films have been produced and disseminated through schools, corporations, churches, and other social groups. In “stag” film, too, and in private home movies, the social, mercantile, the idiomatic history of the nation is on display—and their great preserver is Rick Prelinger: archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. Prelinger began collecting such works in 1983, and in 2002, his Prelinger Archives, consisting of more than one hundred and forty thousand individual cans of film, was acquired by the Library of Congress. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with the Internet Archive (where he currently serves as board president) to make a subset of the Prelinger collection—more than six thousand films so far—available online for free viewing, downloading, and reuse. Prelinger Archives itself remains in existence, holding approximately eleven thousand digitized and videotape titles—all originally derived from film. Also associated with the Prelinger Archives are more than fifty thousand books, periodicals, and pieces of print. Prelinger has called such archives “a primary weapon against amnesia.” As such, the Prelinger collection at Internet Archive represents an enormous resource for artists, educators, documentarians, and those curious about the mores, the “pitches,” and propaganda of the industrialized past. For example, set and costume designers may find it a rich “period” reference source. Even visual effects and sound designers may take inspiration from its scientific and industrial films. Prelinger himself, as film-maker and