Rick Prelinger is an American archivist, writer, and filmmaker. Panorama Ephemera'' published in the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 2 Issue 1 (Ephemera) Prelinger's "Reimagining the Archive" presentation at UCLA, November 2010 on Slideshare Interview/podcast on the future of archives and issues relating to access to archives and culture (2011) Interview With San Francisco’s Guerrilla Archivist, Rick Prelinger on Spots Unknown, A blog. He is also professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prelinger 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. Lost Landscapes and Found Collections, Rick Prelinger at MACBA in Barcelona EPHEMERA: The Prelinger Archives (March 2013 Edition) on Vimeo
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 and 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).
"While the distance between cinema and truth 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 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 printed book and also available for free download from the National Film Preservation Foundation. The Field Guide to Sponsored Films on NFPF website
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