'Lost Landscapes' Spotlights Bay Area History with Found Footage

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The New York Times has called Rick Prelinger “one of the great, undersung historians of 20th century cinema.” But the Bay Area-based archivist isn’t known for books on Chaplin or Bergman. Instead, Rick and partner Megan Prelinger collect the film history of everyday life: home movies, industrial films, studio outtakes and other works that would otherwise be lost or forgotten. The duo may be best known for the free movies they make available through the Internet Archive digital library. And locally, they’ve gained a following for their “Lost Landscapes” film project, a compilation of historic Bay Area footage from their archives. We’ll talk to Rick and Megan about the 18th and latest installment of “Lost Landscapes”, entitled “City and Bay in Motion: Transportation and Communication.” Guests: Rick Prelinger, founder, Prelinger Archives, whose moving image holdings may be found online at archive.org; co-founder, Prelinger Library, a publicly-available collection of historical periodicals, books, print ephemera, maps and government documents Megan Prelinger, co-founder, Prelinger Library; co-director, Prelinger Archives film digitization project. Prelinger is also the author of the books Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962 and Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQWED podcasts comes from Rancho LaPuerta, a wellness resort 45 minutes from San Diego.
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0:33.2	From KQED.
0:34.3	Thank you. From KQED.
0:49.3	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. The Bay Area has official histories, stories that shape how we see the development of our area
0:55.3	and suggest where things might be headed.
0:57.8	But what gets left out of those urban narratives?
1:01.0	Today's guests, Rick and Megan Prelinger, have done the world an unalloyed solid.
1:05.7	They've gathered up films of all types, home movies, industrial films, outtakes, digitize them and made them available free to everyone.
1:13.6	So everyone can see our collective past.
1:16.6	And every once in a while, they collect a bunch of clips under the banner of their lost landscape series.
1:22.6	They've got another one coming up. We're going to talk with them about Bay Area history and hear about the secrets you find hidden in 8mm home movies. That's all coming up next after this news.
1:37.7	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. It's easy to compress history the further away
1:43.3	you get from it.
	...

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