Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit
Name
Shell_Films in the.pdf
Size
644.41 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f8250536f1a6fa66dd48a9ec289998b2
Author(s)
Shell, Hanna Rose
Date Issued
July 2014
Journal
Technology and Culture
Publisher
Muse - Johns Hopkins University Press
Citation
Shell, Hanna Rose. “Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit.” Technology and Culture 55, no. 3 (2014): 711–715. © 2014 The Society for the History of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 60,000 so-called ephemeral films, approximately 6,500 of which are freely available online for viewing and public download, is an amazing resource for research and teaching in the history of technology. [superscript 1] Collector, archivist, writer, and filmmaker Rick Prelinger began assembling his collection in the early 1980s. Over the next decades, his collection of 35 mm and 16 mm films grew into the tens of thousands. Films designed as educational, industrial, vocational, or advertising (overlapping categories often subsumed under the term sponsored), along with amateur and 8 mm home movies, were gathered from far and wide. [superscript 2] Films from any of these genres are often referred to as ephemeral, a term applied based on the idea that such a film’s period usefulness, in the sense of actual time being shown for the purpose for which it was created, is limited. The term’s appropriateness becomes questionable once the lifespan of these films has been extended through the development of new contexts in which they are useful (for example, for scholarly research or nostalgic film series programming). [superscript 3]
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2014.0087
