Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit

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]