No tenía muy claro donde compartir esto, y creo que quizá este sea el mejor hilo: los archivos Prelinger ponen a disposición de cualquiera sus fondos, para visionar, editar o lo que apetezca. Aunque solo como curiosidad histórica, seguro que algunos picamos
Download 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them However You Like
“Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City,” says the collection’s about page. “Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 ‘ephemeral’ (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division,” and now holds “approximately 11,000 digitized and videotape titles (all originally derived from film) and a large collection of home movies, amateur and industrial films acquired since 2002.” Its mission? “To collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere.”
And what can you find amid these
warning against the “pornography which may appear at the local newsstand, malt shop or drugstore.”
Midcentury moralism manifests in countless entertaining forms across the Prelinger Archives collection, including in Make Mine Freedom, a Cold War cartoon treatment of the various treacherous “-isms” out to undermine truth, justice, and the American Way. That came out in 1948, just as fears started roiling again after the United States’ victory in the Second World War. The year before, the husband-and-wife experimental filmmaking team of Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren completed The Private Life of a Cat. “Using their own cats in their own apartment,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Amber Frost, “they chronicle the interior world of a cat ‘family,’ and it’s just insanely compelling, even outside of the cat-lady milieu!” Further down, we have House in the Middle (1954), which suggests that a clean, tidy house can help you survive an atomic blast.
But you don’t have to watch everything you dig up from the Prelinger Archives collection in an ironic or avant-garde frame of mind. Some pieces, like amateur filmmaker and inventor Tullio Pellegrini’s 1955 Cinemascope homage to the city of San Francisco just above, offer much in the way of pure historical interest. You can find a few more suggestions about where to start from Tim Brookes at MakeUseOf, who highlights even earlier footage of the City by the Bay, perhaps the most generic film ever made, and instructions on what to do on a date as well as what to do in the event of a nuclear attack — all valuable material for those of us remixing history, one ephemeral clip at a time.
One final thing worth keeping in mind, the Archive comes with this invitation:You are warmly encouraged to download, use and reproduce these films in whole or in part, in any medium or market throughout the world. You are also warmly encouraged to share, exchange, redistribute, transfer and copy these films, and especially encouraged to do so for free. Any derivative works that you produce using these films are yours to perform, publish, reproduce, sell, or distribute in any way you wish without any limitations.