“Landscape is history made visible.” — John Brinckerhoff Jackson
Duke University MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts is pleased and proud to welcome visiting artist Rick Prelinger to Duke and Durham. The visit will include student critique sessions, course visits and a unique interactive presentation entitled LOST LANDSCAPES OF LOS ANGELES. The first time being presented outside of Los Angeles, the screening will include an artist talk about “the new evidentiary cinema.”
Having given eye-opening “urban history” presentations in San Francisco, Oakland and Detroit, Rick Prelinger now draws on his vast archive to offer a cultural history of greater Los Angeles in pictures. The archivist, writer, filmmaker and UC Santa Cruz professor combines excerpts from long-dated “ephemeral” sources — yesteryear’s home movies, newsreels, educational, industrial and amateur films, even studio “process plates” — into a richly detailed socio-topographical study of L.A.’s bygone cityscapes, and in the process casts the contemporary terrain in a new light. Viewers, meanwhile, are invited to supply the soundtrack, with their own commentaries, questions and discussions. Founded in 1983, the Prelinger Archive is among the largest repositories of its kind in the world.
RICK PRELINGER
LOST LANDSCAPES OF LOS ANGELES
2015, ca. 75 min., HD video from film sources
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Wednesday, February 17
6:30pm
Full Frame Theater
Free and open to the public
Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer, filmmaker and teacher, is Associate Professor in UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Film & Digital Media. He founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of ephemeral nontheatrical film, in 1982. His films PANORAMA EPHEMERA (2004) and NO MORE ROAD TRIPS? (2013) have played around the world, and he has made 18 participatory interactive urban history films throughout the U.S. In 2004, he co-founded Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly library in San Francisco.
