Gallery
- Perversion for Profit part 1
The 125th Street Ferry in New York City from 1941.
Yankee Stadium, 1956 screen capture
The Prelinger Archives is a collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life, and social history. It was in New York City from 1982 to 2002 and is now in San Francisco.
The Archives were founded by Rick Prelinger [1] in 1982 to preserve what he calls "ephemeral" films: films sponsored by corporations and organizations, educational films, and amateur and home movies. [2] Typically, ephemeral films were produced to fulfill specific purposes at specific times, and many exist today only by chance or accident. [3] About 65% of the Archive's holdings are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired, or because they were U.S. productions that were published without proper copyright notice.
The stated goal of the Prelinger Archives is to "collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere". [4]
By 2001, it had acquired 60,000 completed films of varying lengths and over 30,000 cans of unedited film. In 2002, the Library of Congress [5] acquired the physical films held in the Archives as of that date. [6] The Archives made two subsequent donations to Library of Congress totalling some 65,000 cans of film, primarily industrial and educational titles. As of spring 2015, the Archives holds about 8,000 films in videotape and digital form, approximately 14,000 home movies, and 1,000 industrial and sponsored films acquired since 2002.
Compared to many other moving-image archives, Prelinger Archives provides a relatively high level of public access to its collections. Over 8,500 public domain films are available for download and unrestricted reuse on the Internet at the Internet Archive. All the films in the archives can be licensed for production use through Getty Images.
Prelinger Archives currently focuses principally on collecting home movies and amateur film, and has approximately 30,000 items as of Fall 2023. [4]
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Master Hands is a 1936 sponsored documentary film short which shows what work is like in a Chevrolet automobile factory. It was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, a pioneer in industrial film production.
The Internet Archive is an American digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive says that it holds more than 38 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.6 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.7 million images, 251,000 concerts, and over 832 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Their mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge."
Social guidance films constitute a genre of educational films attempting to guide children and adults to behave in certain ways. Originally produced by the U.S. government as "attitude-building films" during World War II, the genre grew to be a common source of instruction in elementary and high school classrooms in the United States from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. The films covered topics including courtesy, grammar, social etiquette and dating, personal hygiene and grooming, health and fitness, civic and moral responsibility, sexuality, child safety, national loyalty, racial and social prejudice, juvenile delinquency, drug use, and driver safety; the genre also includes films for adults, covering topics such as marriage, business etiquette, general safety, home economics, career counseling and how to balance budgets. A subset is known as hygiene films addressing mental hygiene and sexual hygiene.
Rick Prelinger is an American archivist, writer, and filmmaker. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.
The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) is an independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. Growing from a national planning effort led by the Library of Congress, the NFPF began operations in 1997. It supports activities nationwide that preserve American films and improve film access for study, education, and exhibition. The NFPF's top priority is saving orphan films, so called because are not protected by commercial interests and are unlikely to survive without public support. Through its grant programs, the NFPF has helped archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and universities from all 50 states preserve American films and make them available to the public.
Henry Jamison "Jam" Handy was an American Olympic breaststroke swimmer, water polo player, and founder of the Jam Handy Organization (JHO), a producer of commercially sponsored motion pictures, slidefilms, trade shows, industrial theater and multimedia training aids. Credited as the first person to imagine distance learning, Handy made his first film in 1910 and presided over a company that produced an estimated 7,000 motion pictures and perhaps as many as 100,000 slidefilms before it was dissolved in 1983.
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others. Scanning for the Open Content Alliance was administered by the Internet Archive, which also provided permanent storage and access through its website.
Perversion for Profit is a 1963 Eastmancolor propaganda film financed by Charles Keating through Citizens for Decent Literature and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. The film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt young viewers and readers, leading to acts of violence and "perverted" attitudes regarding sex—including inclination toward homosexuality. Although Perversion for Profit was serious in its suggestion that pornography could erode the integrity of American culture, Peter L. Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in a 2003 review that it was "shrill and sometimes comical".
Technicolor for Industrial Films (1949) is a sponsored film about how Technicolor can be used in industrial films. The film features footage of various objects in Technicolor, showing how it can be used in filmmaking. One scene shows a bunch of everyday goods, first being shown in black-and-white, then in Technicolor.
The "Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing United States Entrepreneurship Act of 2007" was a proposed United States copyright law that would have amended Title 17 of the U.S. Code, including portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to "promote innovation, to encourage the introduction of new technology, to enhance library preservation efforts, and to protect the fair use rights of consumers, and for other purposes." The bill would prevent courts from holding companies financially liable for copyright infringement stemming from the use of their hardware or software, and proposes six permanent circumvention exemptions to the DMCA.
Sponsored film, or ephemeral film, as defined by film archivist Rick Prelinger, is a film made by a particular sponsor for a specific purpose other than as a work of art: the films were designed to serve a specific pragmatic purpose for a limited time. Many of the films are also orphan works since they lack copyright owners or active custodians to guarantee their long-term preservation.
An orphan film is a motion picture work that has been abandoned by its owner or copyright holder. The term can also sometimes refer to any film that has suffered neglect.
Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law 102–307, 106 Stat. 264, enacted June 26, 1992, is the first title of the Copyright Amendments Act of 1992, an act of the United States Congress that amended copyright renewal provisions of Title 17 of the United States Code enacted under Copyright Act of 1976. The act eliminated the previous requirements under US law that a second term of copyright protection is contingent on a renewal registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. It amended the Copyright Act of 1976.
The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., that serves as the library and research service of the U.S. Congress and the de facto national library of the United States. Founded in 1800, the library is the United States's oldest federal cultural institution. The library is housed in three elaborate buildings on Capitol Hill. It also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its collections contain approximately 173 million items, and it has more than 3,000 employees. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages."
Northeast Historic Film (NHF) is a regional moving image archive located at 85 Main Street in Bucksport, Maine. It is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting, preserving and sharing film and video related to the people of Northern New England.
Last Clear Chance is a 1959 American short film produced and directed by Robert Carlisle.
Megan Prelinger is a cultural historian and archivist. She is the co-founder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco and author of two books: Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962 and Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age.
American Libraries is a digital collection of ebooks and texts at the Internet Archive. This collection contains over 1,900,000 items sponsored by these partners:
Chicago Film Archives (CFA) is a regional moving image archive located in Chicago, Illinois. CFA is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving and providing access to films that reflect Chicago and the Midwest region of the United States. Since its founding in late 2003, the archive has expanded to include over 160 film collections, which combined contain nearly 30,000 films and elements. CFA safeguards its moving image collections through stabilization, digitization, and climate-controlled-storage.
Wilding Picture Productions, Inc. was a major supplier of audio-visual communications services, involved primarily in the production and distribution of motion pictures, slidefilms, TV commercials, and business shows. It produced industrial films for many corporations on a wide range of subjects, from expounding proper use of the company's products to productivity. During World War II, it was the main supplier of war-related films for the United States Armed Forces.
