Since its inception in 1982, the Prelinger Archives has grown its collection of industrial, advertising and educational films to a whopping 200,000 cans of film. In addition to vast amounts of unedited material, that totals roughly 60,000 cut productions according to founder Rick Prelinger. In 2002, Prelinger’s collection was acquired by the Library of Congress while a great deal of material was then digitized and added to the Internet Archive, making several thousand films available online for free.
Since that time, Prelinger has shifted his focus to home movies, of which the Archives have amassed about 13,000 pieces of footage from as far back as the 1930s. Prelinger’s interests eventually culminated in No More Road Trips?, what he calls a “film experience.” Premiering as work in progress at South by Southwest in 2013, No More Road Trips? represents a staggering assemblage of home movie footage culled from Prelinger’s own archives as well as the likes of Henry Charles Fleischer and Sharon Spain. Snippets of gas station rest stops, Dunkin’ Donuts signs, and Times Square through various decades combine for a reflexive and reflective piece of historical filmmaking that loosely maps the geographical changes from the East Coast of the United States to the West.
In advance of his FREE screening this Saturday at the Chazen at which he will appear in person, Rick talked with me about taking space and travel for granted, the impoverished state of documentary filmmaking, and reading history through place.
Why home movies?
Rick Prelinger: Home movies have become cinema for me. They’re infinitely variable, surprising, spontaneous and incredible records of landscapes and everyday people’s preoccupations. It’s my top fascination now.
You’re an archivist so you’re used to cataloguing, but what has that process been like for No More Road Trips? when you’re working with movies from estate sales, eBay auctions and even private donors?
Rick Prelinger: It’s fun. There’s nothing more fun than looking at home movies because you never know what you’re going to see. You might see five Christmases in a row. You might see a farm family with a two-headed goat. You might see a family traveling to Buffalo in the 1930s and standing on a railroad platform taking footage of Franklin D. Roosevelt walking out of his private car with a cane — which nobody was supposed to photograph. You just never know what you’re going to see.
I watched and I worked with a volunteer group over the years, and what we did was open, inspect, process, and repair and prep footage for scanning, but most of the tagging has been mine with a little bit of help from one intern. And it’s not incredibly sophisticated tagging. I don’t do “2 minutes 27 seconds. Here’s a blue Chevrolet at a three-quarter angle from right to left.” Our tagging database is super powerful, and it helped me make the film. At one point, I had over 800 or 900 items to look at, and I ended up bringing about 400 into Final Cut to edit with. The process of editing Road Trips? was incredibly iterative. I began with a rough assembly that was about 14.5 hours, so I began with the Atlantic and ended with the Pacific and worked hard to figure out exactly where material came from. It’s a journey that doesn’t reverse upon itself, then you just cut and cut and cut until you begin to achieve some kind of clarity.
Road Trips? starts from the East Coast and works its way towards the Midwest, down south and then eventually up to California. There’s a clear geographical trajectory but did you find other narratives on the cutting room floor?
Rick Prelinger: No More Road Trips? arose out of a project of mine that was going to try to tell changes in history through changes in the landscapes, but that was a film I was not able to make, because I didn’t control all the material I needed to work with. With Road Trips?, from the beginning I knew what I wanted to do and it was really a matter of pulling together the material. There are all sorts of little narratives. People come and go, they surface and then they show up later on. It’s a film that’s filled with rhyming where certain sequences bounce off one another, but I was never tempted to try to build a narrative that looks more conventional. I’ve done that. I’ve tried to making a film with safety films where I actually cut a narrative of a composite American family from many different faces that changed all the time. That project was a real challenge, but it can be done because people are much more open now to different ways of making films work. People are much more literate filmgoers.
But I was never tempted. For me, the document is so eloquent. When you see the girls and their mom getting in the car in the beginning: What are they carrying? What’s in that lunch box? What does it say on the kid’s t-shirt? What’s the house look like in the background? We make up our own stories based off of the evidence that we see and I wanted to respect the evidence.
And you also explore whether there’s any truth to the idea that we can pack everything up and start anew in a different part of the country.
Rick Prelinger: There’s a great interest in this idea that our sense of mobility is quite different. The archetypal journey grew out of the European occupation of North America, and then they moved westward to occupy more territory. I think a lot of people feel like that isn’t necessarily true anymore. I think you could make a pretty interesting argument that the archetypal journey now is the journey to the United States, the journey that new Americans make. That is rapidly becoming an essential part of what it means to be American, because we all came from somewhere. I’m not celebrating something that may be dead or gone. I’m just trying to get people to see themselves in these images and question what they take for granted about the way this country is laid out and how we think about place and travel.
You’re also very outspoken about the importance of information availability. In 2007, you gave a lecture at Columbia where you emphasized the need to make basic source materials “open and available to all,” to “get closer to an even playing field.” Beyond the cinematic aspects, is there an educational thrust to No More Road Trips??
Rick Prelinger: I don’t really think it happens in the cinematic space at all. I see this as public history without a history degree.
You include a note in your end credits about deliberately leaving out pieces of footage that might otherwise be deemed stereotypical or misrepresentative.
Rick Prelinger: I’ve chosen not to use material.
But you also use the term “evidentiary” when attributing value to home movies. And to your point, they are a kind of crystallization of those perspectives as committed to film, perspectives that are preserved. There’s a balance between presenting something objectively while still recognizing that its place in time and history, so do you think we lose something when those unfortunate elements are taken out?
Rick Prelinger: I think there are tons of ways to talk about it. The question over who triggers that discussion and who controls that discussion raises some important questions of privilege. There’s a sequence in the film where a fairly elderly couple in Oklahoma gets ice cream on a very hot day, and there’s material where they approach a black child who’s so poor he’s in rags and they give him a nickel and that’s their good deed for the day. That’s a really loaded and fascinating image, and as a filmmaker I have a privilege to do anything I like. If I used that image, the context in which it may be seen might be read as “Well doesn’t that suck, and it’s great that we understand that that’s bad now.” So it can become a congratulatory impulse, pointing to something as a sort of historical example of injustice that we’ve moved past because we know how to call it now. I don’t think it’s productive for me to do that. We know about these images. I don’t need to repeat them. I don’t need to play into complacency by eliciting a predictable reaction. I like to work with people about that, and that little piece of text at the end also makes an open offer to people who might have thought through these issues. I don’t want these images to be unseen but at the same time, I don’t want them introduced in a slapdash or poorly considered way because I think they are loaded and they are offensive.
By and large, what you’re presenting is very hands-off. You’re not putting any overt auteurist stamp on the footage. You’re allowing these home movies to breathe and retain their fidelity. Regardless of how you might classify No More Road Trips?, that “hands off” approach is an element that’s sorely missing in documentary cinema today.
Rick Prelinger: Documentary these days is highly, highly crafted — to the point of not even resembling what we used to think of as documentary. There’s been a convergence of documentary style and technique with fiction film style and technique. Part of that is that makers believe their job is to put together something emotionally strong and compelling and as a result, they pull a lot of strings that I wouldn’t know how to pull or want to pull. I’m not using music. I’m not using a narrator. I’m not going for emotion. With the public screenings I do with historical footage, I’ve found the evidence itself is enough. People will make their own stories if you trust them, and their appreciation at being given some agency in that process is incredible. Not only will they watch this film and put together their own version of it in their minds, but they’re going to talk their way through it.
That’s fascinating to me. You begin the film by imploring the audience to create their own soundtrack. Even watching this by myself, I found the ambient music encourages you to react to an old Howard Johnson’s or a photograph of Herbert Hoover.
Rick Prelinger: The audience response bifurcates. Cinephilic audiences are a little impatient with this film because they want that overlay of production value. I choose to under-produce and it turns out community audiences respond much more favorably than cinephiles. When I showed Road Trips? at South by Southwest, the community members were so much more receptive than the folks downtown. Sometimes it’s nostalgic, sometimes people focus more on landscapes. Sometimes people have questions about the socioeconomics and the history, or Native Americans, African-Americans and urban sprawl. Other times there will be more sophisticated discussion about American mobility and whether this kind of thinking is dated. J.B. Jackson said that “landscape is history made visible” and that’s what I think this film does really successfully. It establishes the idea that you can read history through place.
Cinema is one of the least participatory mediums in our culture. The Alamo Drafthouse takes that to the extreme theater ninjas and hilarious PSAs, but you’re subverting the expectation that audiences should sit and be quiet. Is a “two-way street” something more film should strive for?
Rick Prelinger: I think we’re seeing it. There are documentaries filled with tired tropes and a three-act structure. People get together and they focus group films to build engagement and create campaigns just like commercials. The images are totally subordinate to the emotional arc that they’re trying to establish. Be that as it may, once you get people in that room together, amazing things can happen, and I’m interested in trying to push that.
Lots of people are doing live cinema today. My friend Sam Green has a finely-crafted cinema experience where he works with bands like Yo La Tengo, and it’s rehearsed and performed live. You could argue Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” is participatory cinema. I think there’s a fascination with opening up this process. Just because something has been doesn’t mean that it always has to be.
- Rick Prelinger will personally present No More Road Trips? FREE this Saturday at 7:00p in the Chazen Art Museum in L160.