The Weird & Wonderful World of Public Domain Film
The Prelinger Archives is a collection of educational films, PSAs, vintage commercials, corporate-sponsored films and much more hosted on the Internet Archive, founded by San Francisco archivist Rick Prelinger in 1982 with the aim of preserving what he termed as 'ephemeral' films.
This archive can be a gold mine of source material for visual projects, allowing one to go visual-crate-digging for found footage for projects such as music videos, short films and documentaries. Here you can find everything from harrowing war documentaries, creepy propaganda films and mildly hysterical anti-drug PSAs to vintage burlesque shows, early animations and a plethora of so-bad-they're-good sci-fi knock offs.
Many of the films, particularly the government and corporate ones are unfortunate products of their time, with uncomfortable sexist and racist undertones or obvious political intent, but make for contemplative viewing through today's lens. Others couldn't be more vanilla if they tried, particularly the overly-dramatic PSAs.
While archives can sometimes be a bleak and sobering window into past and present society and attitudes, there are many amusements and creative curiosities to be found – some highlights include:
The strange and spacey campy kitsch of 50s and 60s corporate films, best shown in the mildly surreal films made for General Motors - Design for Dreaming (1965) and the follow up A Touch of Magic (1961), now considered cult films.
The often bland, but useful nature footage of American landscapes - best shown in Autism Beauty in Wyoming and Natural Resources of Oregon
The accidental comedy of early US PSAs, including The Party's Over, Dating Do's and Don'ts and the the 1938 classic Reefer Madness.
The archives are also home to many defining films of their eras, including the gorgeous works of groundbreaking silent film directors George Méliés and Segundo de Chomón, many of which are in colour. Chomón's The Frog and, perhaps the most well-known film of the time Méliés's Trip to the Moon are particular highlights.
With Youtube coming down hard on creators, and 'fair use' copyrights becoming more and more restrictive, perhaps the Public Domain will become the place to mine for visual material, combining old and new, high and low art as the most widely-appealing of pop culture has always done - re-purposing and re-contextualising.
It is, in a way, a visual extension of the principles of sampling, beat and remix culture - with the growing popularity of internet-friendly, borderline-meme genres like vaporwave, lo-fi and bedroom pop over the last decade and the ever-enduring and evolving remix culture ethos continuing to spread into all manner of popular music - it's almost surprising the weird and wonderful Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives haven't been thoroughly digitally-dumpster-dived yet.
Stock footage is more widely accessible than ever, but is also more expensive than it's ever been, with a lot of stock footage retailers now exploring the realm of subscription services. If you're looking for B-Roll for your documentary, background visuals for lyric videos or just some footage to mess around with - Prelinger Archives is for you.
For my own music and with my limited video editing skills, I clumsily edited together a music video for my song Seers & Sages.
Click here to watch.
What would you create?
A word of caution - while a vast majority of footage on Prelinger and the Internet Archives are available for re-use, even commercially, not everything is always listed correctly, so always double check the copyright details in the video description before using any footage. Also, bear in mind that while a film may be public domain, the audio or music may not.
Click here to watch a brief video on copyright and fair use.
For more information about the Prelinger Archives
and other public domain films visit the links below.
Rick Prelinger Plain Text Site
Additional Resources: