Stock Footage Psyche

PANORAMA EPHEMERA

DIRECTED BY RICK PRELINGER

IN MOST INSTANCES, when archival footage is used in a documentary, a commercial, a feature film or tv show, it's used essentially as punctuation, a snippet of visual commentary within the context of the larger framework. It can be something very direct and obvious, as in the case of, say, one of those Ken Burns documentaries on PBS-if the narrator is talking about Louis Armstrong, he'll show you archival footage of Louis Armstrong. It can also be done ironically for comic effect. In a recent obituary, Roger Ebert quoted the great Russ Meyer as once saying, "There was no such thing as a sex scene that couldn't be improved by cutaways to Demolition Derbys or rocket launches."

(Which, come to think of it, is very, very true.)

In the case of Rick Prelinger's new film, Panorama Ephemera (which premiered at the Anthology Film Archives last month), the archival footage is the context and provides the entire framework. There's no narrator, no external story into which the footage has been plugged. It's 90 minutes of clips from industrial, educational and advertising films, old newsreels, driver-safety films and the like. More than just a compilation of amusing clips, however, Prelinger has edited them together in such a way that, taken as a whole, they paint a very lucid portrait of America. Or at least America as it's been preserved and presented in ephemeral films.

Prelinger was pretty much the only man for the job in a project like this. Beginning in the early 80s while he was living in New York, he began collecting ephemeral movies. Over the past 20 years, his collection has grown into the Prelinger Archives-which contains more than 50,000 films.

Prelinger, who now lives in San Francisco, told me that he'd been toying with the idea of using the Archive to construct a feature for a few years now. In fact, he'd made one back in 2001 called Danger Lurks, which was composed of clips from safety films. But he wasn't quite satisfied with how the film was turning out, and after the terrorist attacks he decided not to move forward with it. As he put it, he "didn't want to contribute to the flood of post-traumatic reporting."

Then, over the past couple of years, several things happened. Prelinger, tired of putting together ephemeral film festivals around the country, digitized many of the films in the archive, making them available online. ("So people can put together their own ephemeral film festivals," he said.) In 2002, The Library of Congress acquired his Archive as part of their new Audio Visual library. And last year he set to work on a new feature, which turned out to be Panorama Ephemera.

"Panorama happened really quickly," he said.

He planned the first cut of the film very carefully, working out all the details on paper, and sticking to a strict three-act structure. Since everything had been digitized, he was able to easily edit it together on his computer.

After screening it once, he went back to re-edit it, and things changed completely.

"I can't even say how it changed-it wasn't something that existed on paper anymore...it was very organic; it just came out of my head."

What the film is "about" really depends upon the viewer, because in a way it's "about" the buried parts of the American psyche: those things we've forgotten, take for granted or choose to ignore. There are clips from labor disputes and meat-packing plants. The unemployed watch as their factories get torn down. Kids with emotional problems fantasize about killing their parents. A pair of newlyweds sets to work on a backyard garden. A car is hit by a train and an egg is menaced by a beater. Tying it all together are images of the land itself, and the slow migration of various settlers west across the country. Pilgrims appear near the beginning of the film, and near the end we see a young woman in a convertible driving along a California beach.

Watching it carefully, the film is still broken into three sections. The first involves class distinctions-with archival footage of factory workers and labor conflicts. The second deals with various dangers, especially those encountered by the young (car accidents, mental illness, nuclear war). And the third section focuses on voting and the growth of the suburbs.

Each of these sections is marked by a clip from a hypnosis experiment being conducted upon a young, fresh-faced man and woman.

"It's more contemplative, it's slower," Prelinger says, when comparing Panorama Ephemera to Atomic Cafe, the films of Craig Baldwin and other stock-footage features. In terms of the editing, he says, "a lot of those films are kind of aggressive." Prelinger prefers things that are more meditative. "I've always wanted to see someone actually falling asleep on film."

(And in a way he gets that here, with the hypnotized couple.)

"When people look at archival footage, they're usually looking at style. The clothes, the color or the beautiful old cars and designs. I wanted to get beneath that, to ask 'what's really going on in these films?'"

It's Prelinger's subtle editing that brings this out. He doesn't hit viewers over the head with sharp, ironic contrasts to make a point. Instead, viewers have to do a little thinking-how does the demonstration by the world's fastest typist fit in here? Why did we just see a wolf jump a fence? By the end of the film, it all makes perfect sense. It all fits together-at least insomuch as the American social landscape fits together.

Prelinger makes use of more than 60 films in all, in clips ranging from a few seconds to several minutes in length. He told me it was all footage that had made a deep impression on him, images that had stuck with him through the years.

One of the most intriguing things about Panorama Ephemera is the fact that Prelinger's giving it away. He's posted it online (URL below), and is offering it as a free download. Beyond that, more than 1000 films from his archive are also available as free downloads, which viewers may copy and use as they wish.

The question is, why? Why work so hard on something, be it gathering an enormous archive or making a film, only to give it away?

At first he thought it was a little nuts, too, when the man who ran the Internet Archive urged him to give it a try. After all, he made his living selling stock footage from the Archive. But he gave it a try anyway, and he was very surprised at what happened.

First, as an archivist, he feels strongly that the material he's gathered should be accessible and should be seen. Making the footage available at no cost makes that very easy.

More important, there's the karma factor (though he never used that term). If you give something away for free, you will profit from it in a very real, tangible way down the line. If he gives footage away, more people see it. There's increased name recognition. Everything increases in value. People see his footage, and they come back to him, either to work on a project with him or get more footage-and he profits in the end. Because while you can get it for free if you're an artist, have a cable access show or want to put together a little film festival, if you want some footage for a high-end project-a film or commercial-then you have to pay for it. The goodwill and generosity has come back to him in spades.

"I'm more stable now than ever before," he says of the decision to give footage away. "It's a viable model," he went one. "It's not only a moral imperative-I think it's also a tactical imperative."

Panorama Ephemera is available for download at archive.org.