Film 101: Intro to American Non-Feature Films

One of the drawbacks to using Blogger is that you can't write an introduction that won't one day be banished to the netherworld of blogging archives.

I am a Postgraduate with interests that are not at all constructive to my thesis work. So, rather than letting my opinions on gender and ethnicity incrouch on my work in Greek Number Theory, this blog is my happy compromise.

Asides from the kitsch value, I love these films because of what many of them unintentionally reveal about life in the mid-twentieth century. Because, honestly, why would these mental hygiene films be needed if Americans were not "parking in cars with boys" in the first place? Then, on the other hand, there is still the blatant attitudes and confused messages about gender and race that still shock, dismay and amuse as well as error-filled science films distributed by the US Goverment and Educational Film providers.

When it comes to these collections, the impasse is this; we are watching these films out of context but what the original context was is obscure. Poverty is betrayed under visions of prosperity; discontent beneath conformity; ignorance hidden by bright, beeping machines.

Below is a short primer on the archives and figures I am indebted to for their efforts in collecting and making available all of the films that will be presented on this blog.
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Rick Prelinger: Beginning what would come to be the Prelinger Archive in 1982, he set out to preserve films of cultural significance which were not feature films or television shows. At this point, the collection (including what has since been acquired by the Library of Congress) exceeds 60,000 educational, amateur, government, and industrial films.

Skip Elsheimer: A hobby that began more than ten years ago has become a collection of over 20,000 films, a portion of which can be downloaded and viewed around the web, much like The Prelinger Archive films. However, through AV Geeks, Elsheimer also produces DVD collections of films that are not widely or freely available.

The Internet Archive (IA): These people think that your Myspace/BeBo page is a digital artefact. Well, kindof. IA is a non-profit based in San Francisco, Californiaestablished in 1996. Despite all of the information that is available on the web, we are living in a time that may be called a "Digital Dark Age"; as much asinformation is never lost on the web, we are hardly ever shown the means to find that information. The IA, which is recognized as an actual library in the stateof California, provides two types of service. The first, in the form of the Wayback Machine, confronts the problem listed above by keeping snapshot copiesof websites over the years. As of 2006, that collection consisted of 2 petabytes of data. The second service is an archive of digital media, audio, and printfrom all eras. Unlike a regular library, there is no late fees and no returns.