Excerpt:
This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.
Annotation:
This site offers films selected from the Prelinger Archives, a privately held collection of 20th-century American ephemeral films (films produced for specific purposes at specific times, not intended for long-term preservation). The site contains more than 800 high-quality digital video files documenting various aspects of 20th-century North American culture, society, leisure, history, industry, technology, and landscape. It includes films produced between 1927 and 1987 by and for U.S. corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Some of the films depict ordinary people in normal daily activities, such as working, dishwashing, driving, and learning proper behavior. For example, one 1955 film illustrates the ¨comfort and delight of jet travel for Pan American World Airways and a 1930s film shows how and where bananas were grown and imported into the United States. The site contains an alphabetical index and printable list of all film titles. Note that viewing these movies requires a DSL or faster connection and, even with a fast connection, many of the movies take several minutes to load. This is an important source for those interested in American Studies, business and labor history, advertising and art history, cinema studies, and cultural history.