Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes

This fall, legendary archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger brings his participatory city symphony, LOST LANDSCAPES, back to New York for two very special evenings at Roxy Cinema.

On September 30 and October 1, Prelinger will present LOST LANDSCAPES OF NEW YORK and LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO, featuring digital transfers of 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm home movies, travelogues, industrial films, and cinematic outtakes. Across six decades of moving-image history, these programs function as both journey and excavation, attending to the most intimate, sometimes overlooked, details of work and play. Together, the films trace changing infrastructures, recover un/familiar histories, and reveal the marks left by development and displacement.

Prelinger created LOST LANDSCAPES in part as a response to what he calls “historical amnesia,” questioning the idea of history as a single, predetermined narrative. The screenings transform the cinema into a site for collective memory and interpretation, where archival images become prompts for recollection and free associations. As Prelinger writes in “Archives of Inconvenience,” the aim is “to position archives as places of possibility”—spaces where dominant narratives can be contested and alternatives dreamed up together.

As with every LOST LANDSCAPES screening, the audience provides the soundtrack. Prelinger invites viewers to identify people and places, recall personal experiences, ask questions, and draw connections out loud. In place of conventional spectatorship, Prelinger facilitates a collective act of looking — one in which the past is constantly (re)configured through the contingencies of any given audience. What results is an ever-evolving encounter between archival footage and living memory: a screening that at once encompasses historical record, present-day connection, and imagined futures.

Rick Prelinger will be visiting from San Francisco to present both programs in person, with Q&As to follow.

 

Tickets + Info:

9/30: Lost Landscapes of New York — Rick Prelinger,  2017-26, 83MIN
Post-screening Q&A with Sierra Pettengill

10/1: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco — Rick Prelinger, 2025, 76MIN
Post-screening Q&A with Mackenzie Lukenbill

 

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “ephemeral films” (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called “useful cinema”) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 10,400 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 37 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004, still open to the public three days a week in downtown San Francisco. Rick and Megan currently co-direct Prelinger Archives, which is currently in the midst of a project to mass-digitize archival film, funded by Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Since early 2023, the project has so far scanned some 14,000 films. Newly digitized films are available at Internet Archive and YouTube.