Preview: One Night Only
No More Road Trips? | Rick Prelinger | USA | 2013 | 79 min
Chazen Museum of Art, Elvehjem Building (L160), Saturday, February 21, 7:00pm»
Certain to be a highlight of the 2015 film calendar, archivist Rick Prelinger will present his cross-country collage film, No More Road Trips?, made entirely from collected home movies. The film can only be previewed, not reviewed, because each screening experience is different with a soundtrack created through audience participation.
First of all, I must apologize for not posting a preview earlier this week for such a significant event. Hopefully it will not be too late for many of you to read this and decide to brave the cold and find your way to the basement of the Elvehjem building in the Chazen Museum of Art on Saturday night. What I can do in the time remaining, however, is to provide a few resources about Prelinger and his film so that you can quickly determine that this is not something you will want to miss.
Rick Prelinger is an amazing archivist and filmmaker. He is a leading collector of ephemeral films, or films that weren’t necessarily intended to be archived and preserved: commercials, industrial and educational films, and home movies. Remember the old VHS collection of ephemeral films at Four Star Video Heaven, you know, the one you wondered what it was all about and who put it together? That was Prelinger’s work (he also produced LaserDiscs and CD-ROMs with the Voyager Company).
He and his wife Megan Prelinger have been true innovators and activists for access to information in the information age. Through their Prelinger Library (founded in 2004) they have collected 19th and 20th century historical ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books, and made them available in physical form in San Francisco and in digital form online. But Prelinger is possibly most famous for his collection of moving images, the Prelinger Archives (founded in 1983), most of which is available digitally at the Internet Archive, but its physical materials were acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Even if he weren’t showing his latest film, his visit would be worth checking out just to hear him talk about his pretty amazing career and accomplishments (unfortunately I missed his Communication Arts colloquium talk on Friday afternoon).
Collective Experience
Perhaps I should try to claim that I’m assembling material from different sources for this preview in tribute to Prelinger’s commitment to collage and collective experience. But the truth is that it is hard to find a convenient starting point to persuade you why Saturday night’s screening will be so special. So instead, I’ll simply start locally. David Klein posted a fine interview with Prelinger at LakeFrontRow this week, where they discuss many issues related to found footage, home movies, history, and representation.
Perhaps the most concise introduction to the concepts behind No More Road Trips? can be found at Prelinger’s blog for the film. Besides explaining that the structure of the film is a road trip assembled from home movie sources from across the country, the most intriguing passage on the blog describes Prelinger’s concept for the soundtrack, or the participatory dimension of every screening.
Other than a faint ambient soundtrack, the film is silent. I’ve written no narration, nor have I commissioned music. The primary soundtrack for this fully participatory film will be made fresh daily by audiences at each screening. Perhaps they’ll identify some of the places that come and go in the 600-plus shots that currently populate the cut. Perhaps they’ll ask me questions, or answer those posed by others. Or perhaps they’ll react tendentiously, in the manner of Question Time in the British House of Commons, or riff rowdily in the style of the Elizabethan theater. Once the movie starts, it belongs to the audience. I don’t want to limit how people will respond to the film. But I hope they will act on their permission to speak and create a commentary, not just on the scenes that pass by as our trip speeds west, but on what automobility, speed and travel mean to them. And I hope they’ll be moved to think about whether we’ve reached the end of the open road.
Finally, let me point you to two more resources that should convince you that Saturday night’s screening will be worth it. First, Prelinger was a guest on a recent episode of The Organist, the podcast collaboration between McSweeney’s and KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, California, where he had a chance to discuss No More Road Trips? at length. And finally, to get a sense of Prelinger’s presentation style, I’ve embedded a video of an excerpt of Prelinger’s presentation of No More Road Trips? at the 2013 Creative Capital Artist Retreat. Prelinger had received a Creative Capital grant to complete the film, and they don’t just give those out to anybody.
I hope to see many of you there on Saturday night for what should be a memorable screening experience. Many thanks to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and their co-sponsors for making this event possible.