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Filmed on Thursday December 8, 02011

Rick Prelinger

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6

Rick is founder of Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, whose moving image holdings may be found online at www.archive.org. Rick co-founded Prelinger Library (www.prelingerlibrary.org), a publicly-available collection of historical periodicals, books, print ephemera, maps and government documents.

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 6th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and studio filmmakers.

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past.

New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

More Seminars

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SALT Summaries Book

$2.99 Also available as a paperback book

Condensed ideas about long-term thinking summarized by Stewart Brand
(with Kevin Kelly, Alexander Rose and Paul Saffo) and a foreword by Brian Eno.

Seminar Sponsors

David and Abby Rumsey • Kim Polese • The Kaphan Foundation • Garrett Gruener • Scorpio Rising Fund • Peter Baumann • Brian Eno • Greg Stikeleather • Cameo Wood • Ping Fu • Peter Schwartz • Lawrence Wilkinson • Ken and Maddy Dychtwald • Future Ventures • Ken and Jackie Broad • AtoB • WHH Foundation • Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan • Jackson Square Partners Foundation • The Long Now Members

We would also like to recognize George Cowan (01920 - 02012) for being the first to sponsor this series.

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