Money, patience and courage are no longer necessities for filmmakers choosing to work with archives. While it can still be a struggle to access archival material, vast resources are now freely available for viewing (and often, reuse). But freedom brings new challenges. How can career mediamakers thrive in an age of mass authorship and distributed creativity? What emerging modes of archival work offer the greatest promise? And how can we best use archival material to make works that plumb moving image history so as to propel it forward? Rick Prelinger explores these and other issues in an image-rich talk that includes audience discussion. Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years’ operation. Part of the Vermont International Film Festival with sponsorship by UVM Burack Distinguished Lecture Series.
