Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, Dec. 4

[UPDATE: Just bought my tix to this; only a handful left!]

Rick Prelinger is a San Francisco native who is known as a historian and “guerrilla archivist”, because he collects random bits of old video of the city and puts them into collections known as the Lost Landscapes of San Francisco.

On Friday, December 4, Rick will present his fourth installment. He’ll share 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 industrial filmmakers.

Rick is also a longtime resident of the Richmond District, and this fourth series will include footage from a video collection from a Chinese family that lives in the neighborhood. In a recent interview with spotsunknown, Rick describes the footage he discovered:

We’re going to have a bunch of footage from a Chinese-American family that actually lives across the street from us in the Richmond District who started shooting home movies in 1945, when they lived in Chinatown. And there’s great footage of life in Chinatown, and visits to Playland and to the playground at Golden Gate park – really beautiful, evocative, and it’s a very sweet family, too…

And I just looked [at the footage], and there was a fender bender at 15th and Balboa in the ’50s, with all these old cars all over the place, and everybody watching. There was a pickup band of kids playing on the sidewalk, both Anglo and Chinese-American kids all playing music together, just on the sidewalk, on 15th Avenue in the early ’60s.

In the interview, Rick also talks about why he likes living in the Richmond District:

Richmond is great. It’s quiet on the residential streets, but it’s busy and full of life on the busy streets. It’s very diverse. It’s much more diverse than other parts of the city. I think it’s more diverse than the Mission in a lot of ways. It’s not as crowded. You know, you don’t have that unbelievable density that you have in the east side of town. You can walk to the ocean. You can walk to Golden Gate Bridge. We’re a block and a half from Golden Gate Park.

In 2004, Rick and his wife founded The Prelinger Library, located downtown and described as “an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents.” Much of the collection is online at archive.org.

For Rick, pulling together archival footage of San Francisco isn’t necessarily for nostalgic purposes. In the interview, he says, “The funny thing about Lost Landscapes is that it would be wrong to say that it’s all about the past. It’s not intended to be nostalgic. It’s intended to be a look back at the way people lived. But I’m especially interested in it because the past can be predictive. I’m interested in looking at how the present has been constructed out of the past, and because of that, how the present is going to construct the future.”

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco Pt. 4 screens on Friday, December 4 at the Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Avenue. Doors open at 7pm, with Rick’s lecture and screening from 7:30 – 9pm. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased in advance.

Sarah B.