At Christmas, my mother sent us both some money to be used, she insisted, to buy something we could enjoy rather than putting it towards boring things like phone bills. After some consideration, we decided to put it together and buy ourselves a cute little DVD player, which now sits proudly atop our television. In choosing the player, I put quite a lot of effort into ensuring that it would be able to play a variety of formats from recordable media.
The question, then, is what to burn. We could, for example, download and burn episodes of our favourite American animated sitcoms in an effort to relieve some of the arguments over control of the cable remote, but that would be naughty and illegal and stuff. Hmm. Anyway, the answer must be found in movies with more open licences, and where better to begin than with the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films.
So far it’s been hard to select what to download. Every film seems to be as culturally significant or at least quirky as the one before. I began with the 1953 film A Is For Atom which, possibly rather worryingly, I remember watching at school in the Eighties. Although terribly dated and biased, it still stands up as a fascinating and insightful look at nuclear fission: rarely does popularist science fare so well at explaining complicated concepts so succinctly while maintaining technical accuracy. It somehow manages to stimulate both the academic physicist and the anti-nuclear petitioner in me, in equal measures.
Much of the archive’s content is American, but I found two films from which Anglophiles may derive delight. English Children: Life in the City brings us a slice of English family life from 1949. The narration has an ever-so-slight Yorkshire twang that adds a certain endearment to an otherwise typically formal delivery. Awfully romanticised, but cherishable nonetheless. Also, Seeing London from around 1922 is a silent tour of the city. It seems both distant and familiar: the majority of the sights remain to this day, even if they are heavily surrounded by more modern developments.
All this goes to show that everything in culture has cultural significance. We tend to rely on television for entertainment and information, but there’s a whole stack of culture that more subtly surrounds the medium of the moving image. Everything tells us something of the time in which it was created.