Welcome to Prelinger Archives Online
Prelinger Archives collects home movies (originally shot on film) and "useful cinema," films created to fulfill a function, including advertising, educational, government, industrial and sponsored films. We also collect outtakes and documentary footage.
The home movies and amateur films held in our collection are offered as vivid documents of everyday lived experience. These show work, leisure, culture, rituals and celebrations, mostly photographed by nonprofessionals who sought to record and document their own experiences. We believe these images and sounds can contribute to future histories that are better-informed and reparative.
We acknowledge that moving images may contain offensive, outdated and even harmful content. Expressions of bias, violence, and bigotry, both explicit and implicit, may appear in any document in this collection. These expressions are counter to our organizational and personal beliefs that oppose bias and all forces of oppression today and in the future.
We nevertheless believe in providing access to historical materials in a responsible and transparent way that preserves evidence of legacy social conditions and attitudes. We are committed to culturally responsive, respectful and reparative description and metadata, which includes content advisories or warnings in some cases. We are also committed to research and consultation with members of historically marginalized communities in order to develop respectful, appropriate and accurate descriptions of the moving images we offer.
Contact us at prelingerclips@gmail.com.