A collection of home movies filmed across a variety of times and locations during 20th century America will come together for public viewing tonight at the Fine Arts Plaza.
“No More Road Trips?” is an interactive film because it was created without a soundtrack to encourage audience interaction.
The film’s creator Rick Prelinger’s work with archived film compelled him to make the film silent because rearranging archived film gives him the ability to present history in a different way.
“After a while spent making films, I really began to get tired of this idea that people had to be quiet and that movies were one way,” Prelinger said.
The screening will be a part of the First Thursdays festival tonight, the kickoff to the First Thursdays program created by the council of Arts and Humanities at IU. As its name suggests, the program is a recurring event that will take place on the first Thursday of every month.
“If you look at this footage of the roadscape, you end up seeing the history of the 20th century,” Prelinger said. “You can build a history that doesn’t have any actual historical events in it. It’s all everyday experience,”
The idea of the First Thursday program is to start the night off with artistic activities before patrons continue on to other IU arts performances, said Jon Vickers, the founding director of the IU Cinema.
The film is compiled of archived film shot by regular people on their trips across the country. The product provides a road trip narrative starting at the dawn of automobile transportation and ending well into its use in the late twentieth century.
The idea of showing “No More Road Trips?” came about at the suggestion of the IU Library’s Moving Images Archive. The film will be a great introduction to the archives, Vickers said.
The IU Library’s Moving Images Archive and its impressive collection of over 120,000 reels of film have recently moved from the Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility. Vickers said they are looking for new ways to introduce this resource to the students at IU.
“We have a new space in Wells Library,” said Andy Uhrich, film archivist at the archive. “We are starting to promote this particular archive in the library’s clutch by bringing in experts in the field of moving image archiving and film preservation.”
One such expert is director Prelinger. After the film is shown, he will take part in a Q&A with audiences members where he will explain the motives behind how he created “No More Road Trips?”
“When the audience takes ownership of the event, it gives them a very different kind of relationship to history,” Prelinger said. “It’s redefined as what they would like it to mean.”
