Lost Landscapes III: Film Fragments of San Francisco

So I was a bad boy tonight.  I was supposed to go home and do work.  I was supposed to go home and finish a grant proposal so my boss can proof it tomorrow (sorry if you’re reading this JR).  But I thought it would be much more worth my while to attend the weekly TALKS! hosted by Shaping San Francisco.  And it kind of was.

Ever since I was hired at CounterPULSE last June I’ve been promising myself to attend one of these infamous talks and inevitably kept “putting it off till next week.”  It could have been all the cool press coverage, or my inner film buff reacting the word celluloid in the description, or just a good reason to procrastinate but for whatever reason I found myself back at CounterPULSE at 7:30p on a Wednesday night.  I walked in to this free event to find not only no empty seats in the house, but no empty seats anywhere on the floor and almost no standing room.  I thought: “Oh my god! What have I been missing?”

This particular evening was hosted by Rick Prelinger who has collected a large archive of film reels all in some way documenting San Francisco and the surrounding area.  His goal this evening was to share some snippets of his collected material.  The packed house was treated to a trip back in time to explore the 1939 World’s Fair, the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, the rise of the trolley system and many other unique glimpses into the San Francisco of yesteryear.

Now I have only lived in the city for a little over 2 years now and am just starting to feel familiar with all of the landmarks and iconic locales.  What made this particular talk so special for me was that through the films I was able to more viscerally comprehend the longer history of my new home city.  While some of the clips were staged, it was clear to me that the photographers were viewing our beautiful city with the wide eyed excitement that I too felt when I first arrived in town.  Not only were the films, which dated back to 1905 at their earliest, magnificent gems of history but Mr. Prelinger encouraged a dialogue between the audience and the mostly silent movies.  This created a unique atmosphere where audience members shouted out their guesses at what part of town we were watching, reminised about stores and shops long gone from todays streets and posed questions for others to answer.  This collective and spontaneous approach really made the history of the city come alive for me.

Chris Carlsson I know is a big proponent of everyone being an historian and with this evening I realized that not only do we each have our own story to tell but that these stories are crucial in documenting and preserving the common and collective history that is so fragile.  On many occasions I have picked Chris’s brain about good history books that will help me get acclimated to my new surroundings and indeed his suggestions have been right on the mark.  But no reading material could compare to the first hand education I got this evening.  Much like the way a good book can inspire an active imagination, this evening allowed me a rare glimpse into the past, present and future.  These buildings and streets around us, that I walk blindly by each day, hold hundreds of years worth of stories and as I walked home I was conscious of my own perspective of our great city by the bay changing in a very fresh and enlivened way.  I have Chris Carlsson, Rick Prelinger and Shaping San Francisco to thank for opening my eyes to a new (and old) San Francisco.  And what’s more with that out of my system I can now eagerly tackle that pesky grant application.