Event

EPHEMERA: MARCH MADNESS

No outlet served post-war American cultures ebullient pride and prosperity better than that of the now-infamous educational film. Today these didactic artifacts are relegated to sideshow status by the likes of Pee-Wees Playhouse, Weird Al, MST3K and Adult Swim, all of whom freely lampoon such easy targets for their comically dated sensibilities. Our monthly EPHEMERA program aims to present these documents to a contemporary audience in perhaps a more even light, ideally free from the ironic framing that can easily overwhelm some of their more interesting details. Fortunately the humor is irrepressible.

March 2016s installment MARCH MADNESS is a rare edition of mostly color shorts that employs a liberal interpretation of madness, presenting a varied selections of purported solutions to the various emotional problems, personality complications and physical ailments that may in some wayby someonebe termed mad.

Rick Prelinger began collecting ephemeral filmsall those educational, industrial, amateur, advertising, or otherwise sponsoredin 1982, amassing over 60,000 (all on physical film) before his Prelinger Archive was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Since then, the collection has grown and diversified: now it exists in library form in San Francisco and is also gradually being ported online to the Internet Archive (http://archive.org), where 6,533 of its films are currently hosted (as of this writing).