The Prelinger Archives is a collection of educational, news, government, advertising, and amateur films in the public domain founded by Rick Prelinger. The term of art for these kinds of things is "ephemeral" films. Several years ago, the collection was acquired by the Library of Congress.
You are encouraged to download these movies and reuse without restrictions. And even if you have no purpose in mind at all, they're great fun to browse, even if a fair number are, to put it mildly, politically incorrect.
[Note that as we went to publish, the site was experiencing technical difficulties]
written on Tuesday Aug 28, 2007
odds,
ends,
films.
