Rick Prelinger | Lost Landscapes 02025: YEAR 20!

LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO doubly celebrates this year! First, our 20th anniversary, and second, San Francisco itself — center of creativity, style, resistance and freedom. The city shines throughout this wide-ranging, unbounded panorama made from 128 years of San Francisco moving images with a soundtrack made by the audience as the film plays.

Drawn from some 300 newly-unearthed archival films, LOST LANDSCAPES 20 recreates the textures and activities of everyday life, labor and play, replaying known and unknown historical moments, daylighting lost and found infrastructures, revealing the scars of settlement and pointing to more hopeful futures. Highlights include transportation in the air, water and on the land; images of the City's rich and resilient communities; unfamiliar footage of familiar places; countercultures and counterdemonstrators; and unpredictable moments on the streets.

Each year, LOST LANDSCAPES Patron Tickets support about 25% of Prelinger Library's annual budget. Please consider supporting this famed South of Market experimental research library, going strong after 20 years, that provides access to artists, historians, community members, researchers and readers of all kinds!

This talk was presented December 3, 02025 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join