For more than twenty years, media archeologist Rick Prelinger has been investigating and interpreting ephemeral media forms, most famously educational and industrial film. Projects such as Our Secret Century, Call It Home and the Ephemeral Films series use this material as a means to expose twentieth-century trends such as the growth of the American middle class, the history of suburbia and the ever-rising tide of advertising and consumerism within post-war capitalism. Tonight, Prelinger presents Panorama Ephemera, which he describes as “a collage of sequences taken from a wide variety of industrial, advertising, educational and amateur films which traverses the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America and lets the films’ often skewed visions construct a new American history that begins and ends in unexpected places.” (Steve Polta)