Films nobody meant to keep
Industrial films about assembly lines, classroom films about manners and hygiene, adverts for cars and kitchens, home movies of holidays: made for one purpose and then forgotten, these “ephemeral” films are now a goldmine of period footage. The Prelinger Archives on the Internet Archive hold thousands of them, roughly from 1903 to the 1980s, and Wikimedia Commons adds early cinema and digitised films from institutions.
Using them well
These are whole films, not stock clips: scrub through for the shot you need, and skip opening titles and countdown leaders. Expect standard definition and 4:3; pillarbox or crop carefully. The films are public domain, but the people and products in them never signed releases, so they are flagged editorial: perfect for documentaries, essays and history channels, risky in an ad.
