Navigator: Lost Landscapes

The Torres family is having a party, and I’m watching it happen. Balloon animals bounce around, a young boy makes a face, and a woman in pink pants and a matching shirt jumps around, delighted by the camera. When someone filmed the Torres’ tables overflowing with half-eaten platters in the 1970s, they didn’t know this footage would be seen by hundreds of San Franciscans in 2019. But here we all were.

For 14 years, the filmmaker and archivist Rick Prelinger has made an annual movie from found and archival 20 century footage like this, as part of his “Lost Landscapes of San Francisco” series. Hosted in recent years by the Long Now Foundation, an organization that supports “long-term thinking,” the screenings are meant to be rowdy affairs, where audience members call out what they recognize when confronted with the landscapes of the past.