Rick Prelinger is the archivist and filmmaker whose Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings reflect not just on "the city that's gone," as he says, but also "the city we'd like to live in." He has a kindred spirit in Budapest filmmaker Péter Forgács, who likewise understands the value of raiding our cultural cupboards for proto-selfie mementos of more innocent times. Forgács' Letters to Afar is a haunting mosaic of pre-Holocaust home movies from Poland, and his Private Hungary series builds inquisitive, experimental narratives out of found footage from the 1930s-1960s — a not undramatic period, it's fair to say, of Hungarian history. Like Prelinger, Forgács turns ostensibly ordinary banalities to poetic purposes — illuminating, for instance, philosopher István Bibó's assertion that "the greatest threat to the rule of law is not the people outside it, but those uncertain and distorted situations in which it becomes bad, contradictory, and hypocritical." It's a wonder we made it through the last century, and there's no telling how this one will end — except with lots of footage.
Filmmakers Rick Prelinger and Péter Forgács speak at 6:30 p.m. at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F. $10; 655-7881 or thecjm.org.
415-655-7800
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