The Experiment

Anne Golden continues her study of the Prelinger Archives, begun in 2018. This impressive trove of films chronicling daily life and constituting a cultural and social history of the United States is now in the public domain and accessible online. In mining this rich visual and auditory material, Golden is part of a flourishing movement that looks back at archival images and ephemeral films. She casts a critical, political, feminist and often affectionate eye on this found footage, redeploying it toward other narrative, identity-affirming and political functions. The Experiment employs fast cutting between scenes that show troubling atmospheres, oddly deserted and silent domestic spaces, rigid facial expressions and worried, sometimes absent gazes, evoking possible psychiatric experiments.