Oddball Films

Oddball Films presents Animazione Demente - The Psychedelic World of Italian Cartoons, an evening of some of the trippiest, most imaginative, and mind-blowing animation to come out of Italy, all on 16mm film from our incredible animation collection, including several "brand new" finds. From the insane surrealism of Bruno Bozzetto to the whimsically sublime cut-outs of Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini, to the worldwide phenomena of Osvaldo Cavandoli's character "The Line", to the groovy mixed-collage work of Carlos Marchiori, it's more than just your average night of cartoons. From the sick and brilliant mind of Italy's foremost animator Bruno Bozzetto (Allegro Non Troppo, West and Soda) come four deranged shorts: Oddball's all-time favorite cartoon Ego (1970) the surreal nightmarescape of sexuality, fascism, consumerism, a naked Mona Lisa and a host of other explosive imagery, Opera (1973) a hilarious ode to opera that features the destruction of the planet and the Statue of Liberty in a gas mask(!), Pickles (1973) several brief bizarro vignettes about religion, drugs, TV and more, and Mr. Rossi Buys a Car (1966) in which bureaucracy and road rage lead one man on a bloody rampage throughout the city. From the very different - but no less imaginative - Oscar-nominated team of influential painter, illustrator, and production designer Emanuele Luzzati and screenwriter and animator Giulio Gianini come three breathtaking cut-out shorts imbued with their unique visual style. Oscar nominated short The Thieving Magpie (1967), set to Rossini’s famous overture, shows what happens when birds revolt against their hunters, Ali Baba (1971) animates Luzzati's children's book of a little boy and his turban of butterflies that outwit a motley band of thugs, and Frederick (1971) tells the inspiring tale of a mouse that gathers sunbeams and poetry for the winter. The NFB produced the anti-smoking short The Drag (1967), Carlos Marchiori's psychedelic mix of collage and cell-animation. Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea (1973) features a character so popular, it became a worldwide advertising mascot for years. Plus, early birds will get to take a cinematic vacation to many beautiful places in Italy via the vintage travelogue Italian Interludes (1970s).

Date: Thursday, March 3rd, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Four by Bruno Bozzetto!

Opera (Color, 1973)The brilliant Bruno Bozzetto (Allegro Non Troppo) takes Opera to the most insane, surreal, political, and hilarious place you could ever imagine. Morbid and sexual with rips on fascism, sexism, racism and pollution, this over-the-top survey of opera features some of the most eye-popping imagery in animation history including the Statue of Liberty wearing a gas mask and Hitler with a new-wave hair cut! Safety glasses are recommended to keep your eyeballs in your skull!

Ego (Color, 1970)
One of the most phenomenal animated shorts of the collection, this surreal masterpiece starts with traditional comic-style animation until the factory-working family man goes to sleep and unleashes his subconscious thoughts sending him into a battleground of situations. His bizarre dreams lead him to Freudian juxtapositions of sex and gruesome fascism. Bozzetto utilizes a number of animation styles including optical printing and pop art imagery and a wild soundtrack by the ultra-lounge master Franco Godi to create the most unforgettable 9 minutes of cartoon history.

Pickles (Color, 1973)

Another eye-popper from Bruno Bozzetto. In twelve animated vignettes, Bozzetto creates brilliant visual, satirical and comical treatments of some of man's great preoccupations: war, omnipotence, religion, democracy, advertising, drugs, television, hunger, "conquest" of nature.

Mr. Rossi Buys A Car (Color,1966)

Part of Bruno Bozetto’s (Allegro Non Troppo) great series of psychedelic screwball shorts starring the “everyman” Mr. Rossi. Unbelievable animated hijinks with appropriately off kilter soundscore. Signor Rossi is in the market for his first car. After ridiculous bouts with bureaucracy, car salesmen, and rude motorists, he eventually loses his cool and goes on a high-speed road rage fueled terror spree throughout the city.

Three by Luzzati and Gianini

The Thieving Magpie (Color, 1967)

Three kings who tire of war turn to recreational bird hunting, sweeping the skies with barrages of arrows, and sending countless birds plummeting to their demise. One wily magpie, however, manages to evade the kings and, in turn, terrorize them with his antics, eventually amassing an army of bird troops to avenge themselves against the killer kings. Directed by Emanuele Luzzati, this film received an Academy Award nomination.

Ali Baba (Color, 1971)

Another beautiful cut-out film set to an operatic overture. Ali Baba animates Luzzati's eye-popping children's book of the age-old folk-tale of a little boy and his turban full of butterflies that goes up against 40 criminals and their ruthless leader Mustafa.

Frederick (Color, 1971)

A groovy adaptation of a much beloved children's book by Leo Lionni, directed by famed Italian animator Giulio Gianini. This beautiful cut-out animation features a little mouse contemplating poetry and gathering colors and sun rays rather than gathering food for the winter. A lovely film about the importance of artists in civilization.

The Drag (Color, 1965)

Produced for the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare this jaw-dropping film montage depicts the difficulty of breaking the tobacco habit in a child-adulthood go-go frenzy of wild animation by Italian animator Carlos Marchiori. The story depicts the case history of a chain smoker-satirically told on a psychiatrist's couch, with the patient's recollections--illustrating the psychology of the smoking habit and the part that cigarette advertising plays in the addiction. With hopping music and brilliant kaleidoscopic montages.

La Linea (Color, 1973)
A witty and self-reflexive short featuring Osvaldo Cavandoli's classic character The Line: a funny little man who is drawn in a continuous line with the world around him and interacts with the hands of his animator. The character was so popular, it was used for advertising campaigns worldwide.

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson's 3 Year Anniversary: Shockucation's Greatest Hits, the 36th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. After 3 years of digging out the best and worst the archive has to offer, we are celebrating our 3 Year Anniversary with a sampler of all our favorite lessons thus far including sex, drugs, enemas, talking cars, exploding dolls, choking babies, and the creepiest of creepy puppets. Find all about wet dreams and unexpected hard-ons in the outrageous male puberty primer Am I Normal? A Film about Male Puberty (1979). The US Navy gets unclassified and teaches you the ins and outs of Giving an Enema (1944). Watch out for those burning dolls and exploding refrigerators in GE's explosive safety film Chemical Booby Traps (1959). See how Barbara loses friends by being a pushy, mouthy scalawag, maybe reading a book from the library can give her better Manners in Public (1958) and more square friends. Get ready for one swingin' party with The Munchers (1973), a groovy oral hygiene rock opera featuring a mouthy bandstand of claymation teeth. Jimmy dreams of overbearing anthropomorphic automobiles in the surreal The Talking Car (1969). Plus, the triumphant return of Gooney and Herky, the ugliest most belligerent puppets ever in Feelings: Don't Stay Mad (1972). Plus, musical numbers from Free to Be... You and Me (1974) and Junior High School (1978), and for the early birds a predatory scare film: Meeting Strangers: Red Light, Green Light (1969). It's an extra-special night to learn your lesson!

Date: Friday, March 11th, 2016 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Featuring:

Am I Normal? A Film about Male Puberty (Color, 1979)
"In this job I see a lot of penises"
It's the companion piece to Oddball favorite "Dear Diary: A Film about Female Puberty", but this one if all for the boys! Is it normal to think about sex all the time? Are these inexplicable hard-ons and nocturnal emissions just part of puberty, or are you some kind of freak? Are the other boys going through these same kinds of changes? Can you learn anything important from a book titled "Great Moments in Sex"? Find out all that and more when one pubescent boy dares ask every adult he knows "Am I Normal?" Well, Billy, the answer is yes and no...

Giving an Enema (B+W, 1944, excerpt)

Of all the instructional films the US Navy has made Giving an Enema is no doubt the weirdest and most hilarious. If you can find anything stranger than a crash course in how to inject water into another man’s rectum let us know. Don’t worry-you’ll be seeing an abbreviated version not the entire 22 minute film!

The Munchers (Color, 1973)

Like the California Raisins of Oral Hygiene, The Munchers is a trippy, psychedelic rockucational film for all tastes. Dancing and singing on some kind of a mouthy bandstand, the Munchers fall victim to the Pusherman Jack Sweet, a masked demon that has an endless supply of delicious candy. Can the peg-legged, metal-skulled old toothman convince the young Munchers to stay clean and candy free? If not him, then maybe the conga-line of anthropomorphic healthy foods can do the trick.

The Talking Car (Color, 1969)

Jimmy is supposed to go on a camping trip tomorrow, but while packing the station wagon he runs out into the street and almost gets hit by a car. Now his dad doesn’t think he’s responsible enough to go camping. Can the talking cars that visit Jimmy in his dreams teach him the ‘see and be seen traffic safety rules’ in time so he can go? Warning: do not do drugs before watching this film. These talking cars mean business.

Chemical Booby Traps (Color, 1959)
Let's set sh*t on fire! This GE (General Electric - We Bring good things to life) industrial safety film shows you how NOT to store explosive chemicals - and what happens when you do! There are burning dolls, exploding sinks, mannequins and fridges and fires galore!

That They May Live (Color, 1959, excerpt)
From (of all places) the Saskatchewan College of Medicine comes this look at every conceivable scare story about loss of life. Babies choke on plastic, kids lock themselves into refrigerators and dinner guests choke. All this can be prevented by YOU!

Manners in Public (B+W, 1958)
Barbara is new in town and desperately wants to make a friend, although she's never had much luck in the past. The neighbors have a daughter around her age, maybe if they go to the movies, they will be fast friends. But when Barbara pushes some ladies, is too raucous on the bus and talks through the whole movie, the neighbor girl is not interested in a rude friend and shuns Barbara until she goes to the library and brushes up on her good manners. Barbara learns about good manners in public- on the sidewalk, on the bus, in the theater, in the store , and in the elevator. Now Barbara is a quiet, well-behaved girl, just like the system wants her to be. Directed by Herk Harvey (Carnival of Souls).

Feelings: Don’t Stay Mad (1972, Color)

This bizarre and head-scratching PSA attempts to teach children to deal with their anger. Herky and Goonie are two of the ugliest puppets you may ever see, and they seem to be locked in some sort of domestic abuse situation, although it would seem they are only supposed to be 9 year-old children. Goonie is a belligerent, baseball bat wielding maniac, that none of the kids want to play with, but maybe there is hope if he can learn to not stay mad (and put down the baseball bat). There are also some marvelous scenes of precious little girls screaming and beating their pillows mercilessly.

For the Early Birds:

Meeting Strangers: Red Light, Green Light (Color, 1969)
Watch out for the "red light" people! Learn how to cross the street and how avoid the countless molesters that are constantly following you and your crew of tots in this ridiculous shock film for the grade-school set. A group of kids are just out for a stroll to see a movie, when they are beset by predator after predator, until each child has learned their lesson. Even includes a rare scene with a female pedophile.

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Better Call Saul: Saul Bass on Film, an evening of 16mm short films showcasing one of the 20th century’s legendary graphic designers, filmmakers and title producers - Saul Bass. The man responsible for some of the most easily recognizable corporate logos, film posters and film title sequences was–in his own right–an incredible, visionary and award-winning filmmaker. Films include documentary Bass on Titles (1977) featuring the man himself musing on the creation of some of the designer’s most iconic title sequences from such films as Man with a Golden Arm, It’s a Mad Mad Mad World, Seconds, West Side Story, Grand Prix, and Walk on the Wild Side as well as some of his most famous corporate logos; Notes on the Popular Arts (1977), explores escapism in American popular media through a smorgasbord of bizarre dream sequences with exquisite time-lapse cinematography; Why Man Creates (1969), a series of explorations, episodes and comments on creativity by Saul Bass and winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1969; and A Short Film on Solar Energy (1980), presents an animated history of solar power and a possible future without fossil fuels. Plus trailers for films with Bass-designed titles sequences and more!

Date: Thursday, March 10th, 2016 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Featuring:

Bass on Titles (Color, 1977)

The work of Academy Award winner Saul Bass (Why Man Creates) covers the full range of the design spectrum, from feature film titles, corporate logos and product design to directing his own films about perception and creativity. In this film Bass talks about the evolution of the thematic title sequences that open and close many of the great productions of cinema. The design of these symbols involves the search for an elusive visual statement that instantaneously communicates the film’s intent while generating public interest. Title sequences included are the iconic Man With the Golden Arm, West Side Story, Nine Hours to Rama, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, A Walk on the Wild Side and many more.

Why Man Creates (Color, 1969)

A series of explorations, episodes and comments on creativity by Saul Bass, a master of conceptual design, this film is one of the most highly regarded short films ever produced. Humor, satire and irony are combined with serious questions about the creative process and how it comes into play for different individuals. A fascinating cornucopia of trenchant ideas and important truths it’s transgressive and insightful, way-out and weird. Winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1969.

Notes on the Popular Arts (Color, 1977)

This exploration of popular media in America (think TV, movies, magazines, and music) has Bass blowing up the absurd of the every day to show how our popular arts serve as a means of wish fulfillment and escapism. In a series of fantasies, each of our treasured American art forms takes an unsuspecting person through a smorgasbord of bizarre dream sequences. Bass’s typically beautiful visuals turn this essay film into a hilarious and elegant statement.

A Short Film on Solar Energy (Color, 1980)

Ever the innovator, Saul Bass and friends give us a taste of what the future could look like with renewable energy. Bass treats us to short history of the use of solar energy by humans, and a wonderfully animated look at dastardly fossil fuels. The year after this film was released, Reagan removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. Go America!

For the Early Birds:

The Searching Eye (Color, 1964)

A small boy takes a hypnagogic trip through nature in this visually stunning investigation of the mind’s eye. During a long, wandering hike, the boy sees the history of man in a sand castle and the creation of the earth in a piece of rock. Bass goes all out on this one, using exquisite time-lapse cinematography and flawless composition.

About Saul Bass

One of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century, Saul Bass was born on May 8, 1920 in Bronx, New York. He became known for designing brilliant animated sequences for motion pictures. In his 40+ year career he did work for the best Hollywood movie makers including Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and many more.

Bass designed title sequences for over 50 feature films, including classics such as The Man With the Golden Arm, Psycho, Casino, West Side Story, Anatomy of a Murder and dozens of others. He won numerous awards, including an Oscar in 1969 for best documentary for Why Man Creates. In 1965 won Lion of San Marco award for Best Film about Adolescence for the film The Searching Eye. Bass was also well known in the publishing/advertising industry, having designed the corporate identity of United Airlines, AT+T, the poster for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games and dozens of iconographic logos still used today. He died on April 25, 1996 in Los Angeles.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films presents Sexperimental Cinema, an evening of 16mm films that blur the line between experimental film and erotica. From the sensuous to the bizarre, this program features avant-garde and experimental works as well as post-modern erotica, animation, art, documentary and more. Films include Orange (1971) experimental filmmaker Karen Johnson’s abstract and erotic short consisting of extreme close-up shots of an orange being peeled and eaten, Fuck Horray (1970) an anonymous highly-edited slice of subliminal sex, Peter Foldes' eye-popping rare animation Go Faster (1971) with a man who does everything in his car including his secretary, Lot in Sodom (1933), Watson and Webber’s landmark Pre-Code Sodom and Gomorrah story filled with sinewy and semi-clad bodies and delirious bacchanales devoted to physical pleasure (print provided by the Jenni Olson Queer Archive), experimental filmmaker Scott Bartlett’s lyrical and tactile flesh and fantasy film Lovemaking (1970), an excerpt from the groundbreaking Mondo Cane (1962) featuring famed artist Yves Klein utilizing naked Human Paintbrushes on a giant canvas, 7362 (1967), Pat O'Neill's breathtaking optically printed ode to the human form and the orgasmic motion of oil derricks, Relativity (1966), Ed Emshwiller's meditation on corporeality featuring interesting manipulations of the female form, and Constance Beeson's homoerotic cine-poem Stamen (1972). Is it smut or an art film? You decide.

Date: Friday, March 18th, 2016 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Featuring:

Relativity (Color, 1966, excerpt)
Avant-garde master Ed Emshwiller's bizarre and beautiful film was made with a grant from the Ford Foundation. It's not clear whether or not they knew what they were getting into, but the result is an arresting and audacious poetic masterpiece that examines the human condition from the inside out. Emshwiller called it "something that deals with subjective reality, the emotional sense of what one's perception of the total environment is -- sexual, physical, social, time, space, life, death." We will be skipping past the gutting of a pig to a fascinating segment on human sexuality featuring two disparate halves of a woman's body seamlessly composited into one fascinating image. The looping soundscore only heightens the hypnotic view of life, sex and the human body.

Lot in Sodom (B+W, 1933, excerpt)

Lot in Sodom was one of the strangest works of cinema of the early 1930s. Even by the standards of Pre-Code cinema, the blatant sexuality pushes the envelope to the point of being shredded. Lot in Sodom was the second and final collaboration of two Rochester, N.Y.-based creative artists, James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber. In 1928, the duo created an expressionistic silent short based on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” Inspired by German Expressionism this avant-garde interpretation of the Old Testament tale of the trials of Kit and features sensual dances and distorted multiple images in telling its tale of a good man and his family living amidst a sexually charged band of Sodomites. Lot in Sodom is a sensual depiction of the Sodom and Gomorrah story filled with sinewy and semi-clad bodies, delirious bacchanales devoted to physical pleasure, and a searing, cataclysmic finale depicting the fall of a city devoted to sins of the flesh.

Lot in Sodom is an early and important and influential film (this film greatly influenced Barbara Hammer’s “Nitrate Kisses”) in the history of American avant-garde cinema. The overlapping multiplies the sensual landscape of human flesh and gives a choreographic grace to the erotic movements of the Sodomites. Print courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Archive.

Go Faster (Color, 1971)
The pace of modern life demands that we constantly go faster, often forgetting where we are going, according to this satirical animation from the brilliant Peter Foldes. Modern man is shown to be at the mercy of his car, although on the surface he seems to have made it suit his needs. Our hero shaves, dictates letters, watches T.V., eats, drinks and makes love to his secretary - without budging from behind the wheel. Everyday the routine is the same, increasingly faster and more perfunctory. He is indifferent to the changing scenery. Nothing changes even when he exchanges his car for a boat, or a plane, or a spaceship. At last he begins to wonder what it’s all about. The film speculates that man’s machines serve him efficiently, but the resulting way of life gives little pleasure or sense of purpose.

Orange (Color, 1971)

Experimental filmmaker Karen Johnson’s erotic short consists solely of music accompanying extreme close-up shots of an orange being peeled and eaten. A metaphor for the body erotic, the texture of the fruit’s flesh, the sensuous color and the physicality of the action make this film one of the most erotic shorts ever made.

Fuck Horray (B+W, 1970)
This anonymous hand-made slice of subliminal sex, found in a collection of beefcake erotica features a semi nude male with highly edited subliminal messages flashing by.

L.A. Too Much (Color, 1968)

A couple having sex is interposed over shots of the architectural details of a house. Strange noises fill the sound track. Ultimately the old house succumbs to a violent death.

Lovemaking (Color, 1970)

The famed experimental work by film pioneer Scott Bartlett is a delicate and arousing treatment Bartlett’s films often form an interaction between film material and photographed image by combing complex analog film effects with film and video images to create a lush, colorful, and layered flow optical and auditory information. Its mode is simple and classical, combining technical mastery and personal restraint. The image is vivid subtle and ambiguous while the sound is sharp and clear. Bartlett's “Lovemaking” is an imaginative, suggestive, artistic, non- clinical evocation of the sexual act of lovemaking. Both visually and conceptually dense,Lovemaking explores eroticism, sex, and the body in a completely new and innovative way.

Human Paintbrushes (Color, 1962)

This excerpt from the groundbreaking “Mondo Cane” has famed artist Yves Klein utilizing human paintbrushes on a giant canvas. Klein, a student of Eastern spirituality was on a quest for pure color and form. His live performances were groundbreaking precursors to minimalism, conceptual, land and performance art. Klein was a showman and one of his most famous events was the imprinting of paper with naked models smeared with his trademark blue paint, as he directed their performance to music. As well as his monochrome works, Klein created sculptures using sea sponges, paintings made with fire, and is well known for his exhibit called The Void, in which he chose to exhibit an empty gallery room, void of everything but a large cabinet.

7362 (Pat O'Neill, Color, 1967)

The languid rhythms of fades, dissolves and superimpositions permeate this masterfully dense film by famed avant garde filmmaker and auteur of the optical printer Pat O’Neill. This film preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation and included in their dvd box set Treasures of the American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986.

“This film started out to be about the motion and sound of the oil derricks that once lined the beach in Venice, California. The derricks, which had been built during the oil boom of the 1920's, were made of wood and rusted iron, and were largely open and unattended. I was attracted to these towers by their moaning sounds, their heady aromas, and the consolation of the endless rising and falling of the pump heads. Somehow it seemed like prayer. The film came to contain a human body, and then moving objects, which I filmed in my studio: rotating and oscillating shapes whose outlines would merge with one another. But in a way the piece was really about re- photography - about making something out of ordinary parts using mechanical technology to reveal a glimpse of something uncanny.

Thirty-some years later, it seems to be about orgasms. Joseph Byrd, later of the United States of America (a band) made sounds on the fly from a primitive synthesizer. Burton Gershfield stopped by with a gallon each of yellow, cyan, and magenta developers from Technicolor, which were used to develop black and white, emulsion 7362”.-Pat O’Neill

Stamen (Color, 1972)

A lyrical piece of experimental homoerotica by the radical filmmaker Constance Beeson. A beautiful and romantic encounter between two men superimposed with lush imagery of flowers and waterfalls.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Tiki Fever! Vintage Hawaiiana. This evening of surf, tiki and Polynesian serenades offers an array of breathtaking, mesmerizing and rare films about an idyllic Hawaii including cartoons, mini-musicals, burlesque, promotional and ephemeral films from the 30s thru the 50s - all on 16mm film from the archive. See pre-jet travel footage of Waikiki beach and music by Sol Hoppii in Hawaiian Rhythm: Hawaiian Nights (1939). Then join the jet-set as two newlyweds travel from New England to Hawaii via stylish Pan Am jet in the campy promotional travelogue Wings to Hawaii (1947). The mini-tiki-musical Isle of Tabu (1945) features angry Tiki Gods, erupting volcanoes, human sacrifice and (of course) musical numbers. Betty Boop hulas her heart out in nothing but a grass skirt and a lei in the pre-code Fleischer Brothers cartoon Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (1932) with an authentic soundtrack by the Royal Samoans and rotoscoped hula moves. Homer Groening gives us A Study in Wet (1964), a poetic meditation on water including plenty of groovy surf shots, natural psychedelia and a soundtrack made up of water droplets. Learn how you too can make a Coconut Head Bank (1950s) in a bizarre slice of instructional Tiki ephemera. Plus! A Hula Hottie Burlesque (1950s), an island full of Hawaiian Soundies (1940s) like the goofy Little Grass Shack , a Busby Berkeley musical number Aloha Oe from Flirtation Walk (1934) and more! For the early arrivals there is the rare Kodachrome short, Polynesian Holiday (1955) starring bandleader Harry Owens and featuring his Academy Award winning Sweet Lailani.

Date: Thursday, March 17th, 2016 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Featuring:

Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle (B+W, 1932)
While not the most racially sensitive Betty Boop cartoon, this nonetheless fun Fleisher Brothers animation features music by the Royal Samoans and Betty Hula dancing before the natives get restless. Betty's authentic dancing was rotoscoped from performances by native dancers. Rotoscoping was a technique pioneered by the Fleischers in which they would trace the body movements from a human subject onto the animation cell to achieve the most realistic movement and proportion of their cartoon characters.

Wings To Hawaii (Color, 1947)
This beautiful and campy color promotional film begins in a small New England town with a newlywed couple (Dick and Nancy) on their way to San Francisco, where they enjoy the views from atop the Mark Hopkins Hotel before heading off to the Pan Am Clipper Boeing 377 for a flight to Hawaii. The remainder of the film shows us everything you would expect to see in mid-century Hawaii: a luau, hula dancing, erupting volcanos and some great outrigger and surf scenes!

The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was a luxurious long-range postwar prop airliner. Its pressurized cabin could hold about 100 passengers or sleeping berths for up to 28 berthed and 5 seated passengers. One distinctive feature was a lower-deck lounge, reached by a spiral staircase from the upper-deck, that inspired the one on the later 747 jumbo. Only about 56 were built as airliners and by the early 60's, they were quickly made obsolete by the success of the Boeing 707 jetliner. The next morning the Pan Am Clipper arrives in Hawaii and passengers are exiting PAA N90944, Clipper Romance of the Skies. NOTE: This Clipper was involved in the 2nd worst accident involving a Boeing 377 when on November 8, 1957 the aircraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean, 940 miles east of Honolulu.

Study in Wet (Color, 1964)
A short, semi-experimental piece from Matt Groening's father, Homer Groening. As a title card informs us in the beginning, everything in this film is wet; from mesmerizing reflections on the ocean to groovy 60s surfer chicks to the melodic drip drip dripping of the soundtrack (which is a recording of water droplets falling into a bathtub). The trippy visuals will make you think that optical effects were used, but it's simply the magic of science, nature and Groening's eye that bring us such incredible and otherworldly imagery.

Hawaiian Rhythm/Hawaiian Nights (B+W, 1939)
Two early shorts from Castle Films (later to become the leader of 8mm and 16mm films sold to consumers for in-home projection). Hawaiian Rhythms is a compilation of mostly Anglo-Hawaiian Soundies with some great hulas and luau scenes, while Hawaiian Nights is more of a travelogue with music, including the slack-key master Sol Hoppii and amazing footage of Waikiki beach, outriggers and surfers in the days long before jet travel and high-rises.

Coconut Head Bank (B+W, 1950s)
Watch this step-by-step demonstration of how to make a Missionary bank with a coconut and some common household supplies!

Hula Hottie Burlesque (B+W, 1950s)
Check out that pair of coconuts! A tantalizing tidbit of Tiki T&A, this exotic slice of smut features a pretty blonde hulaing her ass off.

Isle of Tabu (Color, 1945)
Two-hour musical epic packed into 17 minutes! Part of Paramount’s Musical Parade Featurette Series, this early Tiki film has angry Tiki gods, exploding volcanoes and a curse-lifting, human sacrifice plot with some song and dance numbers and a happy marriage ending. The not-so-authentic natives include Nancy Porter in her starring role debut (never to be heard from again) and several B-movie pretty boys. Music by Napua, Sam Koki and his Islanders and Pau Kua Lana Girls. Director William Shea’s most notable later work was an episode of “Mister Ed”.

Hawaiian Soundies (B+W 1940s)

The precursor to the music video, the Soundie was a short musical film made in the 1940s, often featuring singing and dancing in under 3 minutes. They were distributed to be played on specialized jukeboxes in night clubs, bars and amusement parks. Cashing in on the huge popularity of the Hawaiian aesthetic, dozens of Hawaiian soundies were made to exoticize the musical roster.

“Little Grass Shack”

A goofy sailor plays the ukelele and sings about the ladies of Hawaii, all the while an overly-aggressive hula dancer tries to seduce him into dancing with her.

“Ana Lani”

Ray Kinney and his Orchestra featuring the Aloha Maids

A big band clad in matching Hawaiian shirts play an old island favorite while hula dancers shake their stuff.

For the Early Birds:

Polynesian Holiday (Color, 1955)

Filmed in stunning Kodachrome color, this rare short travelogue stars bandleader Harry Owens in a tongue-in-cheek island vacation, where he’s fanned and feted by beautiful native women. Harry established the “hapa haole” style of Hawaiian music (native music as interpreted by foreigners) and won an Oscar for his song “Sweet Leilani”.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films welcomes film collector, filmmaker and found footage expert Anthony Buchanan for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Buchanan will be swinging into Oddball to unspool some of his new super8 films--predominantly found footage--which deal with issues of media hypnosis, distorted perception in American life, satirical but poignant commentaries on home movie traditions and ideologies, and other American mythologies. Source material for the films include orphan home movies from the '70s, Hollywood classics remixed with personally-shot footage, audio pulled from dumpsters, discarded VHS tapes, Buchanan's own one-reelers, and other media ephemera. Buchanan's super8 mm films include KneelReel (2015), Manipulating the T-Bone (2015), Flip Flick (2015), I, CHRIS (2016), and ATA Lives (2016). Also included in the program are 16mm vintage satires on consumer culture from Buchanan's own archive, as well as gems pulled from Oddball's collection including Report (1967) by Bruce Conner and Future Shock! (1972) narrated by Orson Welles!!

Date: Thursday, March 31st, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Films Include:

KneelReel, 2015, super 8, silent, 2 minutes

The first in an on-going series that expose middle-class American ideals as enacted through the history of “small film history”--home movie--tradition, as opposed to “Film History,” with a capital “H.” Emphasis was on how the secondary body--the apparatus and the filmmaker’s movement--shape the subjective interpretation of the objective physical world.

One roll of super 8, kneeling in a church, four times, in a circle, simple transition into the same gesture, into “Nature:” four kneels, forming a circle. A simple comment on the transference of Holy Worship from religion onto that of so-called “Nature.”

Manipulating The T-Bone, 2015, super 8, silent, 2.5 minutes

The second in the series, playing with the inevitable historical domestic associations embedded within the super 8 format; home movies, cooking, etc... and how, through the process of photographing, banal events become significant, even mythical, in the Barthesian sense. The T-Bone in question is the age-old signifier of Good Ol’ Americana. Title is a reference to the famous Bruce Nauman minimalist piece.

FlipFlick, 2015, super 8, silent, 2.5 minutes

The first in a series that literally challenges/questions the physical limits and endurance of both the human body and the camera’s body, and their dependency on one another. Also a satire on minimalist Structuralist film, based on a pun. A one-reeler inside a heavily-padded super 8 camera, which was turned on, facing a mirror, and literally tossed into the air and caught by me, over and over, like a child tossing a ball, until the reel ran out.

I, CHRIS version 1 2016, found super 8, sound with accompanying CD, 9 minutes

The first of two films with the same audio. A serious investigation into the absence of an idealized self, a collaboration between two discarded and refound cultural pieces--audio and visual--both of which are blatant signifiers of lack. The audio is a disturbing self-hypnosis tape discovered by Joel Haertling in a dumpster in Boulder, CO, in the ‘80s. The visuals are from a slightly edited super 8 reel of shot-off-TV-screen-images of glamour, pageants and other late-night media shot by an unknown filmmaker in the ‘70s, and given to me by the Bay Area-based filmmaker Thad Povey in 2011. The obviously re-photgraphed images of desire, distorted by the super 8 camera lens, add further distance to the fantasy of self-fulfillment, as the photographer tries desperately to capture something that they themself are so obviously not.

I, CHRIS version 2 2015-2016, super 8, sound with accompanying CD, 9 minutes

“No signifier is more imaginary in cinema, more primordally elsewhere, perhaps, then that of the moving body. The moving, gesturing body in cinema signals its presence in the world...but also its withdrawl, its status as an imaginary signifier that becomes a figure for absence; a figure of the absent figure.”

--Akira Lippet, “EX-Cinema, 2012

The second version with the same audio, this time the visuals are from re-photographed/manipulated images of VHS Yoga exercize tapes found around Boulder, CO. The fact that the audio--and the VHS tapes--were found in Boulder is significant, as this version is a critique of Boulder’s image as a New Age haven of yuppie leisure, success and “self fulfillment,” all of which hide a desperate existential crisis underneath. Once again, the awareness of the re-photographed image of movement, signaling further distance and absence, combined with the “seizuring” of the image, brings the imaginary signifier of success to ruin. Two New Age byproducts of unfulfilled personal crises, turned against themselves through manipulation, to expose the desperate unfulfillment and failure that they are manufactured to mask. NOTE: This version is a work in progress, as it will later have a hand-made abstract element applied to it from New Age “Healing” chemicals found at local stores, furthering the foregrounding of simulated bodies and absence.

ATA Lives!!! 2016, super 8, silent, 11 minutes

A cinematic Holiday card to our dearly-loved San Francisco microcinema, ATA and Other Cinema. A short film I made with my own footage as well as a super8 print of "It's A Wonderful Life" to celebrate Artists' Television Access's success in renewing their lease for five years as of 2016, despite all the odds, in the increasingly-gentrified Mission District of San Francisco. Edited in four nights with a hot splicer, plenty of beer, and lots of love. A Tragedy-turned-Triumph.

Anthony Buchanan is a filmmaker, curator, and internationally-published scholar of underground and experimental film. His films investigate--and interrogate--simulated narratives and myths embedded within landscapes, narratives and various media, as well as emphasizing issues of absence, displacement, and the trace within archival/”found” media and in constructed human “desire,” oftentimes literally testing and incorporating the physical limitations of the technology. Buchanan has been an adjunct professor of critical studies at Santa Fe University Of Art And Design and guest-lectures at CU Boulder and has freelance-lectured on topics as varied as Barthes, Conner, Derrida and the Trace in Found Footage film, History of Experimental Film in the San Francisco Bay Area, History of the Occult in World Cinema, and Paracinema in Performance, and his interviews with found footage and deconstructionist experimental filmmakers have been published in Abraxas Journal and Otherzine. He has screened and lectured at numerous venues including Other Cinema, ATA, EXPLODED VIEW, as well as many New Mexico and Colorado-based spaces. In 2014, Buchanan spearheaded the Denver-based microcinema Cinema Contra.

Selections from the Oddball Archive:

Future Shock (Color, 1972)

Alvin Toffler predicted the electronic frontier of the internet, prozac, youtube, cloning and the self-paralysis of too many choices, instant celebrities and the end of blue-collar manufacturing. Not bad for 1970.

Narrated by Orson Welles and screened at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival this filmed version of Toffler’s much hailed book provides a glimpse of the collision between the present and the future and how proliferating technology is affecting human behavior. It also documents the disturbance, the dislocation and the disorientation that rapid technical developments can cause.

Report (Bruce Conner, 1967, B+W)

"Report” can mean an account of events or a blast of a rifle and both meanings are apt for this incendiary work. Using found footage, footage the news coverage captured from his home TV and even mostly blank film, Conner arranges familiar images and audio against each other in throbbing juxtapositions. Events in Dallas had a clear before and after for America, but Conner's careful structure plays with the sequence of events to shocking effect. Report ultimately fuses images of promise and plenty with those of cataclysm and oblivion.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Coming Attractions from Hell: Horror, B-Movie and Exploitation Trailers a 16mm program of rare B-Movie, “Art Film”, Horror, Suspense, and vintage XXX trailers from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. Many of these films sank without a trace, but their garish promotional trailers live on in the massive archives of Oddball Films. Ranging from 30 seconds to several minutes in length, these promotional shorts for coming attractions were often much more entertaining than the features they promote. From the silent cinema trailers featuring Lon Chaney Sr. as Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1925), and as a deformed phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House in Phantom of the Opera (1925), to the 1930s drug scare film Marihuana: Assassin of Youth (1934) to the B-movies of the 40s like Horror Island (1941) and Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948), to Hitchcock's seminal thrillers Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), and Vertigo (1958), all the way through the 1970s box office blockbusters Halloween (1978), The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973), as well as the forgotten schlock of Jennifer (1978), Eyeball (1975), and Manitou (1978). With dozens more deadly coming attractions, as well as excerpts from Dante's Inferno (1935), a writhing vision of the afterlife, and The "What Did You Think of The Movie?" Movie (1969).

Date: Friday,March 25th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Trailers Include (but not limited to):
Halloween, Killer Fish, Don’t Go in the House, The Amityville Horror, The House on Sorority Row, The Fog, The Clonus Horror, Phantom of the Paradise, The Exorcist, The Omen, Jennifer, It's Alive, Fade to Black, Love at First Bite, The Honeymoon Killers, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Eyeball, Manitou, Manson, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phantom of the Opera, The Cat and the Canary, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, Chamber of Horrors, Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round, Torn Curtain, Munsters Go Home, The Third Day, The Ghost & Mr. Chicken, The Killers Three , Comes a Horseman, House of Usher with Vincent Price,

Whiz Bang, It Happened in Hollywood, Kinkorama, House of Kinky Pleasures, Desires within Young Girls, Memories within Miss Aggie, Fugitive From Prison Camp, Horror Island, Invisible Agent, Island Of Doomed Men, King of the Wild Horses, Kiss the Blood off my Hands, Larceny, The Man Who Cried Wolf, The Man Who Lived Twice, Murder in the Blue Room, The Possession of Joel Delaney; Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde; Cover Girl Models; Switchblade Sisters; War Goddess; The Big Bus; Zero Population Growth; Little Fauss & Big Halsy; Grave of the Vampire; House of Exorcism; Return of Count Yorga; Girls in Trouble; Girly; The Student Body; Super Stooges Vs. The Wonder Women; Girls Are For Loving; 1000 Convicts and a Woman; Black Mama/White Mama; Face of Terror; Dimension 5; The Farmer’s Daughter; Obsession; Prime Cut; JD’s Revenge; Mein Kampf; Underworld USA (Sam Fuller);Truck Stop Women; Seduction of Mimi; Andy Warhol’s Trash; Marihuana; Assassin of Youth; and much more!!

Dante’s Inferno (B+W, 1935, Excerpt)

This 1935 version of the afterlife stars Spencer Tracy, and claims “It Will Burn Itself In Your Memory Forever”. This haunting excerpt features the fires and torments of the netherworld. In the age of Busby Berkeley musicals, this Inferno is chock full of hundreds of writhing tormented souls. An awe-inspiring spectacle of beauties and brimstone.

The “What Did You Think Of The Movie?” Movie (Color, 1969)
Early comic-documentary short from the director of Heroes, The Big Fix and The Chosen, moviegoers are interviewed as they leave the movie theater- to much comic effect. Not least of which is the 1970 NYC milieu.

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 98,a monthly evening of newly discovered films, rarities and choice selects from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled this 98th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 98:“Ecstatic Cinema” features a sampling of films that stretch the boundaries of cinema while serving to bring a sublime ecstasy to the viewer. From famed director Claude LeLouche’s (A Man and a Woman) mad dash (at speeds of up to 140 mph) through the early morning streets of Paris in Rendezvous (1976) to the legendary high wire artist Philippe Petit’s High Wire (1984) metaphoric bridging of the ancient and modern this program explores the exalted, the experimental and the ecstatic side of cinema in all its genres. Films include Spacy (1980), a stunning, eerie, hypnotic experimental short by Takashi Ito, Denys Colomb de Daunant’s Dream of Wild Horses (1962) remarkable cinematic poem using slow motion and soft focus camera to captures the wild horses of the Camargue District of France as they roam on the beach running through walls of fire and water, Nazi cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl's legendary (and breathtaking) Olympia Diving Sequence (1936) from the Berlin Olympics, Dream Flowers (1930s), a fascinating profile of the opium poppy and those who partake of it, award-wining filmmaker Carroll Ballard’s (The Black Stallion) abstract Crystallization (1975) explores the intricate and dazzling formation of crystals in liquids set to a electronic sound score, Maya Deren's A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945) articulates the potential for transcendence through dance and ritual, The Wizard of Speed and Time(1979) features Mike Jitlov’s legendary mind-blowing special effects speed binge, Arabesque (1975), John Whitney’s masterpiece of shimmering, oscillating waves set to the music of Persian composer Maroocheher Sadeghi, Free Fall (1964) brilliant director Arthur Lipsett’s featuring dazzling pixilation, in-camera superimpositions and percussive tribal music that in his words ““attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of creativity and the transformation of physical phenomena” and finally Busby Berkeley pushed cinema iconography a step further when he conjured up a thousand surrealist Ruby Keelers for the show stopping I Only Have Eyes for You number from the 1934 musicalDames.

Date: Friday, March 24th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Rendezvous (Color, 1976)

"Yes, I was scared. I was scared of running out of film”- Claude Lelouch

In 1976, at the end of a film shoot, Director Claude LeLouch (A Man and a Woman) found himself in possession of four things: a camera with ten minutes of film left, a gyroscopically stabilized camera mount, a sports car, and an idea: to film a mad dash (at speeds up to 140 mph) through the early morning streets of Paris. Denied the necessary permits, he shot the film guerrilla-style, in one take, with no special effects and no street closures. No one was hurt, his subsequent arrest was brief, and the film has become a legend. One take, no film tricks- you won’t believe your eyes.

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High Wire (Color, 1984) Directed by Sandi Sissel. Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”) is a French high wire artist who gained fame for his spectacular walk between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974. Here he metaphorically bridges the ancient and modern as he walks a high wire suspended between the towers at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and a sixteen story high-rise building across the street. With sound score by composer Phillip Glass.

Spacy (Color, 1980-81)

Hypnotic avant-garde rarity by Japan’s celebrated avant-garde filmmaker Takashi Ito. This experimental stop-motion film takes place in a gymnasium: we approach a picture on a frame, which turns out to be a picture of the gymnasium. We enter the picture and approach another frame, which turns out to be a picture of… and so on. A mesmerizing electronic soundtrack completes this trance-inducing meditation on time and space.

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Dream of the Wild Horses (Le songe des chevaux sauvages) (Color, 1962)

Directed by Denys Colomb de Daunant with innovative musical score by Jacques Lasri this cinematic poem which uses slow motion and soft focus camera to evoke the wild horses of the Camargue District of France, showing them as they roam on the beach running through walls of fire and water. A remarkable film.

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Olympia Diving Sequence (B+W, 1936)

A section from Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympics. Leni Reifenstahl was one of the most talented and innovative female directors of the 20th century. Her adulation of Nazi Germany in her film “Triumph of the Will” (1934) ensured that she was the most infamous as well. In 1936, at Hitler's behest, she filmed the Berlin Olympics. She used more than 40 cameramen, shot 250 miles of film and spent 18 months in the cutting room. The Olympia Diving Sequence is a supreme example of editing where physics are transcended and somehow weightlessness is achieved. This film, despite its overtly Aryan leanings is also a celebration of the human form. Film critic Pauline Kael called Triumph and Olympia"the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.”

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Dream Flowers (B+W, Silent, 1930s)

Beautiful black and white time-lapse footage of the development of the poppy flower in its various stages, both fascinating and other worldly. Watch smokers partake of the euphoric drug.

Crystallization (Color, 1975)

Directed by award-wining filmmaker Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion) this hypnotic non-narrative film explores the formation of crystals in liquids through the electron microscope under polarized light all set to an early 70s electronic sound score. Screened at the SF International Film Festival and winner of the Golden Gate Award in 1975.

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A Study in Choreography for Camera (B+W, 1945)

Maya Deren was one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century working and spending time with such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, John Cage and Anaïs Nin. In A Study in Choreography Maya Deren's 16mm Bolex becomes a performer equal in significance to the star of this film, Talley Beattey. In the opening sequence Deren's camera rotates more than 360 degrees, scanning past the figure in movement. In this film Deren articulates the potential for transcendence through dance and ritual. Deren writes, “The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places” -Wendy Haslem

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The Wizard of Speed and Time (Color, 1979, Mike Jitlov)

A young man in a green wizard costume runs throughout America at super speed. Along the way, he gives a pretty girl a swift lift to another city, gives golden stars to other women who want a trip themselves and then slips on a banana-peel, and comically crashes into a film stage, which he then brings to life in magical ways.

Jittlov is a special effects technician, and produced all of the special effects in the film himself, many through stop motion animation.

This mind-blowing, celebratory short was originally shown as a segment of an episode of The Wonderful World of Disney and later extended to a feature length film.

Arabesque (Color, 1975)

John Whitney’s shimmering lines and waves of oscillating color dance to the music of Eastern rhythms in Whitney’s undisputed masterpiece. Flowing lines evolve from randomness to patterns inspired by 8th century Persian designs. Music by Persian classical composer Maroocheher Sadeghi.

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Free Fall (B+W, 1964)

The brilliant avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (who committed suicide in 1986) is, in the words of Lipsett himself, an “attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of creativity – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological ones – a visual bubbling of picture and sound operating to create a new continuity of experience – a reality in seeing and hearing which would continually overwhelm the conscious state – penetration of outward appearances – suddenly the continuity is broken – it is as if all clocks ceased to tick – summoned by a big close-up or fragment of a diffuse nature – strange shapes shine forth from the abyss of timelessness.”

Dames (B+W, 1934)

A wondrous excerpt from director Ray Enright's Dames. During the spectacular musical number I Only Have Eyes for You, Ruby Keeler is the only girl in the world, but there are hundreds of her in this dreamy landscape. And from those hundreds, one face emerges, and when Miss Keeler pops out of a giant eye there can be little doubt that notorious dance director Busby Berkeley had something seriously surrealist in mind!

Curator Biography:
Stephen Parr’s programs have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical/Hysterical?) and oddities from his archives (Strange Sinema). He is the director of Oddball Films, a stock film company and the San Francisco Media Archive (www.sfm.org), a non-profit archive that preserves culturally significant films. He is a co-founder of Other Cinema DVD and a member of the Association of Moving Archivists (AMIA) where he is a frequent presenter.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Sid Davis, the 37th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month, we are celebrating the career of the master of the educational scare film who would be turning 100 today. Sid Davis films were famously funded by an initial $1000 donation by John Wayne. He went on to produce numerous classics of the educational scare film genre, priding himself by making each one for $1000- a miniscule amount even in its day. With sex, drugs, speeding, stranger danger and even puberty, this program touches on all of Davis' favorite topics. We begin where he did, with The Dangerous Stranger (1950), about the threat of child molesters. Davis sold the film to police and schools, reaping $250,000 which he used to fund the rest of the treasures of the evening. Girls need to look out for creeps too in another stranger-danger short Girls Beware (1961). Freak out on acid with the knee-slapping LSD: Trip or Trap? (1967) and mellow out with junior high pill-heads in Users-Losers (1971). Sammy's got a need for speed that might turn deadly if he's not careful in What Made Sammy Speed (1957). Learn the ins, outs, outgrown shoes and all the changes in your body in You're Growing Up (1955) for the pre-pubescent set. Find out how stupid it was for Robert to give up on high-school in The Dropout (1962). Plus more hilarious shockers in store!

Date: Friday, April 1st, 2016 at 8:00PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Highlights Include:

The Dangerous Stranger (B+W, 1950)

The very first Sid Davis film, the one that started it all, this film was made with a $1000 loan from John Wayne. A young girl was abducted and murdered at the same time the pair were working together. Davis suggested there should be a film for children to learn the dangers of strangers. The rest is history. This schlocky short lets little boys know that molesters are everywhere- and what to do if that nice man offers you a ride.One of Davis' favorite preoccupations was the murderous pedophiliac predator, a theme he revisited over half a dozen times from the 1940s-1980s.

You're Growing Up (B+W, 1955)
Sid Davis takes on the growing child replete with homoerotic wrestling scenes and laughably erroneous "facts". "This film introduces the physical and emotional changes that happen as we grow from birth to early adulthood. While more subdued than most of the cautionary childhood tragedy films made by Sid Davis Productions, this film still features some of hallmarks Davis is known for - a baby in peril, cartoony illustrations superimposed over a scene to set the tone or establish the feelings of a character and a droning voiceover narration. Also, Jill, the adolescent girl doing the shoe stretching dance, is Sid Davis' daughter whose naivety about the dangers of the outside world led Sid to make his first film, Dangerous Stranger." - A/V Geeks' Skip Elsheimer.

Users-Losers (Color, 1971)
Another great drug scare film about adolescent addicts – played by a cast that looks like they’re fresh out of middle school . Fresh-faced David hordes his lunch money and steals from his mom in order to buy red pills until he stumbles upon the corpse of girl who’s just overdosed. Rattled and disturbed, he then meets an older kid who gives him the lowdown on drugs and scares him straight. But – don't look now! – David’s little brother is now getting high.

LSD: Trip or Trap?(Color, 1967)

A Sid Davis classic that starts with a fatal crash, and then traces the tragic path that led a good boy to experiment with the latest thrill on the scene- LSD-25. Wild freak-out scenes and good kids pressured into drugs by misguided peers.

The Dropout (B+W, 1962)

Robert thinks he's got it all figured out. He doesn't need high school; he's going to join the work force but keep his best gal and go right ahead and make a man of himself. After he slams the door on his education, he begins to realize so many other doors are closing in his own face. His girlfriend and him no longer have much to talk about, no employers are willing to hire a dropout and his dad's getting on his case about sleeping till noon. Will Robert discover the world is kinder to folks with diplomas, or continue to squander his youth as a fast-food bus boy?

What Made Sammy Speed? (Color, 1957)
Automobile accidents in stunning Eastman color with great southern California street scenes and 1950s cars. A teen-age driver, Sammy Robertson, is killed in a traffic accident as a result of speed. This film explains the steps leading up to the accident: background, attitude, and reasons for poor driving.

Girls Beware (Color, 1961)

This treat will teach you to keep your eyes out for predators. Awareness that sexual attacks exist is seen as a responsibility of growing up. Helps girls develop that awareness by showing typical situations that lead to danger and shows how to avoid them. From misplaced trust in a stranger to failure to follow safety precautions in a baby-sitting job to problems with someone already well known and trusted, four dramatized stories alert girls / young women to early danger signals in situations that go beyond the more common dangers of hitchhiking or walking alone at night. Concludes with the importance of reporting incidents to responsible adults.

About Oddball FilmsOddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents What the F(ilm)?! 16: You Can't Handle the Spoof!, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This month, we're making a mockery of ourselves by offering you gut-busting parodies of Fellini, Bergman, Coppola, Lucas and more. May the farce be with you in the ridiculous Star Wars parody Hardware Wars (1978) replete with flying toasters, puppets, and z-grade special effects. See the horror, the horror of Porklips Now (1980) shot in San Francisco and featuring a war between butchers in Chinatown and a spot-on Brando impersonation. Play badminton against death in the Oscar-nominated Ingmar Bergman send-off De Düva (1968) starring a then-unknown Madeline Kahn speaking in mock Swedish. Fellini takes a hit in the uproarious short Two (1971) written by and starring Renee Taylor (The Nanny). Mel Brooks and Ernie Pintoff mock experimental animation in the Oscar-winning animated short The Critic (1963). Another Oscar nominee - the knee-slapping Political Posture (1984) mixes commercial modeling and political ads for one great-looking campaign. Turn the channel for more bizarre fake commercials like maidenform sweat socks and horse food made from dogs in Nut House Nuggets (1950s). Simian crime fighter Lancelot Link makes a monkey out of spy shows in the Oddball favorite Lancelot Link Secret Chimp: To Tell the Tooth (1971). Daffy Duck hits his head and dreams he's "Duck Twacy: Famous Detective" in Robert Clampett's brilliant cartoon The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946). Plus more spoofy surprises for the early birds!

Date: Friday, April 8th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Hardware Wars (Color, 1978)
"But basketball is a peaceful planet!"
Watch out for the Death Toaster in this insane Star Wars parody. Join Fluke Starbucker, Princess Anne-Droid, Ham Sandwich and a muppet as they battle Darph Nader and a fleet of flying toasters, waffle irons and more ridiculous appliances. Later turned into a feature film, this is the original outrageous short! A brand new acquisition, this bizarro gem is making its Oddball debut!

Porklips Now (Color, 1980)
Hilarious by some accounts, incredibly stupid by others, this spot-on low budget spoof of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” made just one year later features Billy Gray (of Father Knows Best fame) as Dullard, a young barbecue chef who is sent into Chinatown to end the career of Fred "Madman" Mertz, an insane butcher who's cutting meat prices to pennies per pound. Filmed in San Francisco!

Two (Color, 1971)

Spoof of overwrought Italian films written by and starring Reneé Taylor (nominated for an Oscar for Lovers and Other Strangers and well-known as Fran's mother on The Nanny). A delicious send up of your art house favorites by way the Borscht Belt! A glamorous pair of Fellini rejects find themselves on an empty beach and become tangled in an absurd frenzy of neurotic passion and brutal debasement! In perfectly awful Italian and Yiddish with subtitles in English.

The Critic (Color, 1963)An animated Oscar winner from the great Ernie Pintoff - The Critic is Mel Brooks, sitting in a movie theater loudly describing/deriding what he seeds on the screen (a spoof of a Norman McLaren-styled animation). Brooks' old man character relentlessly rags on the experimental animation he's shown to hilarious effect.

Nut House Nuggets!! (B+W, 1950s)
This "Viewer's Digest” spoof of soap operas and other programs is a bizarre gem. Watch a simulated commercial for Gains Horse Food (made from dogs), a lodge meeting where a cake comes out of a dummy of a woman, "commercials" for Quigleys Menthol bubble-gum and Prudential Underarm Deodorant. "News bulletin" about a zookeeper who clawed a leopard to death." Later in a spoof of "amazing feats," a woman tells time by beating a baby carriage with a dead fish. The fish is 5 minutes slow, so they give her a watch!
Starring Kathy “Nut House Squirrel Girl". Brought to you by Maidenform Sweat Sox!

Political Posture (Color, 1984)

A hilarious and Oscar-nominated short skewering political campaign commercials. Taking his movements from television advertisements featuring sinuous performers who posture for the camera as they fashion blue jeans, fictitious presidential candidate Ray Hardale offers his platform as he humorously poses for the camera. Writer and Director, Bill Tunnicliffe.

De Düva (Dir. George Coe/Antony Lover, B+W, 1968)
Nominated for an Oscar (Best Short Subject – Live Action) in 1969, this short parodies three of Ingmar Bergman’s films – Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and The Silence. It also marked the first film role of Madeline Kahn. Speaking in mock Swedish, with English subtitles, a retired physicist with a hernia recalls, while sitting in an outhouse, a garden party he attended as a youth. In a game of badminton rather than chess, Death loses his intended victim because of a hilarious obstacle – a dirty pigeon. Director George Coe was one of the original cast members on the first three episodes of Saturday Night Live. And scriptwriter Sid Davis, who also plays the role of Death, is perhaps best known as a director/producer of educational safety films; he was also a long-time body double for John Wayne. (Tom Warner)

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp (Color, 1971) in “To Tell the Tooth”.

Get Smart meets James Bond in this chimptastic TV spy spoof as the top agent of APE (Agency to Prevent Evil) detective Lance Link discovers a dentist working for C.H.U.M.P. (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan) has been inserting secret radio transmitters into the teeth of military officials.

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (Color, 1946, Robert Clampett)

While reading his favorite comic book, Daffy Duck knocks himself unconscious and dreams that he’s “Duck Twacy, Famous Detective.” All the piggy banks in town have been plundered and Duck Twacy is on the case as he follows footprints, climbs walls and ceilings, peels off a footprint to look under it and has a tussle with Sherlock Holmes. Porky the Pig has a cameo (driving the trolley car that leads directly to the secret hideout), and Daffy has to deal with numerous and ridiculous evil villains from Neon Noodle to Hammerhead.

Curator’s Biography

Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Czech Please! an evening of mind-blowing animation from the former Czechoslovakia. From stop-motion puppets to cell-animation; from the adorable to the dark and thought-provoking, this evening will open your eyes to the brilliance, vision and creativity of some of the great Czech animators. Films include Jiří Trnka's exquisite parable of totalitarianism and named one of the top five animated films of all-time: The Hand (1965). Jiří Brdečka's Blessings of Love (1966) is a sublime tale of love and longing. Get a triple dose of Zdeněk Miler's beloved Little Mole in three new colorful acquisitions. In The Mole and the Music (1974), mousy and mole gather music from the birds to melt into a psychedelic record. The mole has the need for speed and soups up a toy convertible in The Mole and the Car (1963). The mole finds a lollipop and can't figure out what to do with it in The Mole and the Lollipop (1970). In a huge departure from his mole cartoons, Zdeněk Miler also made the bleak allegory The Red Stain (1967) featuring a fisherman and his son trying to fight off an oncoming army. Head into the land of the kitties in the sweet fairy tale The Tom Cat's Meow (1974) The two-cutest bird friends you may ever see dance to the radio, take pictures of themselves and fight off a hungry cat in the darkly charming Queer Birds (1965). Set off for space in Kosmodrome 1999 (1969). Bulbous-nosed inventor Mr. Koumal (1968) deals with a series of amusing calamities following inventing fire, robots and wings. Plus more for the early birds! All shorts screened on 16mm film from the archive.

Date: Thursday, April 7th, 2016 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 

Admission: $10.00, limited seating RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/

Featuring:

The Hand (Color, 1965, Jiří Trnka)
This is Jiří Trnka’s last, and many say his best work. “The Hand” is an allegorical take on the Stalinist Czech dictatorial regime. Trnka directed some of the most acclaimed animated films ever made. In 1966, four years before his death, Newsday lauded him as "second to Chaplin as a film artist because his work inaugurated a new stage in a medium long dominated by Disney." Trnka, was a 1936 graduate of Prague's School of Arts and Crafts. In 1945 he set up an animation unit with several collaborators at the Prague film studio; they called the unit "Trick Brothers." Trnka specialized in puppet animation, a traditional Czech art form, of which he became the undisputed master. He also created animated cartoons, but it was his puppet animation that made him an internationally recognized artist and the winner of film festival awards at Venice and elsewhere. His films are brilliant, bizarre and meticulously rendered.

Three Little Mole Cartoons!

Zdeněk Miler's little mole Krtek is an internationally beloved character that spanned six decades of animation (1956-2002). The mole's gibberish language voiced by a human toddler led to its ease of distribution across the globe. His delightful antics are accompanied by vibrant, often psychedelic imagery, making them a treat for children and adults alike. These beautiful prints are from a new donation to the collection and have never been screened at Oddball before.

The Mole and the Music (Color, 1974)
The little mole's mousy friend breaks his record, so the pair set off to gather musical notes from the birds in the forest. Then they cook down the music and make their own psychedelic record.

The Mole and the Car (Color, 1963)
The little mole wakes up underground beneath a busy street. When he emerges from his tunnel, he sees all the bright shiny and speedy cars and dreams of having one for his very own. After a nasty little boy destroys his toy car and leaves it in the street, our rodent hero fixes her up and speeds off in his very own set of wheels.

The Mole and the Lollipop (Color, 1970)
After two filthy children leave their candy wrappers strewn around a park, the little mole (on self-appointed trash duty) comes across a colorful lollipop. Unsure of what the colorful object on a stick even is, the mole walks around trying to use it as a stop sign, a tennis racket, a shovel, and a flower before the rain releases its sticky sweet deliciousness for the mole and his pesky bee friends to enjoy.

Red Stain (Color ,1963, Zdeněk Miler)

A much darker vision from the man that brought us the joyful and colorful Little Mole cartoons. A somber tale of fisherman and his small son who try to retain peace after they discover that their country has been invaded and that an armory has been established near their house. The blood of the peaceful protestors becomes a swath of red flowers that grow all around the armory and force it to shut down. Miler made the film to break free from his little mole rut and try something different; a moving and thoughtful piece drawn simply with charcoal on paper.

Blessings of Love (B+W, 1966, Jiří Brdečka)

A sublime and sentimental piece about the thralls of young love that ripple across a lifetime. We watch a lifetime of longing from one man from childhood to old age. As a child, he sees the metropolitan men in the cafe -smoking their pipes - and longs to be one of them. As he grows and takes up a pipe himself - joining the cafe crowd - he sees a beautiful young woman and he begins to long for her. As they grow older together, he yearns for the beauty of her youth, but as she passes, he grasps for any trace of her, young or old.

The Tom Cat's Meow (Color, 1974, Bozena Mozísová)

A delightful fairy tale set in the kingdom of the kitties! A downtrodden girl is the chambermaid and the whipping girl for her cruel mother and sister (much in the vein of Cinderella). Her only friend is a little tabby cat that beckons the girl to follow him to an underground land of anthropomorphic cats in clothes doing all kinds of chores terribly. The girl helps out the frustrated kitties one by one and then joins them for a feast with the kitty dignitaries, including her friendly tabby who is himself the king of the kitties. For her help, King Kitty offers the girl her choice of riches. When she returns home, her greedy mother sends out her sister in search of more gold and jewels. But the sister is a big jerk and instead of helping the kitties, she plays all kinds of cruel pranks on the cats and goes home with a disfiguring surprise instead of riches while our sweet heroine and her best feline friend live happily ever after.

Kosmodrome 1999 (Color, 1969, by Frantisek Vystreil)
The year is 1999. Interstellar travel is so commonplace; hordes of commuters shuttle about on rockets as casually as they commute from SF to LA today. Our hero misses his flight, however and his zany adventures with the Rube Goldberg-like rocket he tries to enlist results in bizarre and weirdly animated adventures. Brilliant animation and zany, electronic sounds! Produced by the famed Kratky Film Company in Prague.

Mr. Koumal (Color, 1968, Gene Dietch)

Part of a series of Czech animations featuring the bulbous-nosed Mr. Koumal. Two separate short cartoons illustrating a variety of human accomplishments in parable form.

Mr. Koumal Flies Like a Bird
While climbing a mountain, Mr Koumal sees an eagle flying even higher and tries to fly off the mountain. He steals the eagle’s feathers as well as feathers from a thousand chickens, but he still can’t fly. He ends up selling the feathers as indian headdresses.

Mr. Koumal Carries the Torch

First, Mr Koumal invents fire (”carries the torch”). He tries to protect his torch from a variety of natural and human hazards. Comedy ensues. Mr. Koumal valiantly attempts to carry the torch to the finish line against many obstacles. The torch is snatched from his grasp at the last minute and another man claims the victory.

Queer Birds (B+W, 1965, Vladimir Lehky)
A bizarre cold war tale of a black cat and two terrorized birds. The two bird friends are out for a leisurely stroll, playing music together and taking selfies until a hungry cat attempts to spoil their fun. After several unique and imaginative evasive maneuvers, the birds pelt the cat with apple bombs. The film features a brilliant and innovative pre electronic music score. One of the top animated films in the Oddball archives!

Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films welcomes back Author and Musicologist Richie Unterberger for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Unterberger will be here to present film clips of rock performers based in Asia, as well as rock by Asian Americans and others of Asian descent. It’s not possible to cover every Asian territory from which rock musicians have emerged or descended, but this program features artists based in or descended from more than half a dozen countries, including Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Phillipines. Styles encompassed will include rockabilly, surf music, garage rock, indie rock, girl groups, psychedelia, punk, singer-songwriters, progressive rock, synth-pop, and more. Many of the performers are obscure to US audiences, yet there are also clips of songs and musicians who’ve made huge inroads into the American and global market. A couple of these records got to #1 in the United States; one of the most famous musicians of all time (and, later, his son) appear in a couple clips; and a few of the most renowned all-women (or mostly women) bands from any country are represented, as is an internationally acclaimed soundtrack composer and actor. Some of the more famous names include Shonen Knife, Yoko Ono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kyu Sakamoto, Damo Suzuki (of Can), Fanny, Shanti, Cibo Matto, the 5.6.7.8.'s, Dengue Fever, and Norah Jones.

Date: Thursday, April 21st, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Clips Include:

The Tielman Brothers: “Rollin’ Rock” (1959 or 1960, German TV).

Many Indonesians settled in the Netherlands in the mid-twentieth century. Of Indonesian descent, the Tielman Brothers were arguably the first band of Asian descent to make an international impact, though this was limited to Holland and some other parts of Europe. The influence of both rockabilly and early rock’n’roll bands like Bill Haley & the Comets is apparent from this early German television appearance, filmed in 1959 or 1960, depending on what source you read.

Kyu Sakamoto: “Ue o Muite Arukō” (aka “Sukiyaki”) (early 1960s, Japan).

One of the earliest clips in our program supplies the most famous song, by far, in this presentation. Certainly this is the most famous of the program’s songs in the United States, as it went all the way to #1 here for three consecutive weeks starting on June 15, 1963. To this day, it’s one of the few songs in a language other than English to top the US charts, and the only Japanese one. Originally released in Japan in 1961 under the title “Ue o Muite Arukō” (“I Look Up As I Walk”), it was retitled “Sukiyaki” for the US market when it was released in this country on Capitol Records.

Tiny Yong: “Tais-Toi Petite Fille” (1964)

As Vietnam was for many years a colony of France, many Vietnamese settled in France in the mid-twentieth century. Tiny Yong was born in Vietnam before moving to France, where she recorded some records in the French “yé-yé” style, which was heavily influenced by American girl groups, as well as a bit of the British Invasion. Fifty years ago (and still, to a certain degree, today) it was common for artists from non-English-speaking countries to record American and British hits in their own language, and “Tais-Toi Petite Fille” is actually a French-language cover of “Foolish Little Girl,” which had been a Top Five hit for one of the most successful US girl groups, the Shirelles, in 1963. In keeping with the girl group style, it’s more lushly arranged than the original version, Ms. Yong apparently having a hard time suppressing giggles in the instrumental break of this promotional video.

Mehmood Ali: “‪Aao Twist Karein” (1965, from the film ‪Bhoot Bangla)

Mehmood Ali was something of the Chubby Checker of India. While songs about the twist had fallen out of fashion in the US by 1965, that didn’t stop Ali from featuring a twist number in this Indian movie, which gives the twist something of a Bollywood twist.

Yuzo Kayama & The Launchers: “Black Sand Beach” (1965, from the film Eleki No Wakadaisho) Surf-style instrumental music was huge in Japan in the 1960s, in large part due to the Ventures, who were huge superstars in the country. Yuzo Kayama & the Launchers were among the many Japanese surf-style bands that bore the Ventures’ influence.

Mohammed Rafi: “Gumnaam Dance Song” (1965, from the film Gumnaam)

Surf music is also an influence on this no-punches-pulled dance number from an Indian movie of the same era. It’s at least as much Bollywood as rock, but that shouldn’t prevent its inclusion in a program such as this. Right?

The Blue Comets: “Blue Eyes” (mid-1960s)

More surf-style music from Japan, except now vocals are starting to enter the picture.

Koyama Rumi: “Watashino Inori” (mid-to-late 1960s)

Influences from British and US mid-‘60s vocal rock can be heard in this clip, which is obviously from a fictional feature film of the period, though I don’t know the title.

The Spiders: “Go Forward” (1968, from the film Go Forward)

And psychedelic music started to infiltrate the Japanese rock scene in the late 1960s, as seen in this clip from the Go Forward movie, which seems a bit of a herky-jerky hodgepodge from a few performances/scenes.

The Golden Cups: ? (1968)

Gotta admit I don’t know the title of this song or the source of this clip, but it’s an example of Japanese psychedelic rock in a more serious vein.

Fanny: “Charity Ball” (November 1971, German TV)

Pioneers on two fronts, Fanny were both one of the first all-women bands who played their own instruments and wrote their own material to release major-label albums, and fronted by two Asian Americans: sisters June and Jean Millington. Both were born in the Philippines, moving to Sacramento in 1961, shortly before entering their teens.

Shanti: “Shanti” (circa 1971)

Comprised of both Indian and US musicians, Shanti were one of the few, if not the only, group fusing traditional Indian music with rock in the early 1970s. Operating out of Marin County, they issued one self-titled album on Atlantic before breaking up. The most famous member, tabla player Zakir Hussein, has gone on to play on many records of both Indian music and fusions of Indian music with jazz and other styles, collaborating with famous US and UK musicians like Mickey Hart, Bill Laswell, and John McLaughlin. Sarod player Aashish Khan also went on to a long, still-running career, though more oriented toward Indian music. I’m not sure when this clip (eighteen minutes long!) is from, but as Shanti’s only album came out in 1971, that’s a good bet. For more on the band, see my liner notes to the Real Gone label’s CD reissue of the album.

Can: “Vitamin C” (1972)

Can, one of the most internationally famous and influential German progressive rock bands of the 1970s, originally featured an American singer, Malcolm Mooney. When Mooney left, Can unpredictably replaced him in 1970 with Japanese singer Damo Suzuki, whom they came across when Suzuki was busking at a cafe in Munich. Suzuki would sing lead on their next few albums, which are usually regarded as Can’s most notable records, until leaving himself in 1973.

Yoko Ono: “We’re All Water” (May 3, 1972, Dick Cavett Show)

One of the most polarizing figures in all of popular culture, Japanese artist, filmmaker, and musician Yoko Ono remains most well known for her relationship with John Lennon, whom she married in 1969. Since the late 1960s, she has released many records, often in collaboration with Lennon before his death in 1980. Lennon plays guitar on this performance of “We’re All Water,” from their 1972 album Some Time in New York City, which was dominated by radical political material. Backing Ono, besides Lennon, is the New York band Elephant’s Memory, which also backed the pair on the album. The woman embracing Yoko at the end of the clip is star actress Shirley MacLaine, another guest of this episode of the Dick Cavett Show.

Shin Jung Hyun & Yup Juns: “I’ve Got Nothing to Say” (1974)

Probably the most famous underground-psychedelic-style rock musician in South Korea, Hyun endured government harassment and suppression for expressing sentiments that were unpopular with the authorities in his music and lifestyle. In recent years, he has started to gain a larger audience in English-speaking countries with the reissue of some of his most innovative material for the global mariket.

The Sand Pebbles: “What Should I Do” (1977)

Although this film clip is dated as originating from 1977, this Korean band were playing in a psychedelic style more strongly associated with an era that had passed nearly a decade earlier.

The Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Firecracker” (1980, Soul Train)

With their early synth-pop sound, the Yellow Magic Orchestra made the biggest international impact of any Japanese act during the new wave era. Figurehead Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of the most renowned Japanese musicians on a global level, branching into soundtrack music on movies such as The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, and acting alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

Shonen Knife: “Kappa Ex” (mid-1980s)

Possibly the most famous Japanese alternative rock bands, and certainly one of the most esteemed all-women alternative bands from anywhere, Shonen Knife have maintained a fervent cult following for decades with their pop-punk sound. Among their big fans was Kurt Cobain, who told Melody Maker after seeing them play in 1991, “I’ve never been so thrilled in my whole life.” Not sure of a date for this rather primitive if charming early promotional video, but it probably originates from the mid-1980s.

Cibo Matto: “Birthday Cake” (May 6, 1997, Viva Variety)

Although New York-based, Cibo Matto were formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son Sean Lennon became a member for their 1997 Super Relax, and plays bass on this clip. After splitting for nearly a decade, Cibo Matto reunited in 2011, playing the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park last year.

The 5.6.7.8’s: “Woo Hoo” (2002, The Jonathan Ross Show)

Probably the most internationally well-known Japanese all-women band except for Shonen Knife, the 5.6.7.8.’s take their inspiration from the rawer side of early American rock’n’roll. This song, with lyrics so minimal it verged on being an instrumental, was originally a hit for Virginia band the Rock-A-Teens in 1959.

Norah Jones: “Don’t Know Why” (2002, Later with Jools Holland Show)

Without a doubt the most commercially successful Asian-American musician, Norah Jones is the daughter of the most famous Indian musician of all time, master sitar player Ravi Shankar. “Don’t Know Why” is from her 2002 album Come Away with Me, a chart-topping record that has now sold more than 25 million copies.

Mia Doi Todd: “My Room Is White”(promo video, 2008)

Asian-American singer-songwriter Mia Doi Todd has released more than a half-dozen albums since the late 1990s. Her Japanese-American mother, Kathryn Doi Todd, was the first woman Asian-American judge in the United States, currently holding the post of associate justice for the California Second District Court of Appeal.

Dengue Fever: “Sni Bong” (c. 2006)

Based in Los Angeles, Dengue Fever are fronted by Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol, combining rock and Cambodian pop. Gotta admit I can’t pin down the date and source of this performance, but it’s probably no earlier than 2005, when this song appeared on their debut album, Escape from Dragon House.

More About Asian Rock:
Although rock music has been dominated by performers from North America and the United

Kingdom, there have been Asian rock performers almost from rock’s inception. The clips on today’s program follow a roughly chronological progression, spanning about fifty years, from the late 1950s to the early twenty-first century. It’s not possible to cover every Asian territory from which rock musicians have emerged or descended, but this program features artists based in or descended from more than half a dozen countries, including Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Many of the performers are obscure to US audiences, yet there are also clips of songs and musicians who’ve made huge inroads into the American and global market. A couple of these records got to #1 in the United States; one of the most famous musicians of all time (and, later, his son) appear in a couple clips; and a few of the most renowned all-women (or mostly women) bands from any country are represented, as is an internationally acclaimed soundtrack composer and actor. The styles encompassed include rockabilly, surf music, garage rock, indie rock, girl groups, psychedelia, punk, singer-songwriters, progressive rock, synth-pop, and more – in other words, nearly the entire gamut of what rock music itself has evolved through since its birth in the 1950s.

Please note that the quality of the footage, owing to the erratic nature of the source material, is uneven (though always watchable, and often excellent). The occasional flaws, shakes, gaps, and freezes that might seem as though they are flaws in the disc or projection equipment are found in the copies of the actual footage that has survived. This is a small price to pay, however, for being able to watch such rare and exciting stuff.

About Richie Unterberger:

San Francisco resident Richie Unterberger is the author of numerous rock history books, including Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll and a two-part history of 1960s folk-rock,Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High. His book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film won a 2007 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. His latest books are White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day and Won't Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia.

He gives regular presentations on rock and soul history throughout the Bay Area incorporating rare vintage film clips and audio recordings, at public libraries and other venues. Since summer 2011, he has taught community education courses on various aspects of rock history of rock from 1955 to 1980. He'll be teaching a five-week course on 1960s San Francisco rock at the Fort Mason campus of City College on Saturday afternoons from mid-October/mid-November.

Go to his website, www.richieunterberger.com, for times of the next scheduled events, or sign up to be on his email announcement list at tonight's presentation. www.richieunterberger.com also has information about his books and other activities; his blog is at richieunterberger.com/wordpress.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Future News: Walter Cronkite's 21st Century, a program of episodes and highlights from the short-lived CB$ News show The 21st Century hosted by the legendary Walter Cronkite from 1967-1969. The show was a spin-off of The 20th Century that focused on the possibilities for the coming century including advances in utopian ideals as well as technology like computers, lasers, robotics, machine-made art, and even predicting 3D TVs and the inflatable furniture trend. The program often featured visionaries, sci-fi authors, and scientists postulating on the future of work, design, and technology. In The Communications Explosion (1967), Cronkite explores satellites, laser beams and talking computers and envisions a very different kind of internet. In Stranger than Science Fiction (1968), he examines how closely science fiction has predicted and influenced the real world of science and technology. Art for Tomorrow (1969) showcases early experiments with computer art as well as the technology-based artwork of contemporary artists Jean Tinguely, Yaacov Agam, Wen-Ying Tsai and Victor Vasarely. In At Home 2001 (1967), the crew gets domestic and attempts to imagine the future of design and technology for the home. Plus, eye-popping excerpts of The Futurists featuring an interview with Buckminster Fuller, Man-Made Man with electrodes guiding robotic arms, Bats, Birds and Bionics with a dancing robot man, Games Futurists Play including role play utilizing creepy masks, The Computer Revolution with a psychedelic visualization of how computers work on the most basic level. See how close they came to predicting this century over 40 years ago.

Date: Friday, April 15th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Highlights Include:

The Communications Explosion (Color, 1967)

"The age of the communication satellite has just begun"
This episode explores the developments and prospects in communications in the 21st Century. Communication satellites, laser beams that transmit phone calls, and computers that diagnose illnesses, recite Shakespeare, and sing are just some of the way-out ideas of future technology explored in this episode. Sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke pontificates on the concept of phone numbers given out at birth that can track us throughout our lives. Cronkite tours the information room of the future complete with a dozen or so individualized computers that feed you news, information, and pictures through each separate machine. Afterall, "in the 21st Century, your best friend may be a computer."

Stranger than Science Fiction (Color, 1968)
CB$ News and Walter Cronkite made time in a pivotal year of American history to finish this report on the technologies of the world and how closely they resemble visions of the future that had been previously erected. It includes a comparison of the epic film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick to the real world of science and technology. Does fiction come from reality or the other way around? The film features clips from Steampunk inspiration H.G. Wells’s film “War of the Worlds” (1953), “Things to Come” and Fritz Lang's dystopian silent epic “Metropolis”.

Art for Tomorrow (Color, 1969)

“The artist is beginning to react to the impact of science and technology and beginning to come to terms with it. The artist better be rather careful or he will be losing his job and the engineer will become the artist of the future.”

The art of the future is foreseen in new techniques demonstrated by artists and engineers using distinctive methods and new technology including computers, cybernetics, heart beat triggers, invisible art by magnetism, prisms, lights, moving objects, converging lines, and number patterns. This fascinating look at the “future past” features a kaleidoscopic portrait of avant-garde art works by Yaacov Agam (who uses strobe lights), Wen-Ying Tsai (vibrating steel rods), John Mott-Smith (computer-generated ideas), Jean Tinguely (machine-made sculpture), Victor Vasarely’s early experiments with IBM computers, Jean Dupuy and many more. Here’s a link to Dupuy’s work “Heart Beats Dust” http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hearts-beats-dust/

The Weird World of Robots (Color, 1968, excerpt)

Famed sci-fi author and futurist Isaac Asimov and Walter Cronkite investigate the strange and surreal world of robotics in the 1960s. Asimov advocates a race of “worker robots” to do the blue collar work for planet earth. Watch a robotic dog (Old Yaller), human amplifiers, a centaur and robotic machines designed to stimulate human responses to medical students. Later the “grave” questions are posed: “There is no question that man can live with the robot. The question is, can the robot live with man?”

At Home 2001 (Color, 1967)

Walter Cronkite envisions the future for the home. An exploration of people’s lives and living conditions inspired the advancement of technology in the future, this jaw-dropping episode includes predictions for 3D TVs, paper furniture, robot butlers and more; some ridiculous and some eerily accurate. An episode of the 21st Century, a short-lived spin off of Cronkite's earlier news magazine The 20th Century.

Plus, eye-popping excerpts of The Futurists featuring an interview with Buckminster Fuller, Man-Made Man with electrodes guiding robotic arms, Bats, Birds and Bionics with a dancing robot man, Games Futurists Play including role play utilizing creepy masks, The Computer Revolution with a psychedelic visualization of how computers work on the most basic level.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Busby Berkeley: Sex, Surrealism, and Song, a night of mind-blowing musical numbers from the wildest imagination in Hollywood choreography all on 16mm film from the archive. Clearly influenced by the concurrent surrealist movement in art and avant-garde cinema, Busby Berkeley numbers transformed masses of chorus girls into kaleidoscopic geometric patterns; blending dozens of bodies into one fleshy piece of moving art. The evening features some of Berkeley's most iconic and insane work including three scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933): Ginger Rogers sings We're in the Money in pig latin whilst draped in monetary lingerie, Shadow Waltz with sixty neon violin toting showgirls, and the overtly political tearjerker My Forgotten Man. From Footlight Parade (1933), we bring you the risque Honeymoon Hotel number "with scores of bashful brides", Sitting on a Backyard Fence with dozens of dancers in kitty costumes, and the mesmerizing By a Waterfall sequence with reportedly 300 bathing beauties creating a human waterfall and then a series of morphing geometric shapes from a tank of water. Everywhere you look it's hundreds of Ruby Keelers, even coming out of her own eyeball in the hallucinatory I Only Have Eyes for You from Dames (1934). A smoking woman morphs into the Manhattan skyline and an army of tap dancers cause a frenzy that ends in one girl's death in The Lullaby of Broadway from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). Plus, two behind-the-scenes featurettes from the studios highlighting chorus girls and choreography: Three Cheers for the Girls (1943) and Calling All Girls (1942) which showcase snippets from Wonder Bar, The Singing Marine, Fashions of 1934, and Gold Diggers of 1937. Plus, Busby Berkeley-inspired Commercials, the trailer for Ken Russell's The Boyfriend (1971) and more!

Date: Thursday, April 14th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Highlights Include:

Gold Diggers of 1933 (B+W, 1933, excerpts)

This follow-up to 42nd Street stars Dick Powell as a songwriter torn between the love of chorus girl Ruby Keeler and his wealthy family's inheritance. The casting is complemented by several dazzling stars and starlets of the Warner's roster - Joan Blondell, Warren William, Aline MacMahon, Ned Sparks and Ginger Rogers. Berkeley choreographed the musical production numbers including Ginger Rogers singing We're in the Money and the stunningly surreal Shadow Waltz featuring sixty violin playing chorus girls expressing first the repression then the fulfillment of sexual desire.

“My Forgotten Man” From Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, B+W)

The hundreds of marching soldiers, both in triumph and on the soup line are the center of this politically charged showstopper and perfectly illustrate the grievances of the Bonus Armies of the era. Part torch ballad, part protest song, My Forgotten Man is a heartbreaker but Busby Berkeley style! Warner Brothers mainstay Joan Blondell shares vocals with the brilliant Etta Moten on a stunning Harry Warren and Al Dubin anthem.

"By a Waterfall" from Footlight Parade (B+W, 1933)
A dazzling and jaw-dropping musical number featuring hundreds of lovely synchronized swimmers all choreographed by the legendary and hallucinatory Busby Berkeley. Ruby Keeler serenades her love by a waterfall and as he nods off to sleep, the waters come alive with bathing beauties, who then form incredible visuals and patterns with only their bodies culminating in the incredible "Human Waterfall". This extravagant number took over 6 days to film and the pool used for filming took up an entire sound stage and required 20,000 gallons of water to be pumped per minute.

Lullaby of Broadway (B+W, 1935)

The entire "Lullaby of Broadway" number from Gold Diggers of 1935 again starring Dick Powell. The silhouette of a smoking woman becomes the city of New York. A Broadway baby is dropped at home, to sleep till the evening. In a swanky 1930s nightspot, a dancing couple is joined by an army of tap dancers. In all the frenzy, a party-goer falls to her death.

Sittin’ On A Backyard Fence (B+W, 1933)

Clip from the great Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade- Watch as litters of human kitties sing, dance and frolic to the Tin Pan Alley favorite.

“I Only Have Eyes for You” from Dames (1934, B+W)

A fantasy world in a subway car! Ruby Keeler is the only girl in the world, but there are hundreds of her in this dreamy landscape, all thanks to Busby Berkeley. From those hundreds, one face emerges, and when Miss Keeler pops out of a giant eye there can be little doubt that notorious dance director Berkeley was something of a Hollywood branch of the Surrealist movement . . . all by himself. A spellbinding excerpt from Dames.

Calling All Girls (B+W, 1942, excerpt)

This short film provides a look at the process of auditioning for musical numbers in 1930s Hollywood. In a combination of behind-the-scenes footage and breathtaking sequences from films such as "Don't Say Goodnight" from Wonder Bar (1934), this film expands upon the role of the once ubiquitous chorus girl.

Three Cheers for the Girls (B+W, 1943)

A musical revue in which the stars are unnamed women of the chorus line. They begin in a dressing room with the song "We're the floradora chorus," and use this as a refrain in between the musical numbers (largely choreographed by Berkeley). Clips include "All's Fair in Love and War" from Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), "The Words Are in My Heart" from Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), "Spin a Little Web of Dreams" from Fashions of 1934 (1934), "Aloha Oe" from Flirtation Walk (1934), and "The Song of the Marines" from The Singing Marine (1937).

Curator’s Biography

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents Antique Animal Antics!, a program of vintage 16mm films full of adorable, hilarious and anthropomorphic animals from the 1940s-1970s. Decades before youtube, CGI, and the Buddies franchise, these furry film stars were doing tricks, wearing clothes, talking, singing and raising hell! This time around we've got singing bears, car-racing capuchin monkeys, hibernating hamsters, daring dachshunds, a talking horse (of course) and so much more. Find out whether a bear or a hippo might be the perfect pet for you - and hear it from the hippo's mouth - in the Speaking of Animals short: Your Pet Problem (1944). Tiny capuchin monkeys zoom around the track in tiny little race cars in Monkey Go 'Round (1961). Otto the German dachshund runs away from home rather than take a bath and sets off for adventure in A Doggone Story (1940s). Hollywood primate Zippy the Chimp hits the big top in Small Fry Circus (1956). Two bear cubs head out for some mischief and tangle with ants, bees, and bacon before destroying a campsite in Black Bear Twins (1952). In Carroll Ballard's bittersweet The Perils of Priscilla (1969), a neglected pussy sets out on her own and hits the big city. The sexy siren Mae West sets a date with the world's most famous talking horse in an extremely bizarre slice of television history in Mae West Meets Mr. Ed (1964). Hammy the Hamster is back and learning all about Hibernation (1961) from his talking animal friends. For the early birdies, The Blackbird (1979) is a bizarre live action tale of a bird wreaking havoc on a whole house and its inhabitants from Hungary.

Date: Friday, April 22nd, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Monkey Go 'Round (B+W, 1961)

Tiny monkeys in tiny racecars! A retired circus performer in Germany falls on hard times. His family is made up of little capuchin monkeys, whom he can’t afford to feed anymore and is thinking of sending to a zoo. The monkeys repair the mini cars they had used in their old circus act and perform in a new act racing the cars on a mini race track. The crowd loves them. They sign a contract to start performing their show around the world.

Small Fry Circus (B+W, 1956)

Zippy the anthropomorphic, clothes-wearing chimp is back and he's ready to help out the kids who have gathered together to put on a circus. With Zippy as the main attraction, it's sure to be a hit!

Your Pet Problem (B+W, 1944)

See if a non-conventional animal could be the pet of your dreams (or nightmares) in this bizarre Jerry Fairbanks “Speaking of Animals” series short features singing bears and talking cows, hogs, hens, baboons and hippos! Fairbanks created a technique to achieve the appearance of talking animals that blended real animals with animation, rather than filming the animals chewing gum or peanut butter.

Mae West Meets Mr. Ed (B+W, 1964, excerpt)
The 1960s were a hard time for many of the great stars of the 1930s and 40s. Joan Crawford made a turn towards schlocky horror and Mae West headed for the horse stables of Television. In this bizarre episode of the classic TV program, Mae West sweeps into town and requests that Wilbur redesign her horse stable, with all the luxury fit for a Hollywood Queen. Ed overhears the conversation and begins to resent his own surroundings, shabby by comparison, but soon realizes pampering isn't what it's all cracked up to be.

Hammy the Hamster in Hibernation (B+W, 1961)

Another chapter of talking rodents from Tales of the Riverbank, otherwise known as Hammy the Hamster, a British children’s television show of talking animals that originated in Canada; created by David Ellison and Paul Sutherland.

A Doggone Story (B+W, 1940s)

Otto the wiener dog is growing tired of his life on a rural German farm. An unwanted bath is the last straw for Otto- he runs away to the city where adventure ensues. The little country pup gets into plenty of trouble stealing sausages, escaping death, and evading the dog catcher.

The Perils of Priscilla (Color, 1969)

A poor, neglected pussy has to head out on her own when she is ignored and neglected by her family. This live action short directed by Carroll Ballard (who went on to direct The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf, and was 2nd Unit Director of the original Star Wars) features another amazing cat trying to make her way in a tough world. What will become of the adventurous, resilient Priscilla?

Black Bear Twins (B+W, 1952)
A delightfully misinformed nature film from Encyclopaedia Brittanica starring a pair of baby bears that can't wait to get away from mom and cause some trouble! They scamper around the forest wreaking havoc and tussling with a beehive. A (human) family spots the cubs' tracks and stupidly attempts to lure the bears to their camp by hanging bacon from a tree (like a hipster Christmas decoration). The bears come to camp and help themselves to the bacon, then decide to come back later and destroy the entire camp!

For the Early Birds:

The Blackbird (Color, 1979)

Bizarre live-action, wordless film from the Budapest Filmstudio in Hungary- a mischievous blackbird gets out of his cage and wreaks havoc on the dog, the room, the mail, the desk, and a little sleeping boy. Revenge for the 4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie!!

Curator’s Biography

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Erotic Oddities with the most bizarre and offbeat smut, burlesque and erotica of the collection. From insane pornographic cartoons to marionette strippers to bizarre stag films, this is one night of the strangest smut you'll ever see. In one of the earliest stag films, Getting his Goat (1923), a man is in for a surprise when he propositions sex through a hole in a gate. Eveready Hardon heads to the beach in the outrageous cartoon Buried Treasure (1928). Get ready for the disgusting pornographic animation featuring music by the Beach Boys and a vegetable gang bang (literally) with Sandy Sunrise in the Babysitter (1971). Play with your toys in a non-XXX excerpt of bizarro porno Orgy of the Dolls (1970s). Dracula is a groovy pimp in Vegas with a brothel full of vampire hookers in an insane excerpt of Ray Dennis Steckler's The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (1971). Tour a museum of erotic art in an excerpt from the thinly veiled pornographic documentary Erotography (1970). It's a ridiculous homoerotic smorgasbord with clips from four 1970s beefcake shorts: naked men on pogo sticks in Wheee!, an alien encounter of the sexy kind in Three's a Crowd, gorilla/man love in Queen Kong and her Fay, and no description necessary for Naked Twister! A bisexual Amazon runs for her life and makes out with everyone in sight in Dionysus (1970s). We've also got a buffet of burlesque with Yvonne DeCarlo (Lily Munster) in Pearl of Bagdad (1930s), an exotic fire dancer in Fire Dance and our favorite marionette stripper in Doll Dance (1940s). Plus, even more sexy surprises in store!

Date: Friday, April 29th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Homoerotica Smorgasbord!

These rare beefcake shorts rarely feature any action, just tons of naked men letting their junk hang out while they dress up, strip down and bounce around!

Wheee! (Color, 1970s)

A great homoerotic beefcake short. In this high-jumping oddity, a couple of everyday dudes are hanging out naked, throwing back some ice cold sodas before jumping on pogo sticks.
Double Projected with: Jump: Anyone Can Do It (Color, 1979)

Naked Twister:

Two nude men play Twister in front of a red curtain, while a third man gives them the commands. The two men then grab the third guy, and strip him nude. Then all three of them play. Double Projected with board game commercials.

Three’s a Crowd:

Alien encounters of the naked kind! Two buff men are camping in the woods. They go hiking when they see an alien. They rocks at the alien who shoots them with a gun that freezes the men, then the alien takes off their clothes. The two men end up freezing the alien and sticking him in their tent and burning the the alien to death.

The Pearl of Bagdad (B+W, 1930s)

A musical number in which a handsome man serenades Yvonne DeCarlo ("Lily Munster"), in a middle eastern theme palace/harem. She lays on a couch whilst he sings and dancing girls sway in time to the music. Then Yvonne gets up and performs a semi provocative dance number to a quicker jazz beat.

Fire Dance (B+W, 1930s)

A provocatively dressed woman addresses the camera, telling us this is her interpretation of the exotic fire dance. She dances to a samba beat and makes a fine attempt at an ‘exotic fire dance’.

On the Beach aka Getting His Goat (B+W, 1923)
“Idylwild Beach where the men are idle and the women are wild”
From 1923 here’s one of the earliest stag films ever made starring Creighton Hale (from D.W. Griffith’s “Way Down East”). A man peeps through a knot hole on a group of girls and gets more than he bargained for.

Buried Treasure (B+W, 1928)
The Granddaddy of pornographic cartoons, persistent rumors suggest that Max Fleischer (Betty Boop and others), Paul Terry (of TerryToons) and Budd Fisher (Mutt & Jeff) were responsible for this bawdy masterpiece. The legendary porno cartoon with a boogie woogie piano soundtrack depicting the unlikely adventures of the perpetually aroused title character (Eveready Hardon) with, among others, a man, a woman, and a cow. You’ll laugh and the guys may even scream!

Sandy Sunrise in The Baby Sitter (Color, 1971)

A disgusting (and hilarious) bit of home-made smut from the archives, this bizarro animated adult XXX animation explores the adventures of a babysitter and vegetables! Produced by Warped Imaginations (A Cum Stained Cartoon) featuring music from the classic Beach Boys Smiley Smile album!

The Orgy of the Dolls (Color, 1970s, excerpt)

A truly baffling piece of pornography (we will cut before it gets XXX) that brings new meaning to "playing with your toys." A woman goes into a doll shop after hours and brings to life a bunch of human-sized horny dolls.

The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (Color, 1971, excerpt)

A bizarro piece of sexploitation from the infamous Ray Dennis Steckler (using a pseudonym, of course). Dracula has set up castle in none other than Las Vegas and he sends his lady-vamps out on the town as high-class working girls, and blood isn't all they're sucking!

Dionysus (Color, 1970s, excerpt)
Amazon-looking woman runs through the forest, chased by two men with bows and arrows. While running for her life, she manages to find time to make out with a man and a lady.

Doll Dance (B+W, 1940s)

A 1940s Burlesque tit for tat dance number with Arlene and Rene. Both ladies are lovely, only Arlene has someone pulling her strings.

Erotography (Color, 1970, excerpt)

A white coater "documentary" about the history of erotic art from the Kama Sutra to Roman pottery. This kind of film was a thinly disguised way to distribute pornography as a documentary film.

Curator’s Biography

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i8xi31x4JN4/UOEqd4rLmfI/AAAAAAAACUA/sSkMR1_FggE/s400/MoonElectricified.jpg

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 99, a monthly evening of newly discovered films, rarities and choice selects from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 99th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. For Strange Sinema 99: Psycho Science Stephen Parr is featuring some of the most way-out and weird science films from the archive. Tonight’s program is anchored by the hilarious and bizarre Moody Institute of Science films, the Christian cult crackpot science company as well as other brilliant and bizarre examples of pseudo science in action. Films include Facts of Faith (1956, Color) featuring mind-blowing science experiments showcasing Dr. Irwin Moon, founder of the Moody Institute Moon running thousands of volts of electricity-god’s creation though his entire body!,Blind as a Bat (1956), the Moody Science bat truck goes on location to study the secrets of bat navigation (an Oddball favorite!), The Electric Eel (1954), in which Christian crackpot Dr. Irwin Moon shocks his employees with “eel” science, Slow as a Sloth (1954) features more mammal abuse experiments –this time with sloths and a loaded pistol!The program also features Sun Healing: The Ultra-Violet Way with Life Lite(1930s), a jaw-dropping forerunner of the infomercial, pitches an ominous health device that's "safe" to use on your own children, and The Mouse Activated Candle Lighter (1973), a bizarre Rube Goldberg inspired device quirks us out. Noir and B-movie legend Edgar G. Ulmer brings us a tale of tuberculosis for the kiddies with an animated TB bug in Goodbye Mr. Germ(1940). Find out what happens when your vision is flipped upside down (and you're paid to live like that for two weeks!) in the imported short Living in a Reversed World (1958). Plus! Rare clips from the 1950s B+W kinescope of Science in Action shot at the California Academy of Sciences including the Animal of the Week!

Date: Thursday, April 28th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Program highlights include:

Facts of Faith (1956, Color) Mind-blowing science experiments showcase Dr. Ervin Moon, founder of the Moody Institute of Science running thousands of volts of electricity-god’s creation though his entire body. A stunner!

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Blind as a Bat (Color, 1956)

The Moody Science bat truck goes on location to study the secrets of bat navigation. Their in-house mammal abuse experiments show us the science of bat radar. An Oddball screening favorite.

The Electric Eel (1954, Color)
Dr. Irwin Moon - part showman, part scientist, part crackpot religious nutcase shows us the electric eel and demonstrates its amazing abilities to shock fish for food and to use "radar" to find them. Don’t miss the scene where he illuminates a florescent light tube using his eel then jolts his staff with electrodes attached to the deadly fish!

Slow as a Sloth (1954, Color)

Dr. Moon presents different breeds of sloths with the help of his lab-coated assistant. The duo explain interesting facts about sloths and attempt to elicit reactions from the animals by petting their fur the wrong direction, poking them with sticks and other "scientific" methods-including a loaded pistol!

The Mouse Activated Candle Lighter (1973, Color)

Watch this odd science Rube Goldberg device consisting of a mouse trap, fishing pole, alarm clock, ice pack, train motor, rubber band, match and candle illustrating various forms of kinetic energy.

Sun Healing: The Ultra-Violet Way with Life Lite (B+W, 1930s)
Quack science in all its glory, this long-form commercial from the 1930s was produced by Ultra-Violet Home Products Inc (out of Los Angeles, surprise, surprise) and demonstrates an ‘amazing’ new product – a handheld quartz instrument that will blast you the ultraviolet light you’re supposedly missing out on by being indoors. Watch it cure diseases of all kinds while starting new ones!

Goodbye, Mr. Germ (B+W, 1940 Edgar G. Ulmer)
A mixed animation/live-action TB scare film from legendary directed Edgar Ulmer. This antiquated campfest features actor (and sometime director) James Kirkland. Kirkland is the doctor (or scientist) father of two youngsters. He imagines inventing a radio that can hear germs speak, and that he can understand their language. Most of the film features Kirkland talking to a animated tuberculosis germ (he views through his microscope) as they discuss how TB is transferred from one person to another, how the body fights it, and how it can live dormant for years in a person's body waiting for a moment of physical weakness that allows it to escape. Kirkland then tells the germ that they've been able to discover "him" in the body now, which is then verified with an X-ray.

Living in a Reversed World (B+W, 1958)

An excellent re-rending of our external visual environment, directors and vision specialists Ivo Kohler and Theodore Erismann stitch the viewer into a weird world of screwy visual illusion and corky dystopia via the use of optical illusions.

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About the Moody Institute of Science

Dr. Irwin Moon got his start In 1938 when he began traveling as a full-time as evangelist demonstrating his “Sermons From Science” under the auspices of The Moody Bible Institute. The next year, with the help of businessmen from San Francisco, a SFS pavilion was built at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair. For nine months, Moon presented up to eight demonstrations each day, seven days a week. The crowds were so large that demonstrations began hours prior to the scheduled time because early arrivals had filled the auditorium while others waited outside. With more than two tons of equipment, most of it homemade, Moon performed such wonders as frying an egg on a cold stove, lighting a bulb on his bare fingers, and allowing one million volts of electricity to smash through his body. Following the presentation he asked, "Can you believe these miracles are the result of chance or accident? Or are they part of a divine pattern?"

In 1945 The Moody Institute of Science was founded with a two-pronged evangelistic approach incorporating films and live demonstrations. Operating on a shoestring budget, The Moody Institute of Science staff would remodel war surplus material and invent and build the equipment to perform live demonstrations and produce films. More than 6 million people have seen their live demonstrations at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair, the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, the 1967 Montreal World's Fair and many more fairs and expositions. Their classroom science films were marketed to schools and churches across the United States and their biblical subtext hit the viewer over the head with the proverbial hammer of faith, far predating today’s “debate” over “intelligent design”.

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About Oddball Films

Oddball Films brings you Totally Strange 80's - Sex, Spandex, and Roller Skates. This bizarre and over-the-top evening features the oddest shorts of the 1980s, a decade known for its over-indulgence, bright colors, big hair, spandex and roller skates...roller skates! Get rappin' about fast food and vegetables in the gut-busting craptacular Fast Food: What's in it for You? (1988). Kids get creepy with grandma and her walkie-talkie-controlled robot when their picture book points out their body parts in Bellybuttons Are Navels (1985). Tag along with a couple of spandex-clad Calendar Control Officers in Calendar: How to Use It (1982). Step into a dream world of silver hair and a chorus line of dancing CPU units in the laughable computer primer Learning About Computers (1984). And, of course, we'll all learn to Roller Skate Safely (1981) with our matching neon spandex. Plus, Bill Plympton's surreal cartoon Your Face (1987), the itchy-kitschy Lice are not Nice (1985), a wacky animated Lego Sports Short (1986), and a whole decade's worth of great trailers, commercials and more snippets and surprises, with everything screened on 16mm. So, tease your bangs, grab your skates and roll on down to Oddball!

Date: Friday, May 6th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Fast Food: What's in it for You? (Color, 1988)

"Hey Derek, I gotta talk to you about vegetables!"

File under Raptastic! This over-the-top nutritional primer has it all: terrible computer graphics, acid-wash denim, hairspray for days and — you guessed it — A Fast Food Rap!! Alex is a confused 12 year-old that loves computers, but hates vegetables. His older sister, Karen is dieting for the stellar party she's throwing when their folks go out of town. His buddy Derek works at a fast food restaurant, but has all the answers to their burning nutritional questions. Will Karen throw the party of her dreams with tasty and healthy snacks? Will Derek agree to be her date? Will they rap about hamburgers?!?

Your Face (Color, 1987)
This film set the style and started career of famed animator Bill Plympton. One of the most popular short films ever made, it’s still showing all over the world. As a second- rate crooner sings about the beauties of his lover’s face, his own face metamorphosizes into the most surreal shapes and contortions imaginable. The music was written and sung by Maureen McElheron, then slowed to sound like a man’s voice because Plympton was too cheap to hire a male singer. Your Face earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short in 1988.

Calendar: How to Use It (Color, 1982)

Poor Karen shows up to Doug's door, wrapped present in hand, only to find out it's the day after his birthday party. She goes home and wistfully wishes, "If only I knew how to use a calendar." That's when the spandex-clad people in her wall calendar come alive and invite her into the "Calendar Control Center." There, they sing catchy educational songs about how tell one day from the next.

Lice Are Not Nice (Color, 1985)

In this hilariously itchy playground primer, we learn all about those creepy crawly insects that love us enough to hop a ride in our hair and tag-along for life. With jazzy music, a chorus of enthusiastically creeped out children all scratching their heads, and laughable animated sequences, this short will give you all the facts with a side-dose of laughs.

Why'd The Beetle Cross The Road (Color, 1984)

Like a game of Frogger set on the bikini-clad boardwalk of Venice Beach, we follow one unlucky beetle as he's trampled by sexy teenagers, volleyballs, and bicyclists, all while merely trying to reach the beach. Will he make it, and why did he do it? One girl in High School knows the answer, but we're not telling...

Bellybuttons are Navels (Color, 1985)

A boy and girl are playing in their room when Grandma peeks into the room and talks into a walkie talkie, which activates a toy robot telling the kids to go to bed. A little later, the kids meet grandma on the couch to read a story. They sit on the couch flipping through a picture book and get interactive. It all gets progressively more disturbing as the naked children in the book (who are taking a bath) begin to show each other their various body parts and the proper names.

Learning About Computers (Color, 1984)

Roger has to write a report for school about computers, but he can't quite wrap his head around the workings of his Apple 2C. That is, until he falls asleep and has a magical dream where his computer comes to life, turns his hair sparkling silver (you know, because it's a dream) and demonstrates the inner-workings of himself with women in CPU costumes dancing on a silicon bandstand.

Roller Skate Safely (Color, 1981)
All you need to know about the old 4-wheel roller skates, with lots of great footage from the Venice Beach boardwalk and trick sites. Don’t miss the skate team in their early 80s matching outfits!

For the Early Birds:

Button Button: A Dream of Nuclear War (Color, 1982)

Regional theater weirdness at its most atomic! Watch out for the bomb! Or is it: Watch out for the people in the giant papier mache masks and those guys on stilts? This head-scratching new age spectacular presents a shortened version of an hour long pageant/play presented by the residents of Strafford, Vermont, combining myth and fantasy to convey the meaning of nuclear war. Featuring mimes, narration, stilt-walkers and folk music effectively blended into a baffling anti-nuclear war statement.

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films presents All That Jazz: Jazz Cartoons and Shorts, a 16mm cinematic screening swinging with a heady and hip sound called Jazz. The evening features antique musical shorts with tons of jazz greats like Maurice Rocco, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway and Ivie Anderson as well as a handful of animated films that feature jazz soundtracks and influence. We kick off our set with a classic of jazz cinema, Jammin' the Blues (1944), which features the coolest of cats, Lester Young, sitting in a relaxed slouch with his sax slung to his side as he wails a languorous line; a cigarette smolders, pinched between two fingers as he plays, but against the black background it looks as though his horn is smoking and you can see the tones floating up from it. The great Cab Calloway teams up with the Fleischer Brothers and Betty Boop for a double dose of rotoscoped cartoons: Old Man of the Mountain (1933) and Minnie the Moocher (1932) including the earliest footage of Calloway ever. Duke Ellington and Ivie Anderson bring us A Bundle of Blues (1932). The surreal and stunning Vitaphone short Yamekraw (1930) features an all-black cast and a soundtrack by James P. Johnston. Norman McLaren's Begone Dull Care (1949) with music by the Oscar Peterson Trio, features animation influenced by the music and painted directly onto film. Lenny Bruce then riffs on hipster speak in Ernest Pintoff’s animation, The Interview (1960). Fats Waller provides a delightfully wacky musical break with the Soundie Your Feet's Too Big (1941). Husband and wife animators John and Faith Hubley team up with Benny Carter for two groundbreaking cartoons Urbanissimo (1966) and The Adventures of an * (1956). Boogie woogie wildman Maurice Rocco hits us twice with Beat Me Daddy (1943) and Red Hot Heat (Sizzling Rhythm with a Beat) from 1937 featuring the Cotton Club Dancers in tinted sepiatone! Jimmy Rushing and the Count Basie Orchestra beg you to Take Me Back Baby (1949). It's a one of a kind evening of music, animation and improvisation.

Date: Thursday, May 5th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp St. San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: https://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

Jammin’ the Blues (B+W, 1944)

Probably the most famous jazz film ever made- produced by jazz impresario Norman Granz, directed by Gjon Mili and featuring incredible performances by Lester “Prez” Young, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Marlowe Morris, John Simmons, George “Red” Callender, “Big” Sid Catlett and “Papa” Jo Jones. Nominated for an Oscar in 1945 and entered into the National Film registry in 1955, this film simply must be seen by any serious jazz fan. Cinematography was by the later Hitchcock stalwart Robert Burks on his very first DP assignment. There is a noir ambience to the film and each scene has a formal elegance that is enthralling. Mili has total command of his form (his only film as director!), and the mise-en-scene and continuity are impeccable.

Cab Calloway teams up with Betty Boop!

Minnie the Moocher (B+W, 1931, Dave Fleischer)

We’d be saps if we didn’t include Betty Boop! After a fight with her folks, Miss Boop runs away from home, and all its surreal comforts -- and takes Bimbo with her! Taking refuge in a hollow of a tree, they encounter ghostly beings! Cab Calloway and his band provide most of the short's score appear in a live-action introduction. The thirty-second live-action segment is the earliest-known film footage of Calloway, whose gyrations were rotoscoped for the spooky, singing walrus.

Old Man of the Mountain (B+W, 1933)

Another Betty and Cab pairing to prove she was the jazz baby for the ages! When you want a strong female lead, authentic jazz soundtracks and hyper-surreal imagery, you need look no further than the Fleischer brothers, and this classic does not disappoint.

Jazz and Jive Soundies (B+W, 1949)

Fats Waller in “Your Feet’s Too Big”

Fats sings about how his feet are too big to dance as he demonstrates how that is a problem on the dance floor.

Count Basie Orchestra in “Take Me Back, Baby”

Count Basie's legendary jazz/big band orchestra that lasted over 50 years from its founding in the mid-30s to Count Basie's death in 1984. One of Basie's saxophonists day dreams about winning back his lady love. Vocals by Jimmy "Mr. Five by Five" Rushing.

Two By John and Faith Hubley with music by Benny Carter!

Urbanissimo (Color, 1966, John and Faith Hubley)

Famed animators John and Faith Hubley’s film tells the tale of a wily farmer who matches wits with a runaway “city” on legs. Dramatizing the blight perpetuated by chaotic urban development, this animated film tells the story of an unassuming little farmer, symbolic of non-urban man, who is sitting amidst natural surroundings enjoying the flowers and bees. He is interrupted by the entrance of a personified city which chews into his charming landscape. The urban monster is rampant and uncontrollable but the farmer is intrigued by its mobility and dynamic excitement. With a hoppin’ jazz soundtrack by the great Benny Carter with Maynard Ferguson and Ray Brown.

Adventures of an * (Color, 1956, John and Faith Hubley)

The first film John and Faith Hubley produced together commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, with music by jazz great Benny Carter. “They violated all the rules”, remembered once animator William Littlejohn, “They threw dust on the cels, and they worked with grease so the paint would run. It came out beautifully: everybody was awestruck that such a thing would work”.

“We decided to do a film with music and no dialogue and to deal with abstract characters. We wanted to get a graphic look that had never been seen before. So we played with the wax-resist technique: drawing with wax and splashing it with watercolor to produce a resisted texture. We ended up waxing all the drawings and spraying them and double-exposing them. We did the backgrounds the same way. It photographed with a very rich waxy texture, which was a fresh look” – John Hubley

Red Hot Heat (Sizzling Rhythm With a Beat) (1937, B+W & Tinted)

Adapted from the Warner Baxter/Joan Bennett film “Vogues of 1938”, this musical short features boogie woogie wildman Maurice Rocco in a sizzling version of “Turn On That Red Hot Heat (Burn Your Blues Away)”. Features the Cotton Club Singers and the Four Hot Shots dancers with a raucous ending and sepia tone not seen in the original.

Beat Me, Daddy (1943, B+W)

Features pianist Maurice Rocco performing the wild and raucous boogie woogie classic “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar”, later performed by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.

Begone Dull Care (Color, 1949)
The great National Film Board of Canada animator Norman McLaren’s film without words. McLaren paints vibrant abstract images directly onto the film. “Begone Dull Care” shines with masterful use of scratching and painting on film stock. The film gives warmth and movement to compositions resembling a constantly morphing Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning painting, yet never fails to remind us of its very calculated aesthetics when it suddenly adapts to the score's slower movements and shifts from expressionistic and oversaturated explosions to minimalist vertical lines that vibrate accordingly to the score by the Oscar Peterson Trio. “Begone Dull Care” won six international prizes between 1949 and 1954.

A Bundle of Blues (1933)

The natty Duke Ellington Orchestra swing in this stylish soundie gem, performing "Lightnin'"& "Rockin' in Rhythm" before easing into the centerpiece: Ivie Anderson`s bluesy and possibly most moving rendition rendition of "Stormy Weather" ever recorded. Moods shift rapidly in these miniature musical films as Florence Hill & Bessey Dudley dizzying tap routine to "Bugle Call Rag" perfectly demonstrates.

The Interview (Color, 1960)

Animated short by the brilliant Ernie Pintoff has square interviewer befuddled by fictional hipster jazz musician Shorty Petterstein (voiced by Lenny Bruce) as the Stan Getz combo blows and riffs “off camera”. “Like, don’t hang me- I didn’t wanna fall up here in the first place!”

Yamekraw (B+W, 1930)

This Vitaphone short is set to James P. Johnston's ballad "Yamekraw: a Negro Rhapsody" and offers the semi-surreal tale of a man seduced and betrayed by the big city and deciding to return home to his dutiful wife. Stunning, moody and expressive, this beautiful piece features expressionistic sets and marvelous scenes of the city dance hall. The protagonist is played by Jimmy Mordecai from St. Louis Blues. James P. Johnston is thought of as the original jazz pianist and was a precursor to Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, bridging ragtime music with early jazz. He also composed the quintessential number of the Roaring 20's "The Charleston" and accompanied both Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith on piano.

For the Early Birds:

The Hat: Is This War Necessary? (Color, 1967)
An entertaining anti-war allegory of two soldiers on either side of a border line. When one soldier's hat flies off onto the other side of the border, he and the opposing soldier get into a fascinating conversation on the nature of aggression, adaptation and the absurdity of war. The soldiers voices are none other than Dudley Moore and Dizzy Gillespie, who improvised their parts in the Hubley's kitchen. For an in depth examination of The Hat, check out Michael Sporn's article here: http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=2769

About Oddball Films

Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Oddball Films invites you to a unique evening of punks, zines and mixtapes with visiting filmmaker and editor of Unsound Magazine, William Davenport for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Davenport will be discussing and presenting clips from “Unsound Redux”, the docu-series that reveals a story told by a generation of musicians who began 30 years ago and have continued their creative output to today. Before the internet they networked with each other, creating an international community, trading tapes, zines and records. Unsound Magazine was published from 1983-1987. Before the inception of the internet and on the brink of the desktop publishing revolution, Unsound created a forum for outlier musicians and artists to connect. Documentary filmmaker William Davenport was the editor and publisher of Unsound: “I left the music scene many years ago, but found myself interested in finding out what happened to the musicians that filled the pages of Unsound. I was limited by only having the resources to film within the United States, although Unsound magazine had an international scope."Traveling from the East Coast to West Coast, Davenport did interview after interview, and soon discovered links that would develop into the Unsound Redux project, three films emerged: “Great American Cassette Masters”, “The New Punks” and “Ziners”. The program will also include a bonus film, “Hunting Lodge” as well as the 16mm film The Dreamer That Remains (1973) featuring a rare profile of legendary composer, musical inventor and hobo Harry Partch.

Date: Friday, May 20th, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring Clips Of:

The Great American Cassette Masters
This film features the pioneers of the home taping cassette network that began in the early 1980's and continues today. They forged the way before the internet and created a network of musicians and artists that spanned the globe.

The New Punks
After the inception of punk rock these musicians took the notion many steps forward. Featuring: The Haters, Hunting Lodge, Audio Leter, Debt of Nature, Beth Custer Ensemble,Trance Mission, Borbetomagus, Medicine, John Trubee & The Ugly Janitors of America.

Ziners

OP, Sound Choice, ND, OPtion and Unsound were some of the zines that linked a worldwide community before the internet. This film highlights interviews with the people who created some of the ground breaking zines of the 80's.

Hunting Lodge
Emerging from the roots of punk and electronic music, Hunting Lodge created their own brand of noise. Dark, intense, somewhat melodic at times, overlaid with harsh vocals. Hunting Lodge was formed in the early 80's by Lon C. Diehl and Richard Skott, both from Michigan. The band reached critical success and was on the verge of moving to the next level, in terms of the music business, but decided to quietly fade away.

From the Archive:

The Dreamer That Remains (Color, 1973)

“Harry Partch is an American visionary. He has built his own musical world out of microtones, hobo speech, elastic octaves and percussion instruments made from hubcaps and nuclear cloud chambers.”

Stephen Pouliot's portrait of Harry Partch, one of the most innovative and influential composers of the 20th century. Partch invented instruments (cloud chamber bowls, cong gongs, the harmonic canon, more), experimented with drama and ritual and created a live ensemble utilizing dozens of invented instruments.

Partch influenced virtually every forward thinking composer and experimental musician of the 20th century. A fascinating artist Partch lectured, performed and rode the rails as a hobo during the Great Depression, incorporated everyday speech into his melodic lines. He transcribed graffiti and used it as text. Partch was one of the great musical innovators of the last century.

“The work that I have been doing these many years parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”-Harry Partch

About William Davenport:

William Davenport (born 1960, Evansville, Indiana) is a documentary filmmaker, musician, publisher, writer, teacher and autism activist. He is best known for his documentary films about autism, also for his work as the publisher of Unsound magazine, and as the founding member of the experimental/noise band Problemist. In 2011 Davenport directed the feature documentary "Too Sane for This World". This film explores the challenges, gifts and unique perspectives of 12 adults on the autism spectrum. The film features an introduction by Dr. Temple Grandin.In 2013 Davenport directed the feature documentary "Citizen Autistic". The history of civil rights in America has been marked by the hard-won progress of one category after another of oppressed and marginalized citizens who stand up and demand recognition, respect, and equal access to the benefits of modern society. William Davenport's film Citizen Autistic brings us an inside look at the front lines of the autistic civil rights movement, showcasing autistic activists and self-advocates on the front lines of this struggle for inclusion, and freedom from persecution. In 2013 Davenport directed a music video for the band Array, which features Robyn Steward and Mark Tinley, who are both on the autism spectrum. The video is for the song, "Spacecadet" was released on April 2, 2013 - World Autism Day. In 2014 Davenport released the short documentary "Conquering Heights", the story of a man on the autism spectrum who completed a 100 mile ski expedition. Davenport has been working on a series of films that focus on the music and zine scenes that origintated in the 1980's. In 2016 he completed the series of films under the title Unsound Redux/ The four films explore the world of experimental and noise music, "The Great American Cassette Masters", "The New Punks". "Ziners" and "The People's Music". His band Problemist will be releasing new material and touring in later 2016.

Check out his website: http://www.talkstoryfilms.net/

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Animazione Demente - The Psychedelic World of Italian Cartoons - Thur. Mar. 3rd - 8PM

Learn Your Lesson's 3 Year Anniversary - Shockucation's Greatest Hits - Fri. Mar. 11th - 8PM

Better Call Saul - Saul Bass on Film - Thur. Mar. 10th - 8PM

Sexperimental Cinema - Fri. Mar. 18th - 8PM

Tiki Fever! Vintage Hawaiiana - Thur. Mar. 17th - 8PM

Cinema Soiree with Anthony Buchanan - Domestic Dystopias: Lost, Found, and Reimagined - Thur. Mar. 31 - 8PM

Coming Attractions from Hell: Horror, B-Movie and Exploitation Trailers - Fri. Mar. 25th - 8PM

Strange Sinema 98: “Ecstatic Cinema” - Thur. Mar. 24th - 8PM

Learn your Lesson from Sid Davis - The Shockucational Master - Fri. Apr. 1st - 8PM

What the F(ilm)?! 16: You Can't Handle the Spoof! - Fri. April 8th - 8PM

Czech Please! - Animated Wonders from the former Czechoslovakia - Thur. April 7th - 8PM

Cinema Soiree with Richie Unterberger - Asian Rock 'n' Roll Rarities - Thurs. April 21st - 8PM

Future News: Walter Cronkite's 21st Century - Fri. April 15th - 8PM

Busby Berkeley - Sex, Surrealism, and Song - Thur. April 14th - 8PM

Antique Animal Antics! - Fri. April 22nd - 8PM

Erotic Oddities - Fri. April 29th - 8PM

Strange Sinema 99: Psycho Science - Thur. April 28th - 8PM

Totally Strange 80's - Sex, Spandex, and Roller Skates - Fri. May 6th - 8PM

All That Jazz: Jazz Cartoons and Shorts - Thur. May 5th - 8PM

Unsound Cinema Soiree with William Davenport - Fri. May 20th - 8PM