Bass on Titles - Thurs. Mar 1 - 8pm

Oddball Films presents Bass on Titles, an evening of films showcasing one of the 20th century’s legendary graphic designers, filmmakers and title producers - Saul Bass. Films include documentary Bass on Titles (1982) featuring some of the designer’s iconic title sequences and logos; Notes on the Popular Arts (1977), explores escapism in American popular media through a smorgasbord of bizarre dream sequences; with exquisite timelapse cinematography, The Searching Eye (1964), follows a boy who sees the history of man in a sand castle and the creation of the earth in a piece of rock; 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 1, 2011 at 8:00PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

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

Sexiest Strange Sinema - Sat. Feb 25 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Sexiest Strange Sinema. This 49^th installment of Oddball Films’ monthly legendary and award winning Strange Sinema series spotlights sex in cinema - from risqué to raunchy, from blatant sexual excess to sublime sensuality. Highlights from the program include Seaside Films nudie cutie Sadie the Sunbather (1940s), camp trailers for films like White Mama, Black Mama (1973), The Stewardesses (1969) and the rare Dennis Hopper trailer for his orgy filled hippie love film American Dreamer (1971) (Hopper destroyed all existing prints), erotic tidbits from the Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival (1960s-70s), Bubble/Fan dancer Sally Rand’s Artist Model (1950s), sexy commercials like the Felliniesque spot for Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, and an inside look at Fredericks of Hollywood 70s style! Also, Bay Area sex starlet Annette Haven stars in a sizzling segment from legendary adult director Radley Metzger’s Barbara Broadcast (1977), 1950s Cheese Nappers, burlesques beauties and the classic Soundie Texas Strip that inspired Devo to “Whip it Good!” Plus! A very rare color reel of vintage Russ Meyer-inspired smut presented by special guest, smut collector, archivist and founder of Zampano’s Playhouse, Albert Steg from Cambridge MA. Strange Sinema is a monthly screening of offbeat films, old gems and newly discovered oddities both entertaining, experimental and eye-opening, all culled from Oddball Films 50,000+ film archive. 

Date: Saturday, February 25th at 8:00PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, and San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415.558.8117.

Don't Miss Albert Steg's Screening Sex in the Shadows Thursday, February 23rd at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

Visionary Design: The Cinema of Charles and Ray Eames - Fri. Feb. 24 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Visionary Design: The Cinema of Charles and Ray Eames. Among the finest designers of the 20th Century, the husband and wife team are best known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and manufacturing, but the Eames’ were also brilliant and inventive filmmakers, able to illustrate the most abstract concepts with readily understood images. There is so much to say about the legacy of the Eames’s that an entire period has been named after them. This program includes An Eames Celebration (1975), a documentary about the 20th century’s groundbreaking designers and filmmakers, shot by Les Blank; Powers of Ten (1968), their most famous film about orders of magnitude; Tops (1969), a brilliant childlike anthropological film capturing spinning tops from different cultures and eras; and IBM Mathematica Peep Show (1961) is a succinct and poignant presentation of 5 separate mathematical concepts.  The legacy of this husband and wife team includes more than 100 films produced between 1950 and 1982 that reflect the rich scope of their interests. Noted for their furniture designs -- the "Eames chair" in particular is considered one of the most significant and widely recognized furniture designs of the 20th century. The Charles Eames Lounge Chair set a standard for comfort and simplicity in modern design. The chair is so important in modern furniture design that it has become a part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. 

Date: Friday, February 24th at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

Private Lives/Public Spaces - Thurs. Feb 23rd - 8PM

Oddball Films, with Lynn Cursaro, presents: Private Lives/Public Spaces: The Many Lives of Cities. This program takes a freewheeling look at cities, real and imagined, as viewed by an individual’s lens. From classic cartoon, government propaganda, experimental documentary and story book, urban life is where people explore facets of their private selves. A pair of siblings make a home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler. You . . . functions as an ode to both a girl and Budapest. The Civil Defense nightmare of Our Cities Must Fight will galvanize your hometown loyalty, or else! See The City of Light through the eyes of a regular schmo in Brooklyn Goes to Paris. Maurice Sendak’s swinging kitchen metropolis, In the Night Kitchen, is just familiar enough to be the stuff of dreams. Post-Be Bop surrealism is out for a long walk on a short NYC pier in Help, My Snowman’s Burning Down. Hollywood glamour goes undersea when the contents of Porky’s Five & Ten go into the briny. S.F. Trips Festival: An Opening shows what happens when you rent a hall and throw a utopia. And, as usual, Lynn’s complimentary home-baked treats for all!

Date: Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 at 8:00PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

Ancient and Imagined Worlds - Sat. Feb 18 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Hannah Airriess present Ancient and Imagined Worlds. This program features films concerning worlds beyond what we occupy; worlds that have been lost to time and worlds that are products of fantastic imagination. The short documentary The Inner World of Jorge Luis Borges (1972) acts as a foundation for this program. Borges masterfully creates worlds and civilizations spanning all of history in his short stories and essays, and through interviews filmed in his native Buenos Aires he explains his relationship to mythology, time, and space. In a clip from The Lost World (1925), we see a prehistoric world that has continued to exist into the present, and the disaster that emerges when explorers try to make contact, illustrated in early stop motion animation. The animator Philip Stapp beautifully renders the ancient agricultural rituals of Mayan and Aztec cultures in First Americans: And their Gods (1969 - Part I), detailing pre-Columbian history with dizzying animation techniques and an experimental audio track. Moving into the imagined realm, Flatland (1965) takes place in a world that only has two dimensions and a strict social code; when a three dimensional sphere enters the picture, the laws of the universe begin to fall apart. Back on earth, Our World in Review: Arctic Exploration (1936) features explorers encountering new landscapes and frontiers, with the aid of a pack of snow dogs. Georges Méliès’s Dreams of Baron Munchausen (1911) concludes the show, showcasing the beautiful and frightening dream world of a man who had too much to drink. 

Date: Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 8:00pm.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558.8117.

Is This Love? Uncertain Hearts and More Certain Parts - Fri. Feb 17 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Joe Garrity present Is This Love?: Uncertain Hearts and More Certain Parts. You’ll-know-it-when-you-feel-it in the program that shelves the rose-colored glasses and examines love as it really is: ambivalent, compulsive, and defying definition. From first dates to free love, sex to sects, we search far and wide for that most elusive feeling. The program includes George Kaczender’s cool 1966 gem The Game, featuring mod rocking teens fumbling for play, and Richard Williams’ animated morality tale Love Me, Love Me, Love Me (1962), where when it comes to love, “no one really has it good.” Also, Chuck Jones unleashes his Lothario-skunk, Pepe Le Pew, in the Oscar-winning cartoon For Scent-imental Reasons (1949). Finally, youth wrestle romantic problems in The Dating Scene (1972), and newlyweds examine cultural mores in the classic Social Sex Attitudes in Adolescence (1953). Plus! Indulge in A Quickie (1969) by Dirk Kortz, and say you do in Love, Honor, and Oh Boy! (1960). Join us for an evening of dubious dates, nervous nuptials, and much more! 



Date: Friday, February 17th at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

The Art of the Sixties: Manufactured Mediums - Thurs. Feb 16 at 8PM

Oddball Films presents The Art of the Sixties: Manufactured Mediums, featuring films from an era of massive-scale manufacturing; a time when art converged with science and industry.  Utilizing metal fabrication, industrial printing techniques and communication technologies artists became inventors and inventors became industrialists. The program features the rare documentary Art of the Sixties (1967), featuring the monumental soft sculptures of Claes Oldenberg, the metal works of Barnett Newman, kinetic artist Len Lye, Les Levine’s interactive environments, action painter Jackson Pollock and more. A seldom seen NET  documentary USA Artists: Robert Rauschenberg (1966) showcases a young Rauschenberg’s innovative “Revolvers” or “Combines”- multilayered painted sculptures that expand the boundaries of art. Merce Cunningham (1964) is very rare a French-made poetic montage of movement pioneer Merce Cunningham’s dance performances in collaboration with life partner and composer John Cage with “found object” sets by Robert Rauschenberg.  Food for a Modern World (1960s), shows 60’s-style industrial farming on a massive scale while Theory of Communications: Learning as Self Learning (1960s) showcases large scale, surreal “visual aid” models in a science museum entertaining and educating inscrutable 60’s school children and more. 

Date: Thursday, February 16th at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

Female Trouble - Sat. Feb 11 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Kat Shuchter bring you Female Trouble: Shedding Light of the Plight of Women, a whole sleight of films designed to shock, alarm and educate the modern girl and woman about the dangers that constantly surround her. From the curse of every woman in films like D*sney’s Story of Menstruation (1945), a beautifully animated short of lovely ladies and their dreamy pituitary glands, to the woes of Teenage Pregnancy, a 1971 campy Canadian melodrama, to the sickness of Eating Disorders:The Slender Trap (1986), the dangers of strangers like Hitchhiking: The Road to Rape (1982) and the risk of intimacy in Herpes: The New Sexual Epidemic (1981), with ladycentric commercials and all sorts of other Girl Stuff (1980). This is one evening that will celebrate the strength of women and educate the men in their life to the constant barrage of dangers us ladies face everyday.

Date: Saturday, Feb 11 at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

After Happily Ever After - Fri. Feb 10 - 8PM

Oddball Films and Emmy winning filmmaker Kate Schermerhorn present After Happily Ever After. Exploring questions about marriage in the 21st Century, Kate Schermerhorn's new documentary, asks why we marry, whether we should marry, and how some of us actually even make marriage work. Simon Winchester, New York Times best-selling author of “The Professor and the Madman” calls it: “Intelligent, sensitive, funny and tender.”  From a couple who dress alike every day, to a pair of nudists and a newlywed pair of mothers, to a feisty English widow, this 60 minute film features an eclectic mix of long married couples who reveal their secret to making their own unions succeed. Along the way, Schermerhorn chronicles the joys and heartbreaks of her own marriage, and finds that even the best advice can't always guarantee  a happily ever after. Plus, rare oddities about love and relationships culled from Oddball Films 50,000 reel archive including Dating Do's and Don'ts (1949) one of the campiest educational films ever made, this fantastically funny short gives you all the tips you need to nab "mr" or "miss right". The filmmaker will be in attendance to introduce and conduct a Q&A after the screening. 

Date: Friday, February 10th at 8pm

Venue: Oddball Films - 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

DVDs available for sale after the screening.

For more information about Kate Schermerhorn and After Happily Ever After visit the documentary's official website. 

Here's a link to SFGate's recent piece about this film. 

Speed Demons - Thur. Feb 9 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Speed Demons. Fasten your seat-belts for an night filled with vintage shorts about classic cars, motorcycles, racing and, of course, speed!!! Featured films include Amanda Pope's The Incredible San Francisco Artists’ Soap Box Derby (1975) highlighting the whimsy and creativity of our fair city's artists; the origins of American car culture are unearthed in The Car of Your Dreams (1984); and Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous (1976) captures a high-speed drive through Paris in a Mercedes 450SEL all captured in a single unedited take! An evening such as this would not be complete without a cautionary tale, The Last Prom (1973), warning hot-blooded / fast driving teens that SEX=DEATH. Plus! Bikers get a new look in Tough on Two Wheels (1955) and much much more!  From short subject, educational and promotional, to commercials, this wide variety of film from the 1950s through the 1980s will tickle your fancy, tap your adrenaline and leave you in  awe… of things that go… GO… GO!!!  

Date: Thursday, February 9th at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA

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

Oddball Oscar Obscurities - Sat. Feb. 4 - 7PM & 9:30PM

Saul Bass, Academy Award winner for "Why Man Creates" (1968)

Oddball Films and guest curator Sterling Hedgpeth present Oddball Oscar Obscurities, a special two show evening showcasing the finest animated and live action shorts ever to be nominated for an Academy Award. 

The era of having a series of shorts precede a feature presentation at the theater may be a thing of the past, but the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences still recognize achievements in the live action and animated short fields, 80 years after these categories were introduced.  While many often take issue with the winners and losers of any respective year, it’s in the shorts category that you can often find the more interesting, innovative, and timeless examples of filmmaking recognized by Oscar.  Come celebrate Oddball Oscar Obscurities, films that celebrate visionary viewpoints and storytelling economy.

Date: Saturday, February 4th at 7PM & 9:30PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA

Admission: $10 for 1 or $15 for 2 shows - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

7PM - Live Action Shorts

Spanning four decades of Academy Award honors, come see these live action shorts (all nominated, some victorious) that cover the realm of comedy icons, jazz legends, documentary, the avant-garde, and storytelling at its economical best.  Pathos, hilarity, surrealism, and even a nice groove are yours for the viewing.  Featuring the talents of Laurel & Hardy, Saul Bass, Alan Arkin, Carson Davidson, and many more, this international collection has something to offer film lovers of all stripes! 

Highlights: 

Tit for Tat (Hal Roach, 1935)

Neighbours (Norman McLaren, 1952)
Help! My Snowman's Burning Down (Carson Davidson, 1964)
Why Man Creates (Saul Bass, 1968)
(For more about these shorts follow the "Read More" link below)

9:30PM - Animated Shorts


From traditional cel lyricism to stop-motion frivolity, from epic works in clay to personal bios in collage, the Academy Awards have honored a wide range of animation styles over the years, and now’s your chance to catch a diverse sampling of past nominees and winners, all in one eclectic program.  From many different countries but speaking a universal language of humor and thoughtfulness, come see the talents of Chuck Jones, Norman McLaren, Orson Welles, Frederic Back, and others on display.  We’ll even have a full nomination slate from a single year, so you can decide if the Oscar went to the right film! 


Highlights:
Ersatz (The Substitute) (Zagreb Film, 1961)
The Dot and The Line (MGM, 1965)
Frank Film (Frank Mouris, 1973)

(For more about these shorts follow the "Read More" link below)

Red. Hot. Love. - Fri. Feb 3 - 8PM

Guest curator Soumyaa Kapil Behrens and Oddball Films present an evening of films filled with passionate duels and screen gods and goddesses of years past.  Cuddle up for an intriguing selection that will let you indulge in the visual nature of cinema and desire. Some highlights include coming of age shorts like the classic Skaterdater (1965) winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1966 and The Magic Tree (1970) by Gerald McDermott that weaves an animated folktale of secrets and desire from the Congo.  The Fable of He and She (1974) by animator Eliot Noyes Jr. sweetly re-tells the age-old “battle of the sexes” story between the fictional hardimars and mushamels.  The Art of Film: Love Goddesses (1968) documents the history and evolution of the female sex symbol in Hollywood with famous faces like Dietrich, Garbo, and the original vamp, Theda Bera.  The guys get their turn with 1960’s movie trailers from films like Easy Come, Easy Go (1967) and the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967).  Jennifer Jones succumbs to the ultimate crime of passion in the heat of the desert in an excerpt from the feature Western, Duel in the Sun (1946) with Brazilian, Mexican and Russian dancing shorts rounding out the night! Ole!

Date: Friday, February 3rd at 8PM 

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

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