Life's a Drag! - Fri. Nov. 2nd - 8PM

Oddball films presents Life's a Drag! a fabulous and glamorous evening of drag royalty featuring groundbreaking documentaries, campy drag fairytales and vintage San Francisco amateur footage, all from the 1950's and 1960s, when homosexuality and transgender issues were first coming to a head in American society.  Highlights include Behind Every Good Man, the low-key portrait of an African American drag queen in Los Angeles.  Black Cap Drag takes an in-depth look at two British drag performers in 1960s London as they discuss their lives and careers and sing a few Barbra and Marlene numbers along the way.  The camptastic Sinderella retells an age-old fairy tale with a cross-dressing twist for a new generation.  Amour Pour Une Femme is a quick stag-gag, with a dressing room full of lovely ladies, but they may not all really be ladies. With incredible costumery in the 1969 Halloween Show at the Levee from our very own San Francisco, and tons of other dragalicious bonuses!  Empowering and entertaining, you'll want this night to drag on forever!

Date: Friday, November 2nd, 2011 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco (map)

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

"You're born naked, the rest is Drag"

-Ru Paul Charles

Animation Behind the Iron Curtain - Thurs. Nov. 1st - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Animation Behind the Iron Curtain, an evening of rare and masterful works of Polish, Czech and Yugoslavian animation.  The films range in form and subject matter, from the melancholic to the celebratory but all possess an intricate artistry and an undercurrent of rebellion from oppression.  In the utterly charming Queer Birds (1965), the cutest pair of best bird friends you'll ever see must team up to fight off an oppressive black cat. Tadeusz Wilcosz creates a dark world of animate inanimates that must band together to overthrow a burlap sack that threatens to eat them all in the creepily wonderful stop-motion short Worek AKA The Sack (1967).    An impish little artist must gather her escaped watercolors to paint a black and white world in The Day the Colors Went Away (1971).  The Academy Award-Winning short Ersatz (1961) features marvelous mid-century artwork and cheeky social commentary.  Jiří Trnka's haunting puppet parable The Hand (1967) presents a sculptor oppressed and manipulated by a giant disembodied hand.  Jan Lenica's paper cut-out marvel Rhinoceros (1963) retells the Ionesco tale of a society out of control with conformity. Creative, compelling and consciencious, this is more than just any night of cartoons.

Date: Thursday, November 1st, 2012 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco (map)

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

Strange Sinema 57: Anti Art - Thurs. Oct. 25 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 57: Anti Art, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ collection of over 50,000 film prints. Tonight, we present a very rare overlapping set of documentaries and short dada works by the most brilliant anti artists of he 20th century. The program is encyclopedic in content, spanning a wide rage of influential anti-establishment artists worldwide. We begin with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s stunning Anemic Cinema (1926), a visual cacophony of hypnotic puns, followed by Helmut Herbst’s An Alphabet of German DADAism (1968), a comprehensive A-Z examination of dadaists shot in true dadaist style with the cooperation of Hans Richter and Richard Hulsenbeck, featuring sound-artist Kurt Schwitters, satirist George Groz, Max Ernst and more followed by L’Etoile des Mer aka The Sea Star (1928) Man Ray’s haunting, dreamlike ode to subconscious sexual desire.  We complete our program with Greta Deses’s Dada(1967), an astonishing profile of the dada movement featuring live performances, film excerpts, interviews and a  live performance reenactment of the groundbreaking Cabaret Voltaire with Jean Arp playing the piano. This film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and features in-person appearances from Marcel Duchamp, a very rare and eye-opening interview with the legendary Man Ray and much, much more.

Date: Thursday, October 25, 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

Winter of the Witch and Other Tales of Possession and Enchantment - Fri. Oct. 26 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present Winter of the Witch and Other Tales of Possession and Enchantment featuring  a coven full of maternal, malevolent, saucy, sweet and hippie-dippie witches to ring in Halloween weekend.  The charming Winter of the Witch (1969) presents us with a mischievous old dear who is eager to share the delicious secret of happiness. Georges Méliès’s pioneering cinema of visual magic is the perfect vehicle for a pair of hellzapoppin’ otherworldly shenanigans: The Inn Where No Man Rests and The Witch’s Revenge, (both 1903). The Occult: X-Factor or Fraud (1973), examines the groovy Woodstock-era resurgence of the dark arts. Witchcraft’s time-tested power is pitted against Woody Woodpecker's madcap cartoon mojo in Witch Crafty (1955). And the devil gets his due in appropriately fleshy style in two sinful oddities: 1920s era stag marvel The Devil and Betty Dolan's endearingly strange mid-century burlesque in Satan-Tease. More is stewing in the Oddball cauldron, so hop on your broom and make sure to be there!  And as always, complimentary home-baked treats appropriate to the season for all.

A Hag Unbagged

Date: Friday, October 26, 2012 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

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

Home Movie Day - Sat. Oct. 20

The San Francisco Media Archive and Oddball Films present Home Movie Day – Latino Home Movies celebrating the Mission and Chicano culture.  The event is being held in conjunction with the 10th Annual Worldwide Home Movie Day.  Members of the public are invited to submit their home movies, particularly films shot in the Mission. Bring your films: 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm home movies to SFMA where they will be inspected by HMD projectionists and shared with an enthusiastic audience in a day-long celebration of amateur filmmaking and home movie preservation.  As a special bonus, qualified films donated to the archive will be transferred free of charge and digital copies given to donors at a later date.  Throughout the day there will be a rare opportunity to view unique, amateur, and historic films from the SFMA collection.  At 8PM we feature a rare screening  of Latino films including: Polvo (2012) and Contemplando la Ciudad (2006) by Angela Reginato, Latino: A Cultural Conflict (Brian Lewis, 1971), San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show  (1965), Bay Area News footage y mucho, mucho mas!  Drop in for an hour or stay all day...  it’s sure to be a delightful afternoon filled with film and refreshments! The evening with feature a special free program of special works.

"There's no such thing as a bad home movie. These mini-underground opuses are revealing, scary, joyous, always flawed, filled with accidental art and shout out from attics and closets all over the world to be seen again. Home Movie Day is an orgy of self-discovery, a chance for family memories to suddenly become show business. If you've got one, whip it out and show it now."
-- John Waters

Date: Saturday, October 20, 2012 Home Movie Cinic 12-5PM -bring your films to screen! 8mm, Super8mm and 16mm only. Screening at 8PM Free!

Venue: San Francisco Media Archive, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 94110

Admission: FREE!!! (Donations to SFMA accepted)  RSVPs encouraged to: 415-558-8117 or archive@sfm.org

Submissions: Submissions are being accepted until October 18^th at SFMA from 10-5PM . No submissions necessary to attend.

Seduced and Abandoned in Florida - Fri. Oct. 19 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Jeff Giordano present Seduced and Abandoned in Florida featuring the San Francisco Premiere of early Ross McElwee documentary Space Coast (1979).  Rarely screened and not available on DVD, Space Coast pairs oddball documentarian Ross McElwee, legendary for directing the offbeat, Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning doc Sherman's March (1986), with Michele Negroponte (I'm Dangerous with Love) for a portrait of 1970s Cape Canaveral Florida.   In true offbeat fashion, Negroponte and McElwee follow three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida -- several years after the phasing out of Apollo moon missions: a salty newspaper reporter who has witnessed 1,600 consecutive launches; an out-of-work maintenance man who now leads a motorcycle gang; and the owner of a small construction company who sidelines as the clown-host of a local kids television show. Negroponte and McElwee transcend the “God, guns, and family” clichés of small town America in this emotionally complex, novelistic portrait of people living in hard times.  Space Coast will be preceded by two fabulous vintage Florida shorts, The World Parade: Fun In Florida (1950's) will refresh you on everything tourists love in Florida: Historic St. Augustine, snarly alligator farms, exotic sea animals, succulent Palm Beach, shuffleboard, the world's largest trailer camp (at the time) in Sarasota, and many more locales and creatures and see Florida through the eyes of a sick chimp in Mr. Chimp Goes South (1950's).  It's one rare evening of fascinating Florida fun.

"Space Coast has the evocative sub-kitsch clutter of an Edward Kienholz tableau or Vernon Zimmerman’s Unholy Rollers."

- Village Voice

Date: Friday, October 19th, 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

The Children of Ray Bradbury - Thurs. Oct. 18 - 8PM

Oddball Films present The Children of Ray Bradbury, a program of adaptations of the short stories of the recently departed literary giant Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury's vivid imagination created some of the most fantastic of worlds, and chilling of prophecies for our own world and since his passing, science fiction and literature may never be the same. In this program, we explore Bradbury's unique take on children, both cynical and endearing with three short film adaptations. In All Summer in a Day (1982), the children of Venus await to see their very first day of sunshine yet proceed to bully the only one of their classmates who has seen it before. The Veldt (1989) gives us the proverbial nuclear family in a fully-automated home with a virtual reality nursery that leads the children of the house to use it for catastrophic ends.  On the softer side, Bradbury's electronic answer to death The Electric Grandmother (1981), based on the story I Sing the Body Electric, an oddly touching tale of a family filling in the gaps when a loved one dies.  Join us as we salute the man, the myth and the machines and characters his mind created.

Date: Thursday, October 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

MESS with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories - Fri. Oct 12th - 8PM

Oddball Films has the rare opportunity to present the fourth annual installment in the innovative interview-based series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) featuring Mark Pauline founder of the Survival Research Laboratories. Los Angeles media artist and curator Gerry Fialka will interview Pauline in person on the Oddball Cine Stage, with video excerpts from 40 years of SRL performances.  Survival Research Laboratories, founded in 1978, is the innovator of robot-based performance art and known for the most dangerous shows on earth.  So dangerous, in fact, that recently the group was banned from performing in San Francisco.  This rare and exciting interview will explore the unique blending of performance and technology and the mind behind the robotic mayhem.

Date: Friday October 12^th, film clips at 8PM, interview at 8:30 PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 in advance, $12.00 at the door. Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com 

or (415) 558-8117

American Trance Cinema - Spellbinding Ceremonies - Thurs. Oct. 11 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents American Trance Cinema: Spellbinding Ceremonies, an evening of rare and intriguing films plus unique shorts exploring the unique cultural rituals and ceremonies of several disparate American demographics.  Enjoy a rare chance to see these normally off-limits customs, including Peter Adair’s extraordinary ethnographic documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) which offers a fascinating look at a West Virginia Pentecostal congregation as they relish the religious fervor of speaking in tongues, anointing and trances.  Famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Buck Dancer (1965) reveals the Northern Mississippi tradition of buck dancing, in this rare filmic and musical artifact.  In Pomo Shaman (1964), we are privy to the intricacies of a Native American healing ceremony. Trance Cinema is part of a series of ongoing film programs exploring ritual, higher consciousness and altered states of awareness.

Date: Thursday, October 11th, 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

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Albanian Cinema But Were Afraid to Ask - Sat. Oct. 13 - 8PM

The Albanian Cinema Project and the San Francisco Media Archive present Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Albanian Cinema But Were Afraid to Ask, an evening of specially selected  and extraordinarily rare films from the Central State Film Archives.  Come and see a selection of communist era educational and instructional films that have never been seen in the US; highlights from Albanian filmmaker Fatmir Koci’s love letter to the Albanian film archives In The Land of the Eagles, and the US premiere of Albania’s film entry in this year’s Venice Biennale, the documentary short Concrete Mushrooms. Help us save Albania’s endangered film heritage!

Date: Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 in advance, $12.00 at the door.  Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117