Date: Thursday, November 6th, 2014 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:
Midget car racing action with a minor plotline involving the “phantom racer”, a lone-ranger masked driver who makes headlines all up and down the California coast for his daring-do. Mostly just an excuse for some hair-raising action in extremely fast and dangerous open cockpit racing cars.
Automania 2000 (Color, 1963)
A satyric tour-de-force, this prophetic and humorous film concerns the state of the world at the millennium. Uncannily accurate in its prediction, the film shows the result of technology gone mad. In the race to produce bigger and better cars we see how humanity adapts to life in a grid-locked world. One of the Halas & Batchelor Studio’s finest films, Automania 2000 was a prize winner all round the world, including an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award.
Behold all the stunning colors of the newest line of shiny new Chevys in this kitschy promotional film made by industrial film giants Jam Handy.
The Car of Your Dreams (Color and B+W, 1984)
Genius educational film about the car industry and their sales techniques utilizing solely mind-blowing historical footage that borders on the surreal. It’s no wonder Americans bought into the car mythology lock, stock and barrel.
What On Earth! (1970’s)
If aliens looked at planet Earth from outer space, what would he or she see? In this film, automobiles are perceives as life forms – with particular habits and behaviors! See beautifully animated lines of cars, dancing figures and stoplights, and other objects dancing. This psychedelic simplified world of shapes and signs, emphasizes consumerism and the ways in which earthlings are being conditioned! Produced by the National Film Board of Canada and directed by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal.
Safety Belt For Susie (Color, 1962)
A child’s innocent plaything turns into a creepy, almost supernatural entity. Little Nancy Norwood who takes her life-sized doll, Susie, everywhere with her. But when Mr. Norwood ploughs the family car into a tree, poor Susie gets smashed to pieces because she wasn’t wearing a safety belt. There’s lots of crash test footage, with baby dolls flying wildly through windshields and into dashboards, after which the camera lovingly dwells on the severed plastic arms and legs lying on the asphalt. An eerie and effective Driver’s Ed film, shown to unsuspecting kids in the early sixties (when seatbelts were optional equipment in cars).
San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show (Color, 1965)
See the sweat and muscle poured into tricked out low riders from the 60's. Parked within a schoolyard are more than just beautiful hot rods, they're well-oiled works of art! Shot on gorgeous Kodachrome!
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, 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.