Oddball Films and guest curator John
Schmidt present Relics and Remnants: The
Cinema of What’s Left, an evening exploration of ruin, decay, and loss.
The program begins with Bay Area filmmaker and journalist Jon Else’s You Don’t Die Here (1972), an impressionistic
documentary portrait of a small, eccentric community eking out an
existence in the unforgiving light of California’s Death Valley. Across the
world, Eugene Boyko records a real-life Wages
of Fear in his 1968 short Juggernaut (1969),
which follows a group of engineers as they attempt to transport a 70-ton
nuclear reactor core across the Indian continent. Glimpses of the traditional
life its pilgrimage quite literally displaces, serve as evocative counterpoint:
roads were fortified and buildings destroyed to let the titular juggernaut (ever-so-slowly)
pass. If in these two films the present impinges itself on—and comes into
direct contact with—remnants of the past, in the Academy Award winning Mexican
documentary Sentinels of Silence (1971) what
remains is mere palimpsest; ghostly traces of cultures long erased. Beautiful
aerial photography of Mesoamerican ruins and voiceover musing by Orson Welles
leave the viewer to wonder at the accomplishments and precipitous fall of
pre-Columbian Mayan civilization. We allow a brief animation interlude for
Croatian master Nedeljko Dragic’s free jazz destruction symphony Tup Tup (1973) before concluding the night with
a print of (the recently deceased) Alain Resnais’ masterful Night and Fog (1955), never before seen at Oddball. Horrifying and
necessary, the film combines archival material with meditative footage shot at
Auschwitz and Majdanek ten years after the end of World War II. In the process,
Resnais reveals the yawning gap between what’s left and what was, challenging
the commonplace assumption that we can ever really understand the magnitude of
history and its many traumas.
Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2015 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:
You Don’t Die Here (1972, 19 mins, color)
Jon Else’s open-ended documentary showing Death Valley, Calif., as a cruel and sublime backdrop against which a small group of aging residents reminisce about a past that seems like a distant, half-remembered dream.
Jon Else’s open-ended documentary showing Death Valley, Calif., as a cruel and sublime backdrop against which a small group of aging residents reminisce about a past that seems like a distant, half-remembered dream.
Juggernaut: A Film of India (Color, 28 mins, 1969)
Set at the crossroads of tradition
and modernity, India is sui generis. Eugene
Boyko’s imagistic portrait of the subcontinent, revealed through the eyes of
her people as they watch the journey of a convoy carrying the 70-ton heart of a
Canadian nuclear reactor into its heartland, documents without pedantry or pity
the contradictions of development. On their way to Rajasthan, engineers carry
the titular juggernaut along roads specially strengthened and city walls torn
down to make way, the past accommodating the uneven development of the future.
Sentinels of Silence (Color, 18 mins, 1971)
Over 30 years before the enormously popular BBC Planet
Earth series, there was Sentinels of Silence, a worthy
forbearer of the documentary epic, whose aerial helicopter shots soar over mist
covered masses of tropical forest and float around the ancient Mayan ruins,
astounding in their architectural complexity and grandiosity. This film
does full justice to its subjects, appropriately brazen in its technical
approach, and supported by the authoritative narration of Orson Welles, whose
Charles Foster Kane, in an earlier time, might’ve presided over one of these
ancient palaces. And, as an enigma is at the heart of Welles’s Kane
narrative, so a central mystery looms over the ruins of this film: why did
these highly advanced societies disappear? All we have as answers
are the relics, “all trying to communicate their secrets through a dozen centuries.”
(Sentinels of Silence is also the only short film
ever to have won 2 Academy Awards.)
Tup Tup (Color,
10 mins, 1973)
A short city symphony and
free-jazz meditation on man’s seemingly limitless capability for destruction,
Nedeljko Dragic’s Tup Tup takes as
its inspiration Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” before spinning
out in wild, surrealist arcs of improvisation. Produced by master animator
Nedeljko Dragic for the highly-acclaimed Croat animation house Zagreb Film, Tup Tup tells the story of a disgruntled
man who takes on the world to silence a pesky noise that keeps him from reading
the paper.
Night and Fog (Color/B&W, 32 mins, 1955)
Alain Resnais’
authoritative Holocaust documentary, produced just ten years after the end of
the Second World War, speaks to the myths of historical progress and the
unimaginable depths of historical trauma. Combining carefully composed color
photography of concentration camp ruins and an array of black and white footage
from the archives, and set to an alienating and totally unexpected score by
Hanns Eisler, Resnais’ film stands as both horrifying testimony to the nightmares
of the past and direct challenge to the viewer to understand their magnitude:
all we have are lingering ghosts, dreams of dreams. Curator's Biography:
After studying film at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, John Schmidt came to Oakland, where he currently works as a bookseller. He was a student participant in the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, has spent time on a number of film sets as producer, DP, and PA, and has worked as an intern at Canyon Cinema since September 2013.
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, 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.