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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.