Date: Friday, Nov.
18th, 2011 at 8:00PM
Admission: $10.00 Limited
Seating RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or programming@oddballfilm.com
Featuring:
Holy Ghost People
(Reel 2) (1967, 22 mins, B&W)
This film is a documentary of a Caucasian Pentecostal
congregation whose fundamentalist philosophy encourages a literal
interpretation of the Bible. Reveals the religious fervor, the trances, the
phenomenon of glossolalia (speaking in new tongues), and the use of
rattlesnakes. Filmed by Peter Adair. This film was rightly hailed by Margaret
Mead as one of the best ethnographic films ever made, and a staple of classes
on anthropology and documentary film, this study of a little-known sect who put
their lives on the line for their religion still packs a wallop four decades
after its release.
You Don’t Die Here (1972, 19 mins, color)
Jon Else’s open-ended documentary showing Death Valley, Calif., as a cruel and sublime landscape in which with strange and eccentric desert-dwelling residents poetically reminiscing about the past.
Jon Else’s open-ended documentary showing Death Valley, Calif., as a cruel and sublime landscape in which with strange and eccentric desert-dwelling residents poetically reminiscing about the past.
Make a Wish (1972, 8 mins, color)
A man with an acoustic guitar
sings a song about making a wish as a very quick, cool montage of images begins
which includes animals in slo-motion, rodeo clowns, glass blowing, astronauts
in space, fireworks, and cool psychedelic animations. This film was
made as one of a series of short films to broaden children's awareness of the
world around them, but feels like you've stepped into the mind of a madman.
A Dream of Wild Horses aka
"Le Songe des Chevaux Sauvages (1962,
10 mins, color) This landmark short film is a cinematic poem which uses slow
motion and soft focus camera to evoke the wild horses of the Camargue District
of France, showing them as they roam on the beach through fire and water,
biting and kicking one another. The raw yet elegant physicality of the horses
in motion is breathtaking and euphoric.
Toothache of a Clown (1972, 10 mins, color)
Clowns are creepy the same way
mimes are annoying. This film attempts to calm children's fear of the dentist
by having a sad ass clown get his cavity filled. Watch our clown whine,
accompanied by half-baked actors and cheap sets in this nitrous oxide-inspired
nightmare!
Beat Me, Daddy (1943, 4 mins, B&W)
Features pianist Maurice Rocco performing the wild and raucous boogie woogie classic “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar”, later performed by Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.
Hailstones and Halibut Bones (1963, 8 mins, color)
Celeste Holme reads the poem “Hailstorms and Halibut
Bones” by Mary O’Neill that is about colors and the way colors can be
described. Uses animation with
lots of flowers, smiley faces, and crazy transforming blobs to help us learn
the colors white, red, green, black.
L.A. Too Much (1968, 10 mins, color)
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.
Free Fall (1964, 10 mins, B&W)
By the brilliant but troubled
avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (who committed suicide in 1986), Free
Fall is, in the words of Lipsett himself, an “attempt to express in filmic
terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of
creativity – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological ones –
a visual bubbling of picture and sound operating to create a new continuity of
experience – a reality in seeing and hearing which would continually overwhelm
the conscious state – penetration of outward appearances – suddenly the
continuity is broken – it is as if all clocks ceased to tick – summoned by a
big close-up or fragment of a diffuse nature – strange shapes shine forth from
the abyss of timelessness.”