Oddball Films and guest
curator Emily Schleiner present The Scene of the Mutant Gene!, featuring films about DNA, heredity, mutants, and
genetic throwbacks! Be amazed by
the antics of mutant monsters, heredity, inheritance and see the results of
science experiments on DNA long before Jurassic Park made its debut and Dolly the sheep walked the Earth! This program features excerpts from Creature From The
Black Lagoon, a
water monster spine-tingler from 1954, directed by Jack Arnold and starring
Richard Carlson and Julia Adams. This film series awed 1950s audiences with
nothing less than a fish-humanoid
monster with a penchant for lady scientists! Future Shock, a 1972 documentary narrated by
Orson Welles, about speedy future technologies and our human inability to keep
up with the times; segments from the creature feature sequel Revenge
of the Creature
(1955) - the monster transplanted to a water park in Florida, only to
fall for the beautiful scientist overseeing it (him?) again! In the dated and British-English
accented A Clone of Frogs (1979) documentary, scientists create albino frogs. See the
amazingly small tools and substances these scientists use when creating
clones! The Double
Helix (1960s) will
teach you about the complex machinery used to study DNA and view a photograph
of the moment when DNA splits! Find out whether dinosaurs still walk the Earth
when a group of stalwart scientist explorers follow a journal entry written by
their deceased colleague in the 1925 silent classic A Lost World, directed by Harry O. Hoyt with
stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien. In My Mother Was
Never a Kid (1980s)
a young girl travels back in time to meet her mother as a girl, discovering
just how similar they really are!
In the final creature sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), the renegade monster is
captured and changed into an air-breathing monster by a wealthy scientist,
making the monster truly unstoppable!
Plus! Excerpts from a 1935
version of Dante’s Inferno in which a wayward father attempts to derail his son from a
path of greed and treachery.
Scenes of smoke machines and writhing semi-clothed people abound!
Date:
Friday, July 6th, 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.
Featuring:
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, B&W)
In this 1954 monster horror film directed by Jack Arnold,
and starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, and
Whit Bissell, a fish-humanoid monster goes after the scientists who study it. The creature lurks in his lagoon,
excited by human visitors!
Future Shock (1972, color)
Synthesizer keyboard sounds set the futuristic stage in
the1972 Future Shock short documentary film directed by Alex Grasshoff,
narrated by Orson Welles, and based on the best-selling book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. In this film, learn about how
technology is moving too quickly for humans to keep up with it, leading us to
experience future shock. Some of
the “shocking” material in this show is hilariously banal to us today, and some
of it has not (yet?) come to pass!
Revenge of the Creature (1955, B&W)
Revenge of the Creature is
the first sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Having survived being
riddled with bullets at the end of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the
monster is captured and sent to the Ocean Harbor Oceanarium in Florida, where
it is studied by an animal-psychologist and ichthyology student. Ultimately, the fish-humanoid monster
escapes from his tank, killing the psychologist in the process, and flees to
the open ocean. But! The monster is obsessed with Helen the ichthyology
student, whom he abducts. Will she
manage to escape?!
A Clone of Frogs (1979, color)
In this documentary Dr. John Gurdon of Oxford illustrates
each step in a complex frog cloning process. Nuclear transplantation is the
method used to clone! Time lapse
photography shows an injected cell dividing and developing into an albino
tadpole. Tanks of frogs abound in
this lovely short film!
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956, B&W)
This film, directed by John Sherwood and starring Jeff
Morrow, Rex Reason and Leigh Snowden, is the third and final installment of the
Creature from the Black Lagoon horror film series from Universal Pictures,
following 1955's Revenge of the Creature. Here, the creature is captured in the
Everglades, and, with his scales burned off, given human clothing. The monster longs for the ocean and
when it is unjustly blamed for a murder, it goes on a rampage!
Double Helix (1960s, color)
In this colorful 1960s documentary learn about complex
machinery used to study DNA, and see footage of the 3 discoverers of DNA:
Watson, Wilkins and Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. See representations of the basic
building blocks of DNA. And also,
take a look at a photograph of the moment when DNA splits and life reproduces!
The Lost World (1925, B&W)
The Lost World is a 1925
silent film based on Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel, directed by Harry O. Hoyt
with pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien. The story begins in 1912 in a men's
club, when a young woman brings her father’s journal and map to a group of
scientists, who immediately begin their journey. They go down a jungle river
with jaguars and monkeys.
Eventually the explorers see a dinosaur - a pterodactyl, which flies high
above and has a nest! They also see a brontosaurus, which is then attacked by
an allosaurus!!
Future (1980, color)
Similarly named and themed as the documentary Future
Shock, this film is a montage of imagery on the topic of speedy
technology. Scenes of DNA
modification of food, human life extension and many other dramatic images
abound. This film is part
commercial, part documentary, and chock full of technology starting with
planets and iridescent matter!
My Mother Was Never a Kid (1981, color)
In this after school special
from 1981, an irate teenage girl plays pranks on her teachers and smokes in the
bathroom. She gets lectured by her
mother and runs out of the house only to jump into the subway and hit her
head. When she wakes up, she has
traveled back in time only to encounter her own mother as a girl! Boys, cigarrets, stealing! These ladies have a lot in common!
Dante's Inferno (1935, silent)
A vision of hell is presented to a son by a father on his
deathbed to turn him from his ruinous path. A robed figure, maybe Virgil,
points to a river with a lone boat on it. Rows of hooded figures march up a
mountain path. Smoke and fire spirit through the rocky cliffs. Women and men
flail and make tortured movements. Fire rages, everything looks painful. Men
push large stones uphill. Large clusters of naked people splattered across the
rocks. A large dead tree with people growing out like branches. People chained
across chasms of fire, diving in. Flames rain down like waves. The son at his
father’s bedside seems troubled, alarmed.
A father attempts to thwart heredity and his son’s similar choice-making
by giving the son a glimpse of hell populated by writhing bodies, disco
lighting, and very flame-y flames.
Curator bio:
Emily Schleiner is a
Brooklyn and Davis CA-based new media artist and thinker. She has been writing since 2009 and has
shown internationally. She has
been published in the Trondheim's TEKS's 'Making Reality Real' Journal and has
presented at the 2nd Inter-Disciplinary.net Global Conference in Budapest. She
received her Masters from Performance and Interactive Media Arts department at
Brooklyn College, NY in 2010.