Oddball Films and guest curator Landon Bates bring you Portholes
to the Past, an exploration of and tribute to the ancient imagination,
centered on (but not limited to) classical Greek mythology. Commencing our tour through antiquity, we’ll
soar over the splendid Mayan ruins of Sentinels of Silence (1971), the
award-winning documentary narrated by that deity of cinema Orson Welles. We’ll then head to Greece for Galathea:
Das Lebende Marmorbild (1935), wherein the myth of Pygmalion—a sculptor
who falls in love with his statue after a goddess brings it to life--is
rendered through the ever-elegant silhouette cutouts of pioneering German
animator Lotte Reiniger. Then, the
part-educational-documentary, part-mythological-reenactment, The
Greek Myths: Myth as Fiction, History, and Ritual (1972), a whirlwind
of a film that combines live action and animation, covering three favorite
myths (most prominently showcasing that fearsome battle in the heart of the
Minotaur’s maze), in addition to taking on questions of modern
interpretation. Rounding out our
program’s Greek center is an animated version of that classic quest for the
Golden Fleece, Jason and the Argonauts (1987).
And, finally, we’ll conclude the night on a more modern note, with a man
who internalized the ancients and laced his own stories with myths and
mysteries, as we delve into The Inner World of Jorge Luis Borges (1972).
Date: Friday, January 18th, 2013 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
“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have
never died. They are only sleeping at
the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call.”
Featuring:
Sentinels of Silence (Color,
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.)
Galathea:
Das Lebende Marmorbild (B&W, 1935)
While rightly celebrated for
her 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (widely credited as the first feature length
animation), Lotte Reiniger’s vast body of short films remains largely
overlooked. We at Oddball seek to
correct this oversight. In this playful
rendition of the Pygmalion myth, Reiniger gets meta: as Pygmalion’s inanimate
sculpture comes to life by the unseen hand of Aphrodite, so Reinger bestows her
paper cutouts with fluidly graceful movement, with life! And (if this metaphor
may be stretched little further), as Pygmalion falls in love with Galathea, so,
too, do we with this film.
The
Greek Myths Part 1: Myth as Fiction, History, and Ritual (Color, 1972)
Throughout his career John
Barnes directed a staggering number of films for Encyclopedia Britannica Films
Inc., believing the genre of educational films to be artistically legitimate as
well as culturally important. “I have an
idea—a faith, I suppose it really is—that some of my films—or a single film, or
even a single sequence in a film—will light up a young mind somewhere: light it
up so that nothing—unsympathetic teachers, lack of a decent place to live, or
lack of love—can ever plunge it into darkness.”
This film, exploring
interpretive ideas about mythology, (myth as a sort of primitive version of fiction,
a disguised history, and as a manifestation of prehistoric ritual), is sure to set
your own mind alight. Includes dramatizations of Theseus and the Minotaur,
Orpheus and Eurydice, and Persephone.
Jason and the Argonauts
(Color, 1987)
Long
before The Avengers there was a serious band
of heroes: The Argonauts. In order to
capture the prized Golden Fleece, Jason and the gang must face a series of
challenges: clashing rocks, deadly birds, seductive sirens, fierce bulls, and
the guarding serpent. An older Jason narrates some major events of his youthful
adventure to two young Greek boys in this animated mythological epic.
The
Inner World of Jorge Luis Borges (Color, 1972)
In
a program preoccupied with myths, no one is more appropriate than Jorge Luis
Borges, whose stories are lean and atmospheric, even hallucinatory; they’re
hard to pin down, but stir a little something up in the mind. While T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, for instance, collaged fragments of myths, one might
say that Borges digested myths, alchemized them, to create others. His stories are made up of the fabric of
myths. He also wrote about them--his stories are thematically
preoccupied with them--, about the way they seep into the culture and can
become almost physically present. This half-hour long documentary
features several conversations with Borges in his native Buenos Aires,
addressing a range of topics from his love of libraries, living blind, and his
literary concerns of mythology, time, and space.
Curator’s Biography:
Landon
Bates is a UC Berkeley graduate of English Literature, plays drums for the duo
Disappearing People, and is a cinephile whose devotion to movies knows no
bounds.