Oddball Films and guest
curator Landon Bates bring you Inside the Cosmic Mind - Sci-Fi in July, seven 16mm films that squint
past our planet and consider the cosmos.
But peering so deeply into the celestial ether will inevitably make us
turn the telescope on ourselves--a theme inspired and illustrated by our first
film, Cosmic Zoom (1968), the classic NFB short in which the
camera zooms ever outward, pausing on the edge of the universe--where our vast
galaxy is but a speck among others—before diving back to Earth and into the “inner
space” of a boy paddling a boat on a river, ending up inside a proton of a carbon
atom within a DNA molecule. And so our
screening proceeds from here in two parts: outer space films, with astronauts
and aliens; and inner space ones, cerebral journeys through space and the mind. We blast off with that honorary astronaut
Orson Welles as our galactic guide, in Who’s Out There (1975), a
documentary that ponders the greater population of the universe and the
likelihood (or mathematical probability) of extraterrestrial company. The question of that film’s title is then
answered by the visitors of It Came from Outer Space (1953), a
staple of the sci-fi thriller genre, directed by Jack Arnold (we’ll see an
excerpt). Then, in Spaceborne (1977), a film
consisting of footage shot during actual NASA missions, we’ll luxuriate in the elegant,
near-balletic images of astronauts floating in zero gravity and our Earth
receding in the black distance—sights made all the more moving by the
soundtrack’s ethereal synth music. The
quality and grandeur of this film’s images justifiably bring to mind 2001.
We move forward and inward, into the dystopic future of Chris Marker’s
landmark La Jetee (1963), a film made up of pristine still photographs,
and set largely in the mind of its central character, who traverses time and
memory. This is one of the great
philosophical sci-fi films, and its tragic lyricism gives way to the optical
apocalypse of our next film, Omega (1970), a shattering and
transcendent vision of The End, in which three silhouetted figures sit serenely
on a hill and accept their cosmic destiny.
Date: Friday, July 26th,
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
Featuring:
Who’s Out There (Color, 1975)
This NASA-sponsored documentary, hosted and narrated by Orson
Welles, explores progressive scientific views about the possibility (or
mathematical probability) of extra terrestrial life in the universe. A panel of eminent astronomers, including
Carl Sagan, discusses the hypothetical circumstances of contact with such extra
terrestrial others. At the beginning of
the film, Welles talks briefly about his notorious CBS War of the Worlds broadcast, which many listeners of the program
mistook for an actual news report. Several
of these listeners speak about the experience.
The film starts with an aerial image of a boy rowing a boat on the Ottawa River. The movement then freezes and view slowly zooms out, revealing more of the landscape all the time. The continuous zoom-out takes the viewer on a journey from Earth, past the Moon, the planets of the Solar System, the Milky Way and out into the far reaches of the known universe. The process is then reversed, and the view zooms back through space to Earth, returning to the boy on the boat. It then zooms in to the back of the boy's hand, where a mosquito is resting. It zooms into the insect's proboscis and on into the microscopic world, concluding at nucleolus level. It then zooms back out to the original view of the boy on the boat.
La Jetee (B+W, 1963)
After a global holocaust, humanity's hopes for
survival hinge on time-travel experiments conducted upon a man whose dreams
reveal a clarion recall of a defining moment in his childhood when he witnessed
a murder and a woman’s face. The narrative, revealed through a montage of still
images creates a tight loop of incident in which the protagonist simultaneously
realizes his past, present, and future. More a human story than sci-fi, densely
layered and deeply effecting, “La Jetee” is evolutionary and enigmatic cinema
at it’s most sublime.
In this eye-popping vision of a film an alien ship
lands on earth. Its occupant holds people hostage while the ship is being
repaired. Townspeople debate amongst each other on what will become of the
space ship while angry mob is after the ship. Someone finds a way to hold them
off until the ship can leave. Is this mysterious group a force for good or
evil?
Omega (Color, 1970)
An optical poem by West Coast experimental
filmmaker Donald Fox, this is a dazzling, highly original non-narrative,
exhilaratingly beautiful film. OMEGA deals with the end of mankind on earth,
prophesying man's liberation from his earthly bounds to roam the universe at
will. By sending an energy ray to the sun and harnessing its solar power, man
is able to make an evolutionary leap. The film can be used to explore the outer
limits of the concepts of death, evolution the afterlife, and the future of
mankind. Phew! A source film that over 40 years later still inspires.
