A Decade of Experimentation: 1960s Avant-Garde Cinema - Thur. Apr. 3rd - 8PM

Oddball Films presents A Decade of Experimentation: 1960s Avant-Garde Cinema, an evening of breathtaking, mind-blowing experimental films featuring works by Norman McLaren, Saul Bass, Chick Strand, Arthur Lipsett, Pat O'Neill, Bruce Conner and more.  The 1960s were a decade of political turmoil and rebellion as well as sexual and pharmaceutical experimentation.  This shift in consciousness affected a whole generation of media innovators who used the climate of change to permanently alter the landscape of cinema.  Canadian innovator Norman McLaren's Pas De Deux (1968), superimposes the minute movements of two glowing ballet dancers to create one of the most beautiful and ethereal films of the collection. Why Man Creates (1968), directed by Saul Bass, explores the human impulse towards creativity while vacillating between live action and animation.  Collage film master Bruce Conner reimagines the Kennedy Assassination by remixing news footage in Report (1967). Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) is a culturally disruptive montage of still images and his first film nominated for an Academy Award.  Underground Film (1970) is a television arts program segment on the Bay Area's own Chick Strand, going in depth into her process and displaying excerpts of several of her most important films of the 1960s.  Local legend George Kuchar's Lady from Sands Point (1967) is a zippy, trippy portrait of artist Betty Holiday. The languid rhythms of fades, dissolves and superimpositions permeate 7362 (1967)  a masterful avant garde film by the auteur of the optical printer Pat O’Neill. Watch the surreal, beautiful and disturbing images of horses in the ocean in Denys Colomb de Daunant's innovative film, Dream of the Wild Horses (1962), suitably scored by Jacques Larsy. Plus! Homegrown hallucinogenic freakout SF Trips Festival: An Opening (1967) and more surprises for the early birds.

Date: Thursday, April 3rd, 2014 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 

Web:http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-decade-of-experimentation-1960s-avant.html

Erotic Oddities - Fri. Mar. 28 - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Erotic Oddities with the most bizarre and offbeat smut, burlesque and erotica of the collection.  From insane pornographic cartoons to marionette strippers, experimental sex to bizarre stag films, this is one night of the strangest smut you'll ever see. One of the earliest stag films, Getting his Goat (1923), a man is in for a surprise when he propositions sex through a hole in a gate.  Eveready Hardon heads to the beach in the outrageous cartoon Buried Treasure (1928).  Nudism: A Way of Life (c. 1950) sheds light on the rise of nudist culture in Mid-Century America.  Get ready for the disgusting pornographic animation featuring music by the Beach Boys and a vegetable gang bang (literally) with Sandy Sunrise in the Babysitter (1971).  One man strips his inhibitions and his clothes when he walks into a North Beach nudie show and becomes the star attraction in a slice of local home-made homoerotica, The Groping Hand (1968).  Experimental filmmaker Scott Bartlett creates a lyrical poem out of the flesh and fantasy of Lovemaking.  A drunk old farmer tries to tune in to naked ladies on his new TV set in the bizarre and notorious nudie cutie Uncle Si and the Sirens.  We all know sex sells; learn the tricks of its best sellers in a Special Edition segment on Frederick's of Hollywood (1970s).  Burlesque queen Betty Dolan is half-woman, half-devil and all erotic in the expertly costumed and innovative Satan-tease (1955).  Plus more bizarre burlesque, The Fabulous Cat Girl struts her stuff and the marionette striptease The Doll Dance with Rene and Arlene.  And perhaps the most insane piece of smut we've located within these fertile walls, the man on stuffed animal flick, Beaver Boy (1968) will be double projected with nature footage.  With more sexy surprises in store, you'll never think of smut the same way again!

Date: Friday, March 28th, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Pop! Goes the Classroom: School Films from the Golden Age of Groovy - Thur. Mar, 27 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present another edition of Pop! Goes the Classroom: School Films from the Golden Age of Groovy. A wide range of 1960’s sensibilities trickled down to educational films, from far out editing to groovy imagery, with weird, wild and beautiful results. Facts and dates gave way to concepts, color, song and action. Narration-free documentary shorts, such as Night People's Day (1971) gave youngsters a chance to ponder the hidden world of the night shift. One of the most outrageously adorable films ever, Baby Rabbit (1969) looks at bunnies and the children who love and care for them. Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack dream of the future in “When We Grow Up” from Free to Be You and Me, which brought classroom pop into livingrooms. Let's See: Lopsideland (1969) is set a San Francisco of psychedelia and childhood wonder. Learning and lyricism meet in A Slice of Bread (1970). Learning-to-read tone poem Sun (1970) will shed new light on old sol, tunefully. Multiculti gem, Pamela Wong's Birthday for Grandma (1977) let's us tag along as a youngster gets ready for her Nana's big day in Chicago's Chinatown. Ball Skills (1969) will open up a whole world of bouncing, rolling and throwing. Wheels, Wheels, Wheels (1970) is an exciting thrills and spills look at this very basic form.   And there’s MORE! As usual, home-baked POP-centric gingerbread will be among the complimentary treats from the curator’s kitchen!

Date: Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/pop-goes-classroom-school-films-from.html

Southeast Asian Film Society presents DOCLAB Selects: Documentary Shorts From Vietnam - Mon. Mar 24 - 8PM

Southeast Asian Film Society presents DOCLAB Selects: Documentary Shorts From Vietnam. The beauty of cinema is its availability to everyone. With the advent of digital technologies, even more people are now able to express themselves. This is especially important in countries where cinema is heavily dependent on state funding, which dictates the ideology and form of the films that are made. DOCLAB Hanoi was created by independent documentary filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi to provide young Vietnamese filmmakers and media artists basic film and video training. Because of this program, we are able to see these gems that, free of any state constraints, illuminate aspects of modern life in contemporary Vietnam while pushing the form of documentary cinema. Films include Tran Thanh Hien's Train Journal (2010), Doan Hoang Kien's The Garden (2010), Do Van Hoang's At Water's Edge (2011), Dang Duc Loc's Public Living (2010), Pham Ngoc Lan's The Story of Ones (2011), Nguyen Tien Dat's Remaining (2011), and Da Thao Phuong's Lady Piano (2011).

Date: Monday, March 24th, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: Tickets are $10. Available online and at the door.http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/612065

Web: https://www.facebook.com/events/423544117781137/

Knee Deep in the Blues - Fri. Mar 21 - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Knee Deep in the Blues, an evening of some of the most exquisite films about blues and jazz music the country has ever seen.  These beautiful rarities contain not only incredible music but stunning visuals and personal and in-depth portraits of brilliant but tortured artists. One of the most haunting and important films of the collection, view Bessie Smith's only film appearance in the moody musical melodrama St. Louis Blues (1929).  Brilliant documentarian Les Blank's A Well Spent Life (1971) taps into the rich history of 75 year-old blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb.  Blind Gary Davis (1964) poetically showcases the streets of Harlem and the moving music of another blues master.  Gjon Mili’s Jammin' the Blues (1944) not only is a rare cinematic appearance of musicians Lester Young, George “Red” Callender, and Harry Edison, but it’s also a masterful use of lighting and composition that puts most contemporary music videos to shame. See rare and exhilarating performances from Billie Holiday, BB King and Nina Simone in an excerpt of Black Music in America- From Then Till Now (1971).   As an added loosely-related bonus, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax documents Northern Mississippi fife player and Buck Dancer (1965) Ed Young.  Everything will be screened on 16mm film from our extensive archive.

Date: Friday, March 21st, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/knee-deep-in-blues-fri-mar-21-8pm.html

Silent Spring - Live Cinematic Soundscapes for the Vernal Equinox - Thurs. Mar. 20 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Tooth welcome the coming of spring with Silent Spring - Live Cinematic Soundscapes for the Vernal Equinox; a trio of silent cinema shorts with live musical accompaniment. As the weather heats up and the pheromones begin to swirl, we look to a collection of films that explore the fabric of human desire and its powers, both destructive and transcendent.  The night begins with a multi-projector expanded/live cinema piece, by Tooth and accompanying electronic musician Joey Casio. Dream Flowers (1930s) studies, in strikingly gorgeous black and white, the cultivation and production of the opium poppy. The performance will use the visual material of said film as a point of détournement and departure into visions of subjective mysticism and social ritual. French writer Jean Genet's only work as a director, the 1950 silent film, Un Chant D'Amour is a powerful and brooding study of the unrequited passions between two inmates and the guard of a French prison. The film eschews spoken dialogue in favor of a visual poetics of the prisoner's bodies often framed in intimate, almost claustrophobic close up which seems analogous to the tensions of their confinement. Heavily censored and widely banned for many years due to its explicitly homosexual and erotic content (including a series of notoriously embattled local screenings in 1964 by Saul Landau and the S.F. Mime Troupe in which the film was confiscated), it remains a striking work. Russian born French avante-garde filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff's earliest surviving work, the masterful Ménilmontant (1926), was profoundly ahead of its time. One of the first narrative silent films to unfold its story entirely without subtitles and employing a wide range of new techniques in rapid montage and multiple exposures to create a visionary and often hallucinatory atmosphere. It follows the story of two sisters, orphaned by a tragedy that opens the film, and their lives, loves, and struggles in the working class neighborhood of Ménilmontant in Paris. Un chant d'amour and Ménilmontant will be scored on cello and electronics by the duo of Angela Roberts and Scott Goff. All films screened on 16mm prints from the archive.

Date: Thursday, March 20th, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/silent-spring-live-cinematic.html

Learn Your Lesson...With Puppets - A Dangerously Squeaky Shockucation - Fri. Mar. 14 - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...with Puppets - A Dangerously Squeaky Shockucation, the thirteenth in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection.  This month, as we await the release of the newest Muppets film, we will learn all our valuable lessons from the mouths of delightfully creepy puppets.  From gender-identity to dental hygiene, fire safety, sex, drugs, anger management and more, this is one night of puppet propaganda too bizarre to see anywhere else.  Mel Brooks and Marlo Thomas discuss gender roles and bald girls as baby puppets in Boy Meets Girl from Free to be...You and Me (1974).  A human-sized rotten mouth puppet learns the ins and outs of dental hygiene when Big Mouth Goes to the Dentist (1979).  Double-headed alien teens take drugs and sex it up at the drive-in (or is it a fly-in?) in the bizarre Deciso 3003 (1982). Poor Egbert lacks proper adult-puppet supervision and manages to poison himself over and over and over in Watch Out for Poison (1970s).  The world's most belligerent puppet Herky is back to run after you with a baseball bat and maybe learn something about anger management in Feelings: Don't Stay Mad (1972).  Shari Lewis and Hush Puppy want you to wear reflective clothing so you don't get hit by a car in Hush Puppy's Bright Idea (1985).  And thanks to a fire puppet, now you can keep all your fingers, thumbs and eyes when you play with Fireworks (1970s)!  With more puppet surprises in store, it's an especially weird week to learn your lesson. 

Date: Friday, March 14th, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/learn-your-lessonwith-puppets.html

Strange Sinema 74: Strange, Strange Music - Thur. Mar 13 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from the collection. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 16mm film prints Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has complied his 74^th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 74: Strange, Strange Music focuses on avant-garde, electronic music, quirky jazz, ethnographic and other musical novelties and exotica from around the world. This program presents the rare documentary The Dreamer that Remains (1973) featuring American visionary composer, new-music instrument inventor and hobo Harry Partch; Discovering Electronic Music (1983), veteran director Bernard Wilets’ introduction to music synthesizers and computers used to create electronic music; The Pretty Lady and the Electronic Musicians (1972) a quirky fairy tale that takes us to the outer fringes of early music inventions like Leo Theremin’s revolutionary sound instrument, effects like reverb, overdrive and fuzztones and the theory of musique concréte; A Balinese Gong Orchestra (1971) showcases the ancient gamelan music of Indonesia; Tanka (1976), David LeBrun’s hypnotic film composed of Tibetan scroll paintings with a pulsating original score by Ashish Khan; Crash, Bang, Boom (1970), a lesson in percussive sounds for pre-teen hippies; Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953), Ward Kimball’s brilliant Technicolor, mid-century cartoon explores the development of Western musical instruments from caveman to present day; Ego (1970) Italy’s Bruno Bozzetto optical printing and pop art imagery bond with master Franco Godi’s wildly ultra-lounge soundtrack; Crystallization (1975), award-wining filmmaker Carroll Ballard’s (The Black Stallion) abstract film explores the formation of crystals in liquids all set to an innovative electronic sound score. Finally Oakland native and electric guitar pioneer Alvino Rey performs The Whistler and His Dog (1941) with his swing orchestra. This novelty big band show-stopper is replete with barks, woofs, whistles and growls from his sidemen!

Date: Thursday, March 13th, 2014 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/03/strange-sinema-74-strange-strange-music.html

What the F(ilm)?! 3: A Third Dose of Cine-insanity - Fri. Mar. 7th - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present What the F(ilm)?! 3: A Third Dose of Cine-insanity an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. From crime-fighting chimps to evangelical "scientists" to children acting like toasters, this is one night of rare and hilarious head-scratchers you won't want to miss. School kids are forced to act out household appliances in a sad attempt at physical education in Perc! Pop! Sprinkle! (1969).  That wise-cracking simian spy spoils a mad dentist's attempt at political espionage in the ridiculous Lancelot Link - Secret Chimp: To Tell the Tooth (1971).  Blustering comedian and consumer activist Marshall Efron clues you in on all the advertising ploys we fall victim to every morning in The Sugar Cereal Imitation Orange Breakfast (1973). Fats Waller provides a delightfully wacky musical break with the Soundie Your Feet's Too Big (1941). In Blind as a Bat (1956), the evangelical Moody Institute of Science batmobile manhandles bats in the name of "science".  The irreverent hilarity of Paul Glickman's animated version of Stan Freberg's The Calypso Singer (1966)will leave you in stitches.  In the crowd favorite, Bus Nut (1980), Bobbie is a little girl obsessed with bus safety and her zeal is infectious. Plus, The Job Interview Pro-Bowl (1979), a montage of garbage set to Tom Lehrer's tragicomedic song Pollution (1969) and even more surprise insanity!

Date: Friday, March 7th, 2014 at 8:00 pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-film-3-third-dose-of-cine-insanity.html

German Expressions - From Caligari to Klaus Nomi - Thur. Mar. 6th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents German Expressions, a program of gems of German cinema, as well as rarities from German performers, artists and visionaries from the 1920s-1970s.  Through an excerpt of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), witness the innovation and creativity that set Germany apart from the realism of early cinema and influenced nearly 100 years of film. It may be a little late for the Olympic tie in, but Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia Diving Sequence (1936) endures as one of the most breathtaking documents of the beauty of the human form throughout cinema history.  Silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger offers two of the most exquisite and intricate of her shorter films, The Magic Horse (1953) and Galathea: Das Lebende Marmorbild (1935).  Sultry ex-patriate Marlene Dietrich entertained our troops during the war and in a musical sequence from Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), she entertains the crowd by singing a cheeky song about the Black Market in a post-war world.  Between the wars, Germany birthed the Dada movement; its irreverent and anarchical style is captured perfectly in the eye-popping Germany-DADA: An Alphabet of German DADAism (1968).  New-Wave opera star Klaus Nomi delivers one of his signature arias in a dream sequence from the bizarre cult-classic M*ster M*ke's Mondo V*deo (1979). Plus dazzling excerpts from two groundbreaking artists Richter on Film (1972) and Mary Wigman: When the Fire Dances between Two Poles  (1993) as well as clips of contemporary West German artists in Deutschland Spiegel: The German Scene (1970).  Pretzels will be provided, but BYOB (Bring your own Bratwurst).

Date: Thursday, March 6th, 2014 at 8:00 pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/02/german-expressions-from-caligari-to.html