Date: Friday, May 23rd, 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
Featuring:
Frank Film (Color, 1973, Frank and Caroline Mouris)
An autobiography of Frank Mouris and a stop-motion
free-associative collage of 11,592 media images collected from magazines, which
shift and mutate across the screen as Mouris reads a list of words starting
with the letter "f". The words bounce off the images and trigger
memories, which Mouris recounts on a second track, interwoven with the
recitation. Mouris received an Academy Award and the film was selected in 1996
for inclusion in the National Film Registry. Frank Film, because of its
innovative and energetic use of collage, has exerted an influence on succeeding
generations of animators.
A Dream of Wild Horses (Color, 1962, Denys Colomb Daunant)
aka Le Songe des Chevaux Sauvages
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.
Rendezvous (Color, 1976, Claude LeLouch)
In 1976, at the end of a film shoot, Director Claude
LeLouch (A Man and a Woman) found himself in possession of four things: a camera with ten minutes of film left, a
gyroscopically stabilized camera mount, a sports car, and an idea: to film a
mad dash (at speeds up to 140 mph) through the early morning streets of
Paris. Denied the necessary permits, he
shot the film guerrilla-style, in one take, with no special effects and no street
closures. No one was hurt, his subsequent
arrest was brief, and the film has become a legend. One take, no film tricks-
you won’t believe your eyes.
Time Piece (Color, 1965, Jim Hens@n)This Oscar-nominated live-action short from M*ppets creator Jim H*nson is a rare treat, perhaps just for adults. Starring the young H*nson himself, a hospitalized man is sent through the ringer in this absurd commentary on modernity lost to the harried city around him, money, sex, food, industry, and most of all, time. Drawing on his prowess as puppeteer, H*nson crafts this surreal, racy, quick-cutting gem. The percussion is by swing and bop drummer Ed Shaughnessy (who also appears) and was recorded by the legendary Blue Note Records engineer Rudy Van Gelder.
Blind as a Bat (Color, 1956)
The crackpot Christians at the Moody
Science bat truck go on location to study the secrets of bat navigation. Their in-house “mammal abuse
experiments” show us the science of bat radar. Somewhere between the
explanations of echo location and the scenes where the bats themselves fly into
walls, you’ll fall in love.
Cosmic Zoom (Color,
1968, Eva Szasz)
Eva Szasz’s fantastic,
“continuous” voyage from a rowboat on the Ottawa river, upward and outward to a
grand view of galactic flotsam, then back inwards through a rivulet of blood in
the tip of a mosquito’s proboscis, to examine an atomic nucleus. Remade a decade later by Charles and Ray
Eames (Powers of Ten) with narration (and its jumping-off point moved to
Chicago), then again as an Imax movie (Cosmic Voyage) with Morgan Freeman,
Cosmic Zoom is where it all began.
Buck Dancer (B+W, 1965, Alan Lomax)
World Renowned
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s very rare 1965 film Buck Dancer, is a eloquent,
stirring and mesmerizing musical and movement artifact from Northern
Mississippi featuring fife player/buck dancer Ed Young and the Sea Island
Singers.
Pickles (Color, 1973, Bruno Bozzetto)
The legendary Italian
animator Bruno Bozzetto, in twelve animated vignettes, creates brilliant
visual, satirical and comical treatments of some of man's great preoccupations:
war, omnipotence, religion, democracy, advertising, drugs, television, hunger,
"conquest" of nature. Newly discovered prints!
Clay or Origin of The Species (B+W, 1965, Eliot Noyes Jr.)
Academy Award-nominated
claymation short by Eli Noyes- an eye-popping visual representation of
Darwinism through clay. Noyes worked for
Sesame Street in the 1970s, where he produced the beloved Mad Painter series
(he also designed the MTV logo).
Pas de deux (B+W, 1968, Norman McLaren)
Set against a black ground,
two graceful dancers become pure embodiments of light. Using optical superimposition, National Film
Board of Canada founder and renowned animator Norman McLaren multiplies the
figures, transforming live action into his own brand of kinetics. Beautifully choreographed and shot,
hauntingly scored (featuring the United Folk Orchestra of Romania), hypnotic
and unforgettable.
Tanka (Color, 1976, David LeBrun)
Produced and directed by
David LeBrun; original score by Ashish Khan (sarod), Buddy Arnold (saxophone,
clarinet, flute), Pranesh Khan (tablas) and Francisco Lupica (percussion).
Tanka means, literally, "a thing rolled up". Tanka, photographed from
Tibetan scroll paintings of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is a
cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, an animated journey through the
image world of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
"With his dazzling TANKA David Lebrun has filmed a series of
Tibetan paintings of mythological subjects and then programmed his footage into
an optical printer to create the illusion of animation. The dazzling, vibrantly
colored result is a series of dancing gods, wild revels, raging fires and sea
battles between monsters." -- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
No. 00173 (1966, Color, Jan Habarta)
A stark and brilliant
metaphorical art film by Polish director Jan Habarta that likely influenced the
style and themes of the German group Kraftwerk.
Plus! Time-shifted
fragments from Chris Marker’s La Jetee
(1962)
One of the most influential, radical time-travel films ever made.
Earth lies ruined in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The few surviving humans
begin researching time travel, in hopes of sending someone back to the prewar
world in search of food, supplies, and some sort of solution to mankind's
imminent demise. The protagonist is a man whose retention of a single, vague
childhood memory (that of witnessing a murder on the jetty at Orly airport) is
the basis for his being chosen to travel back in time. His journey leads him
towards an enigmatic and paradoxical destiny.
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.