Date: Friday, October 24th, 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
Featuring:
Spacy
(Color, 1980-81, Takashi Ito)
Hypnotic avant-garde rarity by Japan’s celebrated
avant-garde filmmaker Takashi Ito. This
experimental stop-motion film takes place in a gymnasium: we approach a picture
on a frame, which turns out to be a picture of the gymnasium. We enter the picture and approach another
frame, which turns out to be a picture of… and so on. A mesmerizing electronic soundtrack completes
this trance-inducing meditation on time and space.
The Story of Time
(Color, 1949)
Sponsored by the Rolex watch company this truly unique
Technicolor short pulls out all the stops in its history of time telling from
prehistory through the modern age. With music from the London Philharmonic
Symphony in the background The Story of Time utilizes surreal stop motion
claymation, optical printing and over-the-top narration to give us a dazzling
perspective on time through the ages.
Passion (Color,
1961)
A boy grows up with a need for speed. Like a
dare-devil, he speeds his bicycle past the girls, eventually graduating to hot
rods and motorcycles; all the while getting into more and more dangerous
situations. Hip and stylish, this beautiful puppet animation is both a
charmer and a stunner!
Rendezvous
(Color, 1976, Claude Lelouch)
Brilliant, high-speed drive across Paris via sports
car. Director Claude Lelouch (A Man and
a Woman) mounted a camera to the bumper of his Mercedes 450SEL and zooms
through the early morning streets of Paris at speeds up to 140mph, narrowly
missing several stunned pedestrians (he was arrested immediately after the
first screening). One take, real time- you won’t believe your eyes. Oddball has
several copies of this gem; tonight we will be showing a simultaneous double
projection- stereo mayhem!
USA Film
(Color, 1977, Eric Martin)
Directed by Eric Martin at the Carpenter Center for
Visual Arts at Harvard University the film collapses 4,000 coast-to-coast miles
(From Washington DC to San Francisco) into a high speed 17 minute single-framed
opus incorporating found sound and radio broadcasts, creating a jittery,
pulsating whirlwind of images.
Allegro Ma Troppo
(Color, 1963, Paul Roubaix)
A Parisian evening, conveyed through automatic cameras
and imaginative cinematography of the life of Paris between 6PM and 6AM shot at
two frames per second utilizing automatic cameras. From strippers to car
crashes, Paul Roubaix’s Allegro Ma Troppo evokes the intensity and variety of
nocturnal life in the City of Light through speeded-up action, freeze-frame,
and virtuoso editing.
Cosmic Zoom
(Color, 1968, Eva Szasz)
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.
Fantasy (Color,
1975, Vince Collins)
A hallucinatory handmade animated film from San Francisco
animation legend Vince Collins evokes his particular brand of surrealist
psychedelia. Mind-blowing!
The Wizard of Speed and Time
(Color, 1979, Mike Jitlov)
A young man in a green wizard costume runs throughout
America at super speed, much like the superhero The Flash. Along the way, he
gives a pretty girl a swift lift to another city, gives golden stars to other
women who want a trip themselves and then slips on a banana-peel, and comically
crashes into a film stage, which he then brings to life in magical ways. A
tour-de-force of fast-paced fun!
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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.