Date: Thursday, October 30th, 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
Highlights Include:
Holy Ghost People
(1967, B+W)
Rightly hailed by Margaret Mead as one of the best
ethnographic documentary films ever made, and a staple of every documentary
film studies course “Holy Ghost People” by the late San Francisco filmmaker
Peter Adair(“Stopping History”, “Word is Out”) examines the Scrabble Creek,
West Virginia Pentecostal congregation whose fundamentalist philosophy
encourages a literal interpretation of the Bible. The film reveals the
religious fervor, the faith healing, the trances, the glossolalia (speaking in
tongues), the anointing, the ingestion of poison(Strychnine) and the use of
rattlesnakes in the church’s religious services. Shot inside the cramped interior of a poor,
rural church Adair allows the raw power and the purity of the congregation’s
faith speak for itself and documents it unflinchingly. Says one member: “I could feel the quickening power of the
holy ghost . . . I would dance under the power, and the quickening power would
get on me.” Inside the church people surrender to the spirit, shrieking,
flailing, crumpling to the floor, talking in tongues, drinking poison, and
handling snakes as the ultimate test of their faith.
Holy Ghost People” is visceral and jarring, dizzying and
frenetic and captures the deep faith, ecstatic states and lethal consequences
of their belief.
Ma’Bugi: Trance of the Toraja (1973,
Color)
On the other side of the world "Ma’Bugi: Trance of
the Toraja", depicts an unusual trance ritual that functions to restore
the balance of well-being to an afflicted village community. This film clearly
portrays the song, dance and pulsating tension that precede dramatic instances
of spirit possession in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi (Celebes) Island,
Indonesia. "Ma’Bugi: Trance of the Toraja", augments the growing body
of documentation of ritually sanctioned altered states of consciousness. This
remarkable film communicates both the psychological abandon of the trance state
and the often neglected motivation underlying such activities as the
supernaturally curing of the chronically ill and the ascent of a ladder of
knives. The ceremony is narrated by the Tominaa, priest of the ancestral Toraja
religion.
The Plains Indians: Sundance
Ceremony (Color, 1947)
This beautifully shot Kodachrome film showcases the
Plains Indians and highlights their preparations and tribal rituals of the
Sundance Ceremony. This vibrant, film
shows us the importance of this ancient Native American ceremony of life and
rebirth.
Buck Dancer (1965,
B+W)
This film is a rare portrait of an African American buck
dancer and fife player who briefly performs on the steps of his home in rural
Mississippi. The film was made by the great American ethnomusicologist Alan
Lomax.
Curator's Biography:
Stephen Parr’s previous programs have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical/Hysterical?) and oddities from his archives (Strange Sinema). He is the director of Oddball Film+Video and the San Francisco Media Archive (www.sfm.org), a non profit archive that preserves culturally significant films. He is a co-founder of Other Cinema DVD and a member of the Association of Moving Archivists (AMIA) where he is a frequent presenter.
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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, educationals, 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.