Strange Sinema 85: Dada and Post-Modern Surrealism (The Land of the Melting Watches) - Fri. Feb. 27 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 85,  a once monthly evening of newly discovered and avant-garde rarities from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 85th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 85: Dada and Post-Modern Surrealism (The Land of the Melting Watches) features an eye-popping exploration of Dada and Surrealism including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s stunning Anemic Cinema (1926), a visual cacophony of hypnotic puns;  L’Etoile des Mer aka The Sea Star (1928) Man Ray’s haunting, dreamlike ode to subconscious sexual desire;  Greta Deses’s  rarely screened Dada(1967), an astonishing profile of the dada movement featuring live performances, film excerpts, interviews and a live performance reenactment of the groundbreaking Cabaret Voltaire with Jean Arp playing the piano. The film features in-person appearances by Marcel Duchamp, a very rare and a eye-opening interview with the legendary Man Ray and much, much more. Other films include the legendary eyeball-slitting surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1928) by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel; Orson Welles first experiments with surrealism-The Hearts of Age (1934); and post-modern shorts including Carson Davidson’s award-winning beatnik dada rhapsody Help! My Snowman’s Burning Down (1964) with jazz score by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet; Bill Plympton’s screwy award-winning animated Your Face (1987); and the jaw-dropping psychedelia-inspired surrealist animation of Fantasy (1971) by San Francisco filmmaker Vince Collins. Plus! The Salvador Dali-inspired cartoon Dough For the Do-Do (1949), a tribute to surrealism starring Porky Pig.



Date: Friday, February 27th, 2015 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 

Sonic Cinema Soiree with David Michalak and Live Sound Scores by Reel Change - Thur. Feb. 26 - 8PM

Oddball Films welcomes veteran filmmaker and visionary musician David Michalak and his sound score based experimental music group Reel Change to our Cinema Soiree,  a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. During this program, Sonic Cinema, David will be discussing, composing, collaborating and creating soundscores for his films, showing film clips, and offering unique technical and creative insights into the process. He will also curate a collection of his original films including Life is a Serious Business, starring the late great George Kuchar; Inside Out, featuring the Kate Foley Dance Company with a score performed by the Clubfoot Orchestra; Once a Face, an animated portrait of the filmmaker; Who Stole the Keeshka?, a cine-seance to contact the other side.   The second half of the program will feature experimental musicians Reel Change creating live scores for films. Reel change is composed of SF Bay Area musical luminaries Doug Carroll (cello), Tom Nunn (inventions), Andrew  Voigt (winds) and David Michalak (lap steel). Films with live scores include Regenbogen, an animated finger-painting using vaseline and lame’ as materials; Not Quite Right, an expressionistic tale a man creates the world he fears; Firefly, an animated look inside exploding embers and the groundbreaking film Meshes in the Afternoon by Maya Deren.
Date: Thursday, February 26th, 2015 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

Yesterday's Tomorrow - A Night of Past Futures - Fri. Feb. 20 - 8PM


Oddball Films and guest curator Christina Yglesias present Yesterday's Tomorrow: A Night of Past Futures. The program features an eclectic mix of future prediction films brought to you from the 20th century. There will be humans living on other planets, environmental destruction, the predecessor to OkCupid, personal computers that kill, automatic kitchens, cyborgs, time travel, and more! Whether laughable or eerily spot-on, these future visions will have you thinking about the past, the present, the future, and everything in between. First up, IT beat cops investigate of string of personal computer related injuries and murders in Signal Syntax (1983). With quotes like, "Give me that floppy disk. You're too drunk to compute now!" and a distraught, "IF ONLY I HAD READ MY MANUAL!” this low-budget compu-horror will be sure to please. Ugly Little Boy (1977), an Isaac Asimov adaptation, brings us a surprisingly heart-wrenching story of the connection formed between a neanderthal baby brought from the past through time travel and the nurse tasked with caring for him. Keeping with the heart-breaking sci-fi theme, All Summer in a Day (1982) is a Bradbury adaptation that takes place on a planet that only sees the sun every 9 years. In an excerpt from Eager Minds (1955), we get a glimpse into the fifties kitchen of the future and predictions of  "video phones.” Catalog (1961) is a mesmerizing example of early analog computer animation from cinematic innovator John Whitney; created with his analog computer/film/camera machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Tying it all up is Stranger than Science Fiction (1968). CBS News and Walter Cronkite made time in a pivotal year of American history to finish this report on the technologies of the world and how closely they resemble visions of the future that had been previously erected. For early arrivals, there is The Future (1980), which offers up three (equally dystopian) visions of the future world.


Date: Friday, February 20th, 2015 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


Dangerous Dames and Brutal Beauties - Thurs. Feb. 19 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Dangerous Dames and Brutal Beauties, a 16mm program of witches, temptresses, murderesses, vampires, brawling convicts, derby dolls and more fearsome femmes.  Ida Lupino directs a witchy episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller - La Strega (1962), starring a then-unknown Ursula Andress who must shake her witchy past to fall in love with a handsome stranger. This tragic romance features palpable chemistry between Andress and Alejandro Rey, Jeanette Nolan's scene-stealing performance as one of the most authentically creepy witches ever with her coven of interpretive dancing witches, and (of course) loving close-ups of Andress' gorgeous face. Oscar winner Marie Dressler thwarts an escaped convict (or is it an Evangelist?) in the hilarious early talkie Dangerous Females (1929). Marlene Dietrich proves she has beauty and brawn when she belts out a tune and then belts a lady in a bar-brawl in an excerpt of Destry Rides Again (1939).  Private Eye Daffy Duck goes head to head with a red-headed and yellow-beaked femme fatale in The Super Snooper (1952). Gracie Barrie sings about matrimonial crimes of passion in the delightfully off-beat Soundie Stone Cold Dead in the Market (1946). Watch an all-lady prison riot in a dynamic excerpt of award-winning women's prison movie Caged (1950) and derby dolls face off in the rink in clips of vintage Roller Derby (1956), plus The Battle of the Burlesque Queens (1948) and more surprises.  Come early for Glynis Johns in the made-for-tv vampire tale Mrs. Amworth (1975). 
Date: Thursday, February 19th, 2015 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

Oddball's Vintage Valentine - Love, Sex and VD - Fri. Feb. 13 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Oddball's Vintage Valentine - Love, Sex and VD, a night of 16mm mental hygiene shorts, VD scare films and sensuous ephemera to get your Valentines weekend off to a strange and sexy start.  Dating Do's and Don'ts (1949) will teach you how to pick the right girl for your teen carnival and how to have the squeaky-clean time of your teenaged life. And girls can learn how not to be sluts, but still treat a boy to a real nice time in Are You Popular? (1947). One soldier is all ready for his furlough, until he meets the wrong dame and ends up with the clap in the newly unearthed WWII army VD training film The Pick-Up (1944). We'll examine whether those enthralling pangs of early love will lead to a happy marriage or devastation in Is This Love?(1957). Find all about wet dreams and unexpected hard-ons in Am I Normal? A Film about Male Puberty (1979).  We've got two sexy soundies: one boy's mom has a lot of strange men over to the house while his dad's away in The Man That Comes Around (1940) from the Music with Spice series and Count Basie is begging (in song) to Take Me Back Baby (1940). Dracula is a groovy pimp in Vegas with a brothel full of vampire hookers in an insane excerpt of Ray Dennis Steckler's The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (1971). Plus tons of Burlesque, Double Projected Smut and more sexy surprises!
Date: Friday, February 13th, 2015 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

Masters of Animation - Tex Avery - Thurs. Feb. 12 - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Masters of Animation - Tex Avery , a celebration of one of the funniest, most irreverent animators of the 20th century; the man who created such iconic cartoons characters as Bugs Bunny (and coined "What's Up Doc?"), Daffy Duck, Droopy and many more.  Fred "Tex" Avery's iconoclastic style transformed the adorable and fuzzy characters of Di$ney studios into comedians, half-wits and lunatics; often breaking the fourth-wall and confronting the audience with the artifice of the cartoon they are watching.  This program features all your favorite characters and celebrity caricatures as well as some forgotten friends history may have forgotten along the way. We'll begin where Avery began at Warner Brothers; his first Looney Tunes short (animated by Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett), with long-lost character Beans in Gold Diggers of '49 (1935). See the very first Daffy Duck cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt (1937) and see why that "crazy, darn fool duck" bounced and cackled his way into our hearts.  Then, see what happens when Daffy is let loose at the editing bay and creates an avant-garde collage film in Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938).  While we're in Tinseltown, we'll head over to the club where a few dozen of the most iconic stars of the 1930s and 1940s are all cavorting in style in Hollywood Steps Out (1941).  Avery turns a fairy tale on its head when lounge singers, swingin' grandmas and pimped out wolves put a new twist on an age-old classic in Red Hot Red Riding Hood (1943). Educational films get a jab when we learn all about insects in the ridiculous Bug Parade (1941), and all about monkeys, lions and other wacky fauna in (the not always anatomically correct) A Day at the Zoo (1939). Roy Rogers' early band "Sons of the Pioneers" voice the yodels of the feuding hillbillies of A Feud There Was (1938). Bugs Bunny fakes his own death in one of his very first cartoons, The Heckling Hare (1941), the film that led to a dispute that caused Tex to pack his bags from Termite Terrace and head over to MGM where he made our final three films of the night, King-Sized Canary (1947), Doggone Tired (1949) and Counterfeit Cat (1950).  It's a night of wit, wackiness and wabbits all screened from 16mm prints.
Date: Thursday, February 12th, 2015 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

Learn your Lesson... about the Atomic Bomb - A Radioactive Shockucation - Fri. Feb. 6th - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn your Lesson... about the Atomic Bomb - A Radioactive Shockucation, the 24th in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month, we're heading back to the Cold War and the preparedness films made by The Department of Civil Defense through fear of nuclear annihilation. Watch out for that giant skull over San Francisco in the bombastic foreboding animated warning One World or None (1946).  A mad scientist wants to take over the world, but little Tommy and his fox have other plans in the rare cartoon Up and Atom (c. 1957). Learn how to react when our red enemies drop the big one on your town in the howlingly funny Pattern for Survival (1950), whatever you do, don't look at the light! After the big one drops, Our Cities Must Fight (1951) urges you to stay in the city, after all, the radiation should dissipate in a week or two. It's explosions galore in Operation Cue (1964) a document of the 1955 Nevada atomic tests, starring a cast of creepy mannequins.  Stylish mid-century animation and practical sense help teach us About Fallout (1963).  Once you and your neighbors are safely tucked in your fallout shelter, be sure to find out about Infant and Child Care (1962), including putting your baby in a box and a live breastfeeding scene. Mimes, stilt-walkers and puppets protest nuclear war while performing in a field in the baffling Button Button: A Dream of Nuclear War (1982).  Plus, the trailer for Atomic Agent, excerpts of What You Need to Know about Biological Weapons (1951), Atomic Radiation (1952), Our Friend the Atom (1953) and even more atomic surprises; it's a nuclear night to learn your lesson!
Date: Friday, February 6th, 2015 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

Optical Delusions - Thur. Feb. 5th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Optical Delusions, a night of mind-bending optical experimentation featuring the photographic tricks of Weegee, psychedelic science shorts, Op-Art and the viscerally kaleidoscopic imagery of Donald Fox, Peter Foldes and Pat O'Neill.  Legendary photographer Weegee teaches you how to manipulate images with a camera to create three-legged women and two-headed poodles in Camera Magic (1955). Donald Fox's optically printed Omega (1970) foretells the end of the world through a series of stunning images dissolving into ethereally apocalyptic visions.  Discover the eye-popping optical art of French-Hungarian op-art pioneer Victor Vasarely in the visually astounding documentary Who is Victor Vasarely? (1969).  Peter Foldes and the National Film Board of Canada bring us the first short made entirely out of computer-generated animation Hunger (1973); a dazzling and dark nightmare of metamorphosing images that gives new meaning to "eat the rich".  The NFB also produced Ishu Patel's geometric symphony Perspectrum (1974). Observe the science behind phi-phenomena, optical illusions and color constancy in Experimental Psychology of Vision (1941). Discover the secret scintillating world of Crystallization (1975) featuring incredible microcinematography of crystals forming to a groovy electronic score. In Pat O'Neill's optically-printed experiment 7362 (1967), obscured images of body parts and oil derricks pulsate in an intoxicating rhythm. Find out what happens when your vision is flipped upside down (and you're paid to live like that for two weeks!) in the imported "scientific" short Living in a Reversed World (1958).  You'll never look at your eyeballs the same again.
Date: Thursday, February 5th, 2015 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