Date: Friday, April 17th, 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
Highlights
include:
Rakvickarna (Czech 1966)
Also
known as The Coffin Factory and The Lych House – Master
stop-motion animator Jan Svankmajer’s film features two puppets, Punch and Jody
(mis-titled as "Judy" - Jody has always been a male counterpart to
Punch in his puppet plays, even though Punch does has a wife named Judy) who
become involved in an escalating war with large mallets over a botched attempt
to barter over a fine guinea pig.
Neighbors (Canada 1962)
In this
Oscar®-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used
to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a
parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a
flower. Two neighbors live peacefully in
adjacent cardboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they
fight each other to the death over the ownership of the single small flower.
Gentleman in Room 6 (USA 1952)
Directed in 1952 by Alexander Hammid (husband of Maya Deren and co-director of the timeless classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON) and scripted by Sidney Carroll, with cinematography by Boris Kaufman (brother of Dziga Vertov) is a concise, powerful story with a surprise ending. A story in which the camera is used as the eye and mind of a forgotten man - the audience sees the story through his eyes as a voice speaks his thoughts.
Shooting Gallery (Czech 1969)
This film
revives the simple art of folk artists from old market shooting galleries to
discover and express their naive poesy. It tells a symbolic story about an
encounter of tender feeling and brutal violence. Czech animator, Miroslav Stepanek, uses the shooting gallery as an attack on totalitarianism.
Augusta Makes Herself Beautiful (Hungary 1983)
A claymation masterpiece by Hungarian director Csaba Varga - Augusta tries everything in order to make herself look beautiful.
Claude (USA
1963)
A subtle
but biting comment on the generation gap by the director of GOD IS DOG SPELLED
BACKWARDS- Dan McLaughlin. In this award winning film, McLaughlin, who runs the
UCLA Animation Workshop and teaches at the Art Center College of Design,
produced a slick, polished cartoon film comparable in production values and
artistry to the top Hollywood standards. It deals with a family who have a
communication problem. The parents repeatedly inform the son that he is in
their way, while he silently works on an ever-increasingly complex gadget he's
tinkering with. When he can no longer stand their repetitious criticism, he takes
matters into his own hands.
Children's Magical Death (USA 1974)
Part of the Yanomamo Indian series of films made by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon in Venezuela - a group of young boys imitating their fathers, and pretending to be shamans, blow ashes into each other's noses and chant to the hekura spirits.
Men's Dances (Germany 1971)
The Pushtu men act out a drama. A mountain giant is
portrayed by a cross like figure. This devil is attacked by a brave man, who is
wounded, but eventually wins. Another actor in a mask also represents a Yeti or
a devil. The Mountain peoples of Central
Asia series: Peoples of Badakhstan, Afghanistan. A Julien Bryan and an
International Film Foundation presentation - directed and photographed by
famed documentarian Hermann Schlenker.
Sidewinder's Delta (USA 1976)
Famed experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s mesmerizing
tour de force landscape film that’s as beautiful as it is thought provoking. Sidewinder’s
Delta was initially imagined as a kind of indirect Western, a meditation on the
myth of wilderness. The title conjures a riverbed full of snakes-creatures that
move by thrusting their bodies forward in a series of loops, recalling the
mechanical gist of optical printer and film projector - but delta is also the
scientific symbol for change.
Weekend (Yugoslavia 1972)
Ante Zaninovic’s biting satire about dealing with our elderly. A young boy and his family take a day trip to the country with an aging Grandpa…
About John Cannizzaro
John
Cannizzaro grew up in New England where he made several short films before
relocating to Los Angeles in 1990. There, he completed his first mini-feature, Critical Mass, which was reviewed by Paul
Malcolm in the Nov. 22, 1996 LA Weekly as a “low key tale of guttersnipe
mysticism…Critical Mass is heavy on mood and symbolism with Cannizzaro drawing
some beautiful compositions…What’s most intriguing about the film is the
connection it makes between spiritualism and ennui”. Still working primarily in
Super 8 film, he has completed several more short films including Gulliver’s
Travels and 50 Feet That Shook The World (both made for LA Flicker’s ‘Attack
of the 50 Foot Reels’ which have played in festivals around the world) as well
as a full-length feature film The Left Hand Path. He is also the founder of Smokehouse Films –
a film production company and an ever increasing archive of rare ethnographic,
experimental, and animated 16mm films.
Smokehouse Films - founded by John Cannizzaro in
1996 - started as a production company primarily involved with the production of
films by himself as well as films by a few close knit friends; all making
films independently and outside of the Hollywood system. Around 1997, Cannizzaro started to gather
films for a “found footage” project. As
he proceeded, he realized he could also collect those films that he had seen
growing up, the ones that had affected him so much that he became a filmmaker
himself, as well acquire the
rarer titles that were only heard of and read about in fascinating areas such
as Anthropology and cultural studies – titles that many colleges around the
country were quickly liquidating.
Slowly, Smokehouse Films has grown to approximately 4,000 prints – mostly
in the areas of Ethnographic films, stop-motion animated films (both foreign
and American), and experimental or Avant-Garde works. Many of these films have never made the transition
to video or DVD, and so constitute a vast area of knowledge and history that
needs to be “preserved” for future studies and enjoyment. To that end, Smokehouse Films has opened its
archives over the last few years to multiple screenings. Although most of them
have been in Los Angeles, they have also branched out to screenings as far as
San Francisco, Texas, Vermont, and New York.