Learn Your Lesson on Mental Health and Hygiene - A Therapeutic Shockucation - Fri. Dec. 18th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Learn Your Lesson on Mental Health and Hygiene - A Therapeutic Shockucation, the 33rd in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational scare films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection.  This month we're examining the mind with shocking psychiatry shorts, schizophrenic and anti-social teens, and tons of social conditioning shorts to make all of us valuable, well-adjusted and courteous members to society.  Behold the marvels of "modern" psychiatry in the 1950s, including an unabashed look at shock therapy as one method of mental conditioning in What's on your Mind? (1956). One young man finds himself in the beginning stages of schizophrenia, drawn by the voices in his head into the comforting world of snow in Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1966). A white-coated "scientist" explains the basic emotions and uses the tale of angry young Jeff to explain how anger can ruin everybody's day in Control Your Emotions (1950). Discover the changes all young people go through, and how to navigate the new and exciting worlds of Jr. and Sr. High school in The Age of Turmoil (1953) and Junior High: A Time of Change (1960s). Don't spend your childhood years lonely, go talk to your mom and discover The Fun of Making Friends (1950) Plus, emotional excerpts from Help Me!: The Story of a Teenage Suicide (1970s) and for the delusional: Facing Reality (1959), with more pre-show surprises and everything screened on 16mm from the archive, it's an unbalanced night to learn your lesson.

Date: Friday, December 18th, 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  

Oh Canada! The Best of Canadian Animation - Thur. Dec. 17th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Oh Canada! The Best of Canadian Animation, a program of 16mm cartoons all from Canadians, eh! Clever, hypnotic, mind-blowing, and often politically progressive this program highlights the work of some of the best innovators Canadian animation has to offer. The brilliant experimental animator and director of the National Film Board of Canada, Norman McLaren gives us two breathtaking works of pixilation animation. We'll begin with his Opening Speech. In Neighbors (1952), McLaren presents a much darker world (in beautiful color) where neighbors come to words, then blows, then bombs over who gets the beautiful flower that grows between their houses. Yellow Submarine animator Paul Driessen gives us a strange vision of the Inquisition in a spider's web in Cat's Cradle (1974). From the Oscar-nominated Caroline Leaf, the astounding sand animation based on Inuit legend, The Owl Who Married a Goose (1976). Evelyn Lambart's delightful cut-out animation Fine Feathers (1968) features birds that trade their feathers for foliage. With more cut-out creativity from Grant Munro and Gerald Potterton in the stylish mid-century My Financial Career (1962) based on Stephen Leacock's witty essay. What on Earth? (1966) brings us a martian's point of view of our auto-obsessed world. For some musical mayhem, we've got the eye-popping and surreal animated trip that is Brad Caslor's Get a Job (1985). In honor of the season, we bring you the delightfully strange Christmas Cracker (1964) featuring 3 odd Christmas vignettes from the brilliant Norman McLaren among others, and Jeff Hale's The Great Toy Robbery (1963), where Santa is held up by bandits in the Old-West.  Plus, more pre-show surprises from our neighbors to the North!

Date: Thursday, December 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

Strange Sinema 95: Experiments in Art and Cinema - Fri. Dec. 11th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 95, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ vast collection of 16mm film prints. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 95th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 95: Experiments in Art and Cinema is a heady, techno-cultural look at the multimedia art forms and cinematic uprisings of the tumultuous 60s and 70s featuring a vast array of evolutionary artists, cultural criticism and eye-popping movement art.  Art of the Sixties (1967), features the monumental soft sculptures of pop icon Claes Oldenburg, machine artist and animator Len Lye, Les Levine’s interactive environments, action painter provocateur Jackson Pollock and more. A seldom seen NET documentary USA Artists: Robert Rauschenberg (1966) showcases a young Rauschenberg’s innovative “Revolvers” or “Combines”- multilayered painted sculptures that expand the boundaries of art. Merce Cunningham (1964) the extremely rare French-made poetic montage of movement pioneer Merce Cunningham’s dance performances in collaboration with life partner and composer John Cage with “found object” sets by Robert Rauschenberg. Underground Film (1970), is another rare exploration into the work of seminal experimental filmmaker (and SF Cinematheque foundress) Chick Strand, a pioneer in blending avant-garde techniques with documentary. The Critic (1963), an animated Oscar-winner from the great Ernie Pintoff -watch as comedy legend Mel Brooks relentlessly rags on the experimental animation he's shown to hilarious effect. Also screening will be an excerpt from USA Artists: Jim Dine (1966), a live performance from the sixties artist instrumental in creating early “Happenings” - live, non-linear multimedia events. The evening will also include a breathtaking selection of Whitney films, featuring motion graphics pioneer John Whitney Sr., brother James and son Michael's work, all profoundly audacious and inspiring in their fluidity, motion and spiritual subtext. John Whitney's Arabesque (1975) is a legendary masterpiece of shimmering, oscillating waves set to the music of Persian composer Maroocheher Sadeghi. Michael Whitney's Binary Bit Patterns (1969) is a hypnotic psych-folk audiovisual experience that suggests a secret symbiosis between the digital and the organic as various Eastern graphic permutations appear, dissolve and undergo metamorphoses on the screen. Lapis (1965), made by a spiritualized James Whitney (one of only 7 films he created) and one of the most accessible experimental films ever made; Lapis was created with handmade cels evoking a single mandala moving within itself; its particles surge around each other in constant metamorphosis. To foreground our program, and starting promptly at 8PM is the rare documentary Richter on Film (1972) profiling Dadaist and abstract/avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter as he talks about his ground-breaking experimental films of the 1920s.


Date: Friday, December 11th, 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: www.oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Sexploitation Cinema Soiree with Joe Rubin from Vinegar Syndrome - Thur. Dec. 10th - 8PM

Oddball Films welcomes film programmer, archivist, and preservationist Joe Rubin to our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly event featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights and films. Rubin is the co-founder of Vinegar Syndrome, a home video distribution company focused on preserving and releasing rare, underground, and forgotten sexploitation and exploitation cinema. He will discuss his passion for discovering and restoring lost classics of the Golden Age of Sexploitation and share with us some of the most audacious, bizarre, and mind-blowing clips of films that Vinegar Syndrome has recovered and restored including sexed up space operas, sexperimental bible stories, lurid horror stories, psychedelic-phallic animation and more.  Clips will include big budget sci-fi smut Sex World (1978), the horrifying and titillating Baby Rosemary (1976), Wakefield Poole's scripturally sexy Bible! (1974), underground hardcore Little Sisters (1972), the thrills of Jungle Blue (1978), the sexy remake of The Three Faces of Eve: A Saint A Woman and a Devil (1977), white coater The Oral Generation (1970), the insane psychedelic animation of The Telephone Book (1971) and more!

Date: Thursday, December 10th, 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

Monkey Time - Fri. Dec. 4th - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Monkey Time, a night of antique 16mm simian insanity from the archive. In this program we examine and explore the hilarious and sublime lengths humans go to entertain us via these proxy mammals. Before the heyday of television and the domination of cinema, vaudeville, theater, circus acts, magic shows, impossible and death-defying stunts were all that amused thrill-seeking audiences across the US. Animal acts were a big hit and monkeys basked in their glory. Hollywood primate Zippy the Chimp almost has his birthday party ruined by a bully, until quits monkeying around and gets revenge in Zippy's Birthday Party (1950s). Zippy then hits the big top in Small Fry Circus (1956). Monkeys do all kinds of crazy things like fixing cars and running film cameras in Monkies is the Cwaziest People! (1939). Monkey spy, monkey do with Lancelot Link Secret Chimp (1971), the crime-fighting slapstick simian. The range ain't no place for monkeying around, but one cow-chimp will have to make do in Chimp the Cowboy (1937) starring Shorty the Chimp. See how these plucky primates learn to do what they do in Chimps in Training and Show Business (1950s).  Tiny capuchin monkeys zoom around the track in tiny little race cars in Monkey Go 'Round (1961). Make sure to meet Rikki: The Baby Monkey (1949), a little rhesus in the wild, and listen to the music with The Monkey and the Organ Grinder (1971). Plus, more simian surprises for the early birds.

Date: Friday, December 4th, 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