Oddball Films presents Automania 2000: Vintage Cars on Film, a night of awesome automobiles from the 1950s-1980s dug out of the Oddball Archive. This high-octane 16mm program features midget car racing, mid-century automotive animation, kitschy promotional and scare films, vintage car shows and commercials all highlighting that magic machine on four wheels; the automobile. Behold the beauty of the "newest" line of Chevy sedans in the stylish promotional film The Rainbow is Yours (1951) from Jam Handy. Get in on some midget car racing with the "phantom racer" in Bullet on Wheels (1951). Halas and Batchelor studio brings us an animated vision of a future so obsessed with cars, they begin to take over the whole world in Automania 2000 (1963). The Car of Your Dreams (1984) chronicles car commercials from their inception to the 1980s in a fast-paced, thought provoking, and eye-popping montage of hundreds of ads. The National Film Board of Canada brings us a martian's point of view of our auto-obsessed world in the witty cartoon What in the World? (1964). Learn all about the importance of seat belts when dolls go flying through the front windshield in the ridiculous scare film Safety Belt for Susie (1962). Plus, get a taste of some homegrown auto-worship with the Kodachrome time capsule San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show (1965). Plus more surprises and 1960s auto-show footage for the early birds to enjoy, put the pedal to the metal and speed on down to Oddball!
Date: Thursday, November 6th, 2014 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Featuring:
Bullet On Wheels (B+W, 1951)
Midget car racing action with a minor plotline involving the “phantom racer”, a lone-ranger masked driver who makes headlines all up and down the California coast for his daring-do. Mostly just an excuse for some hair-raising action in extremely fast and dangerous open cockpit racing cars.
Automania 2000 (Color, 1963)
A satyric tour-de-force, this prophetic and humorous film concerns the state of the world at the millennium. Uncannily accurate in its prediction, the film shows the result of technology gone mad. In the race to produce bigger and better cars we see how humanity adapts to life in a grid-locked world. One of the Halas & Batchelor Studio’s finest films, Automania 2000 was a prize winner all round the world, including an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award.
The Rainbow is Yours (Color, 1951)
Behold all the stunning colors of the newest line of shiny new Chevys in this kitschy promotional film made by industrial film giants Jam Handy.
The Car of Your Dreams (Color and B+W, 1984)
Genius educational film about the car industry and their sales techniques utilizing solely mind-blowing historical footage that borders on the surreal. It’s no wonder Americans bought into the car mythology lock, stock and barrel.
If aliens looked at planet Earth from outer space, what would he or she see? In this film, automobiles are perceives as life forms – with particular habits and behaviors! See beautifully animated lines of cars, dancing figures and stoplights, and other objects dancing. This psychedelic simplified world of shapes and signs, emphasizes consumerism and the ways in which earthlings are being conditioned! Produced by the National Film Board of Canada and directed by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal.
Safety Belt For Susie (Color, 1962)
A child’s innocent plaything turns into a creepy, almost supernatural entity. Little Nancy Norwood who takes her life-sized doll, Susie, everywhere with her. But when Mr. Norwood ploughs the family car into a tree, poor Susie gets smashed to pieces because she wasn’t wearing a safety belt. There’s lots of crash test footage, with baby dolls flying wildly through windshields and into dashboards, after which the camera lovingly dwells on the severed plastic arms and legs lying on the asphalt. An eerie and effective Driver’s Ed film, shown to unsuspecting kids in the early sixties (when seatbelts were optional equipment in cars).
San Francisco Excelsior: Low Rider Car Show (Color, 1965)
See the sweat and muscle poured into tricked out low riders from the 60's. Parked within a schoolyard are more than just beautiful hot rods, they're well-oiled works of art! Shot on gorgeous Kodachrome!
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.
