Oddball Films welcomes film collector, filmmaker and found footage expert Anthony Buchanan all the way from Colorado for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Buchanan will be swinging into Oddball to unspool some of his new super8 films--predominantly found footage--which deal with issues of media hypnosis, distorted perception in American life, satirical but poignant commentaries on home movie traditions and ideologies, and other American mythologies. Source material for the films include orphan home movies from the '70s, Hollywood classics remixed with personally-shot footage, audio pulled from dumpsters, discarded VHS tapes, Buchanan's own one-reelers, and other media ephemera. Buchanan's super8 mm films include KneelReel (2015), Manipulating the T-Bone (2015), Flip Flick (2015), I, CHRIS (2016), and ATA Lives (2016). Also included in the program are 16mm vintage satires on consumer culture from Buchanan's own archive, as well as gems pulled from Oddball's collection including Report (1967) by Bruce Conner and Future Shock! (1972) narrated by Orson Welles!!
The first in a series that literally challenges/questions the physical limits and endurance of both the human body and the camera’s body, and their dependency on one another. Also a satire on minimalist Structuralist film, based on a pun. A one-reeler inside a heavily-padded super 8 camera, which was turned on, facing a mirror, and literally tossed into the air and caught by me, over and over, like a child tossing a ball, until the reel ran out.
“No signifier is more imaginary in cinema, more primordally elsewhere, perhaps, then that of the moving body. The moving, gesturing body in cinema signals its presence in the world...but also its withdrawl, its status as an imaginary signifier that becomes a figure for absence; a figure of the absent figure.”
The second version with the same audio, this time the visuals are from re-photographed/manipulated images of VHS Yoga exercize tapes found around Boulder, CO. The fact that the audio--and the VHS tapes--were found in Boulder is significant, as this version is a critique of Boulder’s image as a New Age haven of yuppie leisure, success and “self fulfillment,” all of which hide a desperate existential crisis underneath. Once again, the awareness of the re-photographed image of movement, signaling further distance and absence, combined with the “seizuring” of the image, brings the imaginary signifier of success to ruin. Two New Age byproducts of unfulfilled personal crises, turned against themselves through manipulation, to expose the desperate unfulfillment and failure that they are manufactured to mask. NOTE: This version is a work in progress, as it will later have a hand-made abstract element applied to it from New Age “Healing” chemicals found at local stores, furthering the foregrounding of simulated bodies and absence.
Selections from the Oddball Archive:
Report (Bruce Conner, 1967, B+W)
Our screenings are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, 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.