Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson...about your Private Parts: A Pelvic Shockucation, the eighteenth in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. This month we are dealing with all your favorite and taboo body parts, the genitals! From menstrual cramps to VD, masturbation and sexual development, prophylactics and more, this is one shockucation your ovaries and gonads don't want you to miss! In You Got WHAT? (1970), life is all bell-bottoms and flower power, until you're saddled with VD! Learn all about your first period and making out with smiley-faced pillows with the most awkward pubescent heroine of the 80s in Dear Diary: A Film about Female Puberty (1981). A rabbi, a priest and a psychologist talk about sexual development, masturbation, nocturnal emissions and more squeamish topics in Parent to Child About Sex (1965). Canadian women talk openly aboot the taboo subject of menstrual pain in the laughably menstrutaining film Cramps! (1982). Planned Parenthood wants all men and women to know all about their options in birth control, but mostly to know that Hope is Not a Method (1973). Plus, the infamous Di$ney cartoon The Story of Menstruation (1945) and the double-projection of antique puberty primer Your Body During Adolescence (1956) and Vintage Smut! It's a great night to learn your lesson.
Date: Friday, August 8th, 2014 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Featuring:
You Got WHAT? (Color, 1970)
This quirky film, punctuated by bell bottoms, tarot cards and kooky improv vignettes takes a lighthearted approach to the “VD epidemic”. Mixing actors and real –life medical personnel the film beams with graphics and quirky 60s social relevance.
Dear Diary, a film about female puberty (Color, 1981)
The Welcome to the Dollhouse of puberty primers! The exaggerated characterizations and embarrassing situations experienced by the film's incredibly awkward thirteen-year-old protagonist are humorously combined to provide answers to female adolescents' questions about their changing bodies. The young girl encounters peer pressure from her boy-crazy friends, changing sex roles, and a pillow with smiley face. Keep your eyes peeled for the animated menstruation cycle.
Cramps! (Color, 1982)
Oh those Canadians with their open discussions of taboo topics! This ode to period pain begins with a parade of women throughout history (including Rosie the Riveter) discussing how they must never speak of their menstrual pain. Then, we visit a round-table of early-80s Canadian women talking aboot their experiences with cramps intercut with a delightful dramatization of one young woman's struggle with her uterus that gets in the way of her work life and her love life. When her beau thinks she's growing distant and is ready to call it quits, will she be able to admit to her personal problem, even if it is embarrassing?
Parent to Child about Sex (Color, 1965, excerpt)
A rabbi, a priest, and a psychologist want you to talk to your child about sex! No, it's not a raunchy joke, it's the basis of this Mad Men-styled sex- education short. Frank discussions amongst the panel on topics like wet dreams and menstruation give way to melodramatizations of the kind of sex-education every pubescent child needs.
Hope is Not a Method (Color, 1973)
A Planned Parenthood-sponsored film about all your options in birth control from the rhythm method to diaphragms and rubbers, reinforcing the title that Hope is definitely Not a Method! Mixed live-action and great animation.
The Story of Menstruation (Color, 1945)
A Walt D*sney Production, The Story of Menstruation is an animated short film produced for American schools detailing the menstrual cycle. Rumored to be the first film with the word “vagina” in it’s screenplay, this vintage gem is both matter of fact and dreamily flowery. A large-headed girl takes you through the dos and don’ts of menses while helpful diagrams guide us all to better understanding.
Your Body During Adolescence (B+W, 1956)
A mostly animated account of the changing bodies of boys and girls.
Double Projected with Vintage Nudie Cuties and Beefcake homoerotica!
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009.
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, 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.
