Queer Cinema Rarities- Fri. June 3rd - 8PM

Oddball Films is kicking off pride month with Queer Cinema Rarities, a program of vintage 16mm films from the 1960's through the 1980's offering a rare glimpse of the lives, dreams, and sexuality of the queer community in a more repressive time. The evening features groundbreaking documentary portraits of QPOC, romantic road trips, lyrical experimental erotica, vintage beefcake shorts, and more. Discover the life of a young black lesbian mother in 1980s New York in the powerful documentary short If She Grows Up Gay (1982). Behind Every Good Man (1966) is a rare and understated portrait of an African American transgender woman shopping, cruising and musing in 1960s Los Angeles. Lloyd Reckord’s narrative short, Dream A40 (1965), one of the first queer films of its kind, is a sensitive and moody film that goes on the road with two men and their feelings of conflict within themselves and society. Experimental luminary Constance Beeson brings us two radical cine-poems on the beauty of love in all its forms including Stamen (1972) with ethereal overlays and superimpositions as two men enjoy a romantic interlude in the woods, and Holding (1970) featuring the sexual and non-sexual affection of two women falling in love. We've got two rare homoerotic Beefcake Shorts (c. 1970) from the beefcake connoisseur Pat Rocco: Fanny's Hill with a bunch of naked men running around a ranch and Amateur Strip with more naked men dancing their hearts out on stage. Plus excerpts from the antiquated news program Homosexual (1964) and local filmmaker Arthur Bressan Jr.'s Forbidden Letters (1976), with more surprises in store for the early birds. Several prints courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.

Date: Friday, June 3rd, 2016 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117

Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com

Featuring:

If She Grows Up Gay (Color, 1982)
A powerful documentary short chronicling the life of a young queer black mother navigating New York City with her child and partner. She speaks candidly about her life, her dark past, her sexuality and what she hopes for the future of her daughter. Directed by Karen Sloe Goodman. Print courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.

Behind Every Good Man… (B+W, 1966)

Decades before Laverne Cox became a household name and before the Stonewall riots that launched the gay rights movement, this documentary short features an African American transgender woman pushing the envelope in a society barely out of the repressive 1950s. This very rare film directed by Nikolai Ursin, then a film student at UCLA records our subject’s meditations on love, gay life in the early 1960s, and gender transgression. The film and its subject avoid period cliches about homosexuality and gender and point to hopeful possibilities. “I’d like to live a happy life, that’s for sure,” she says, and one not only wants her to, but believes that it really could happen.

Dream A40 (B+W, 1965)

This groundbreaking short film follows two men, one afraid to show his feelings and one eager to. As they travel down the road in a beautiful car, society watches them. Jamaican born British director, Lloyd Reckord presents a strikingly beautiful and stark tale of homosexuality before it was highly visible in film and media. His journey from the real to the distorted is languid and almost terrifying. A brave film that helped shaped the face of queer cinema in its earliest days. Print courtesy of the Jenni Olson Queer Film Archive.

Stamen (Color, 1972)

A lyrical piece of experimental homoerotica by the radical filmmaker Constance Beeson. A beautiful and romantic encounter between two men superimposed with lush imagery of flowers and waterfalls.

Holding (Color, 1970)
Another radical sensual and explicit educational film from Constance Beeson and the MMRC. A romantic and impressionistic interpretation of a lesbian relationship exploring the fantasies of two women falling in love with each other. The two women relate in a variety of sexual and non sexual ways.

Vintage Homoerotica!

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These rare beefcake shorts rarely feature any action, just tons of naked men letting their junk hang out while they dress up, strip down and bounce around!

Fanny’s Hill:
It's an all-male nudist dude ranch! Naked men run around fields of cows, play on swings, roll down grassy hills and have a huge whipped cream pie fight.

Amateur Strip:
Various men (all nude), dancing in front of a red curtain. Slow-motion shots as they swing their hips and gyrate. Behold the acrobatic stunts, jumping rope, men in a chorus line, taking turns dancing solo. One man even uses another as a wheelbarrow.


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. She has programmed over 200 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.

About Oddball Films
Oddball Films is a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Silicon Valley, Kurt Cobain: The Montage of Heck, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

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.