Oddball Films presents Fight the Power: Radicals, Resistance and Revolution, an empowering and entertaining evening of film rarities documenting the history and enduring legacy of the anarchists, revolutionaries, protestors and artists that stood up to change the world. From Feminists to Black Panthers, this cinematic ode to dissent and demonstration features documentaries, experimental and collage film and even stop-motion animation. Charles Braverman's kinestatic World of '68 (1968) sums up the riotous year of 1968 in four minutes including the politics, pop culture and the devastation of… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro, present Unstoppable: The Many Moods of Momentum , a relentless exploration of the forces of physics and emotion with filmmakers like Chuck Jones, Claude Lelouch, Arthur Lipsett, and Halas and Batchelor. Classic cartoons, crash test footage, experimental cinema, silent Wonder Dogs and a school film or two tell tales of inertia spun out of control! Wheels, Wheels, Wheels (1970) is an exciting thrills and spills look the very symbol of go, go, go! From Britain's Halas and Batchelor studio, the endearingly animated Hoffnung’s Palm Court Orchestra (… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Czech Please! an evening of mind-blowing stop-motion animation from the former Czechoslovakia. With puppet and object animation; from the adorable to the dark and thought-provoking, this evening will open your eyes to the brilliance, vision and creativity of some of the greatest Czech animators including Jan Švankmajer , Jiri Trnka, Bretislav Pojar, Borivoj and Karel Zeman, Hermína Týrlová and Zdenek Miler. Jan Švankmajer , one of the most brilliant and creative filmmakers of our time, creates a dark and witty Freudian fantasy of cannibal dolls,… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Fashion Backward: Beauty and Style from Yesteryear, an ephemeral film fashion show from the 1920s-1970s. We're taking the wayback machine to see the epitome of vintage style with kitschy promotional films, newsreel rarities, silent slapstick, commercials and more, all on 16mm film from the archive. Every stylish look begins with a good foundation and the 1920s give us the birth of the bloomer in the sassy, silly, sexy romp Reckless Rosie (1929) starring Frances Lee. See the latest in 1930s fashion with the Fox Movietone Newsreel Filming the… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints , Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 79 th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment Strange Sinema 79: Psychoactive is an exploration into the cinematic stimuli of moving images. It destabilizes and reconfigures concepts of moving image programs by recontextualizing discordant film footage cast-offs into a cohesive, "entertaining," yet disturbing mutation.… Read more
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… Read more
Oddball Films presents An Existence of Nonsense - Surreal and Absurd Cinema with works by Man Ray, István Szabó, René Clair, Eugene Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Jan Lenica and Luis Buñuel. Realism is overrated and this program explores the magnitude of creative expression when freed from the constraints of rational and linear structures. Man Ray's surrealist classic L'Etoile de Mer (1928) captures the furtive, flirting moments of sexual desire, ever so dreamily obscured. István Szabó 's A Dream About a House (1972) demonstrates the absurdities of war when contrasted with the consistencies of the… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present What the F(ilm)?! 8: Animated Insanity from the Archive, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This month, we are going all animated with the most insane program of cartoons you will ever see with a unique blend of surreal, educational, propaganda and experimental cartoons too weird to be believed. One of our favorite animators, Bruno Bozzetto will knock you out of your seat with his surreal, sexy, funny and morbid brand of animation and we have three mind-blowing shorts: Opera (1973… Read more
Oddball Films and itinerant guest curator Montgomery Cantsin present Elsewhere: Gypsies, Vagabonds and Refugees, a wide-ranging survey of twentieth-century vagrants and refugees on (16MM) film, covering real and invented wanderings and displacements of all sorts. For one night only, we'll be adrift amidst the down-and-out & the out-and-about; gleaning insights into the "planned mobility" of the gypsy, the hard travels of the tramp, the forced relocation of the refugee, and more. Highlights include: The Hitch-Hiker (1950), a rather racy instructional film on how to get a ride; Railrodder (… Read more
Fellini’s 8 ½ The Steam Bath Sequence (B+W, 1963) "I was a little shocked when I saw on a church door a poster that had my name on it that had a black border... the poster said, 'Let us pray for the salvation of the soul of Frederico Fellini, public sinner.'" This is Fellini's dramatic autobiographical film about a famous film director, Guido, (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who loses his inspiration in the midst of making a film. In this sequence Guido, the director, has a fantasy meeting with the Cardinal in a steambath. Guido's friends and associates exhort him to prostrate himself before… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator/ filmmaker John Cannizzaro present Smokehouse Films' Cinematic Cabinet of Wonders – a compendium of rare & remarkable, strange & wonderful 16mm film gems from the archives of Smokehouse Films. This unique mix of films includes early works by animation masters Jan Svankmajer’s Jabberwocky(Czech 1971) – loosely based on the poem by Lewis Carroll; and Ladislas Starevich’ Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman (Russia/Poland 1912) - a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects. Playful, experimental visions erupt with a vengeance in an… Read more
Water (1961, color) Animator Phillip Stapp delivers with this piece commissioned by the United Nations and approved by the World Health Organization. Another Journal Films Inc production, this documentary highlights Stapp’s interesting animation style combining and contrasting live-action footage and photographs with pointillist inspired drawing. These airy images depict the problem of water rights, water shortage, and the needs of our ever-growing world with snappy style. Stapp is well known for his work in animation with films like Boundary Lines (1946) which introduced his ‘evolving scroll… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of rare films, new finds and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ vast collection of 16mm film prints. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 films, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has complied his 78 th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 78: East Meets West- Experiments in Cinema is a compendium of Eastern made and influenced animated, experimental and avant-garde films influenced by Japan, India, Persia and all parts East. These rare films use traditional animation techniques… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn your Lesson...After School: An Afterschool Extra Special Shockucation, the seventeenth 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've got a triple feature of all-star ABC Afterschool Specials recently unearthed from the archive about STDs, Dyslexia and Teenage parenting with River and Joaquin Phoenix, Rob Lowe, Dana Plato and Zach Galligan. These melodramatic programs graced the afternoon airways from the early-70s… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Croatian Animation and Imagination from Zagreb Film, a program offering the most charming, stylish, and award-winning Croatian animation, mini-docs and short films from the internationally acclaimed studio Zagreb Film. Founded in 1953, Zagreb Film has produced thousands of short films and garnered over 400 international festival awards. Dusan Vukotic, the first non-American to win an Oscar for an animated short, created some of the most stylish of all mid-century cartoons including the witty anti-materialist short Ersatz (AKA Surogat, 1961) and… Read more
Oddball Films presents Crazy Cats! - Cat Scratch Fever. This evening of crazy cats includes shorts films and cartoons about cats, starring cats and people dressed as cats! The feline insanity includes: the Oddball favorite anti-drinking primer The Cat Who Drank (and Used) Too Much (1987); The Incredible Cat Tale (ca. 1960), a live action cat adventure from Hungary; The Perils of Priscilla (1969), a neglected pussy sets out on her own and hits the big city; Of Cats and Men (1968), an animated history of Felis Cattus Domesticus from Di$ney ; The Cat’s Meow (1976) , a hilarious educational short… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Fair of the Future - Progress and Innovation from the World's Fair, a program of vintage films about and commissioned for World's Fairs of decades past that demonstrate the progress of the past and the promise of a new, automated future. Tour the fair and witness all the exciting sights and sounds of the 1939 New York World's Fair in the World of Tomorrow (1939), including Elektro, the Smoking Robot and GM's Futurama exhibit! United Airlines commissioned the legendary Saul Bass to follow up his logo design with his promotional short From Here to There (1964), a jet-… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present What the F(ilm)?! 7: All-American Cine-insanity from the Archive, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This month we're featuring a cornucopia of insane-Americana with Di$ney war-propaganda, fire puppets, psychedelic animation, atomic scare films and even a naked marching band. Walt Di$ney and Donald Duck help out in the war effort in The Spirit of '43 (1943), a bit of good old fashioned cartoon propaganda. Psychedelic animator Vince Collins produced the mind-bending animation 200 (… Read more
Happy Birthday America! We will be closed this Friday, but we do hope you will enjoy your barbecues, fireworks and general patriotic merriment! We will return next week with more marvelous gems from the collection.
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn your Lesson...from the 1950s - An Old-Fashioned Shockucation, the sixteenth 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're taking the way-way back machine to the 1950s to learn lessons in drinking and driving, bullying, cheating, sex, prejudice, child molestation, anger management and of course atomic fallout! Watch mice get drunk and drunks flip cars in the teen drunk driving cautionary tale None for the Road (1957… Read more
