Oddball Films presents The Hellstrom Chronicle and other Junk Science , a night of subjective science films that stretch the definition of documentary. The centerpiece of the night, The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) is one of the strangest recipients of the Academy Award for Best Documentary due to its obtuse facts and florid doomsday message. The film utilizes mesmerizing microcinematography of insects juxtaposed with narration from our host Nils Hellstrom, a fictional mad scientist who poetically reveals that insects stand to take over the world and laugh on the collective grave of the human… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Landon Bates bring you Fairy Tale Frenzy, a lovely jumble of fairy tales as interpreted for the screen. This program, a kaleidoscope of colors and textures, comprised of classic tales, and some fresh lesser-known ones, is sure to bring out your inner kid. We’ll begin with the wonderfully weird Czech animation Cecily (1970’s), the story of a girl whose ears, pulled continually by her grandmother as punishment for bad behavior, stretch to the size of sails, doubling as wings that will carry her far away from her previously drab and ordinary life. King Midas and… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 58: Bizarre Cinema Histories , a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ collection of over 50,000 film prints. Tonight we present an offbeat look at the origins and bizarre expressions of cinema through historical inventions, experimental innovations and hand-made films throughout the ages. We start off with a fascinating documentary The Origins of the Motion Picture (1955) examining cinema history from Leonardo Da Vinci to Thomas Edison featuring oddities such as the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistiscope, Muybridge’s… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present All the Trimmings: A Cornucopia of Comedy, Cartoons and Music. There’s something for everyone in this evening of revelry and frolic to banish every manner of Winter Blahs . . . before they start! Buster Keaton remains stoic during the wackiest camping trip ever when he unwittingly becomes The Balloonatic (1923). A double shot of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote - Whoa Be Gone (1958) and Fastest with the Mostest (1960) - are part of a centenary nod to animation genius Chuck Jones. Laurel and Hardy get into prickly, stinky mess during basic… Read more
Oddball Films presents Spacial Relations - The Art of Architecture, a program devoted to the artistry of building buildings with many of the masters of modern design. The show will begin with a trip around the world, featuring four simultaneously projected travelogues demonstrating the architecture of the world including Paris in Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous (1976) and Mexico's Mayan ruins in Sentinels of Silence (1971). Then we will delve into the men behind the buildings, the visionary minds that design the most interesting of domeciles in the world. Carlos Vilardebo's haunting and… Read more
With the Holidays and their yearly double dose of feasting just around the corner, Oddball Films brings you Eat Your Heart Out, a night of vintage films about food, feasts and franchises for all tastes. Learn about basic nutrition with a gaggle of creepy singing children in the campy classroom primer The Eating, Feel Good Movie (1974). Take a funny and fascinating trip to Japan as Colonel Sanders takes his chicken franchise global with The Colonel Comes to Japan (1984). Woody Allen and Joanne Worley do their best to answer an age old question in a segment from their weekly Hot Dog program :… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present: Jukebox Confidential: Portraits and Curios from the World of Pop , an evening of toe-tapping ephemera highlighting hit-makers in performance, behind-the-scenes footage and stuff that defies category. Aretha Franklin, Soul Singer (1968) captures the Queen of Soul as a singer and musician in the whirl crossover stardom and also as an artist questing to find the truest expression of her gifts. The story of a squeaky-clean 70s superstar and her downfall is told in a deluxe excerpt from Todd Haynes' cult classic Superst*r (1988). At just 19,… Read more
Oddball Films presents Visionary Design: The Cinema of Charles and Ray Eames. A mong the finest designers of the 20th Century, t he husband and wife team are best known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and manufacturing, but t he Eames’ were also brilliant and inventive filmmakers, able to illustrate the most abstract concepts with readily understood images. There is so much to say about the legacy of the Eames’s that an entire period has been named after them. This program includes An Eames Celebration (1975), a documentary about the… Read more
Oddball films presents Life's a Drag! a fabulous and glamorous evening of drag royalty featuring groundbreaking documentaries, campy drag fairytales and vintage San Francisco amateur footage, all from the 1950's and 1960s, when homosexuality and transgender issues were first coming to a head in American society. Highlights include Behind Every Good Man, the low-key portrait of an African American drag queen in Los Angeles. Black Cap Drag takes an in-depth look at two British drag performers in 1960s London as they discuss their lives and careers and sing a few Barbra and Marlene numbers along… Read more
Oddball Films presents Animation Behind the Iron Curtain, an evening of rare and masterful works of Polish, Czech and Yugoslavian animation. The films range in form and subject matter, from the melancholic to the celebratory but all possess an intricate artistry and an undercurrent of rebellion from oppression. In the utterly charming Queer Birds (1965), the cutest pair of best bird friends you'll ever see must team up to fight off an oppressive black cat. Tadeusz Wilcosz creates a dark world of animate inanimates that must band together to overthrow a burlap sack that threatens to eat them… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 57: Anti Art , a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ collection of over 50,000 film prints. Tonight, we present a very rare overlapping set of documentaries and short dada works by the most brilliant anti artists of he 20th century. The program is encyclopedic in content, spanning a wide rage of influential anti-establishment artists worldwide. We begin with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray’s stunning Anemic Cinema (1926), a visual cacophony of hypnotic puns, followed by Helmut Herbst’s An Alphabet of German DADAism… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present Winter of the Witch and Other Tales of Possession and Enchantment featuring a coven full of m aternal, malevolent, saucy, sweet and hippie-dippie witches to ring in Halloween weekend. The charming Winter of the Witch (1969) presents us with a mischievous old dear who is eager to share the delicious secret of happiness. Georges Méliès’s pioneering cinema of visual magic is the perfect vehicle for a pair of hellzapoppin’ otherworldly shenanigans: The Inn Where No Man Rests and The Witch’s Revenge , (both 1903). The Occult: X-Factor or Fraud (… Read more
Th e San Francisco Media Archive and Oddball Films present Home Movie Day – Latino Home Movies celebrating the Mission and Chicano culture. The event is being held in conjunction with the 10th Annual Worldwide Home Movie Day. Members of the public are invited to submit their home movies, particularly films shot in the Mission. Bring your films: 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm home movies to SFMA where they will be inspected by HMD projectionists and shared with an enthusiastic audience in a day-long celebration of amateur filmmaking and home movie preservation. As a special bonus, qualified films… Read more
Oddball Films and guest curator Jeff Giordano present Seduced and Abandoned in Florida featuring the San Francisco Premiere of early Ross McElwee documentary Space Coast (1979). Rarely screened and not available on DVD, Space Coast pairs oddball documentarian Ross McElwee, l egendary for directing the offbeat, Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning doc Sherman's March (1986), with Michele Negroponte ( I'm Dangerous with Love) for a portrait of 1970s Cape Canaveral Florida. In true offbeat fashion, Negroponte and McElwee follow three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida -- several years after the… Read more
Oddball Films present The Children of Ray Bradbury, a program of adaptations of the short stories of the recently departed literary giant Ray Bradbury. Bradbury's vivid imagination created some of the most fantastic of worlds, and chilling of prophecies for our own world and since his passing, science fiction and literature may never be the same. In this program, we explore Bradbury's unique take on children, both cynical and endearing with three short film adaptations. In All Summer in a Day (1982), the children of Venus await to see their very first day of sunshine yet proceed to bully the… Read more
Oddball Films has the rare opportunity to present the fourth annual installment in the innovative interview-based series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) featuring Mark Pauline founder of the Survival Research Laboratories. Los Angeles media artist and curator Gerry Fialka will interview Pauline in person on the Oddball Cine Stage, with video excerpts from 40 years of SRL performances. Survival Research Laboratories, founded in 1978, is the innovator of robot-based performance art and known for the most dangerous shows on earth. So dangerous, in fact, that recently the group was banned from… Read more
Oddball Films presents American Trance Cinema: Spellbinding Ceremonies, an evening of rare and intriguing films plus unique shorts exploring the unique cultural rituals and ceremonies of several disparate American demographics. Enjoy a rare chance to see these normally off-limits customs, including Peter Adair’s extraordinary ethnographic documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) which offers a fascinating look at a West Virginia Pentecostal congregation as they relish the religious fervor of speaking in tongues, anointing and trances. Famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Buck Dancer (1965)… Read more
The Albanian Cinema Project and the San Francisco Media Archive present Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Albanian Cinema But Were Afraid to Ask, an evening of specially selected and extraordinarily rare films from the Central State Film Archives. Come and see a selection of communist era educational and instructional films that have never been seen in the US; highlights from Albanian filmmaker Fatmir Koci’s love letter to the Albanian film archives In The Land of the Eagles , and the US premiere of Albania’s film entry in this year’s Venice Biennale, the documentary short Concrete… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you It's Not Easy Being Beautiful , a fun and fashionable night of vintage films that highlight the endless steps of beauty women must take on a daily basis, from makeup to hair to fashion to diet. Our beauty regime begins with glamorous undergarments, as we can see in the Special Edition segment on Frederick's of Hollywood (1970s), replete with sexy teddies and padded panties sold to you by frumpy old women. From there, we must build the foundation, with a creamy liquid foundation, of course, as we learn what goes into the makeup we pile on our… Read more
Oddball Films presents Seuss on the Loose! a night of curious creatures, surreal landscapes and imagination gone wild, all from the mind of the inimitable Dr. Seuss. Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist widely known for his legendary children's books written under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Geisel also worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns and was a political cartoonist for a New York City newspaper. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the U.S. Army, where he co-authored Design for Death, a film that later won the 1947 Academy… Read more
