Oddball Films welcomes world renowned artist and filmmaker Paul Clipson for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Clipson will be presenting a selection of rare and early works "displaying his unique vision to transform the everyday into phantasmagoric celluloid landscapes." San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson makes stunning Super 8mm and 16mm films often in collaboration with sound artists and musicians that attempt to suggest the excitement of experience, of taking a walk, going on a trip… Read more
Oddball Films presents Retro-Tech - Vintage Computer Shorts from the Archive , a program of 16mm films from the 60s-80s about the rise of computer technology and the early predictions for an automated future. From William Shatner explaining microprocessors to killer-computers, the original computer dates, animation and more, take a look at the future of technology through the eyes of the past. Science Fiction's perennial Captain, William Shatner gets trippy with silica and microprocessors in the AT&T sponsored Microworld (1976). Presaging the current internet matchmaking trend, Comput-Her… Read more
The Goldilocks fairy tale gets a sexy twist in one segment from the nudie cutie series Bikini Girls (1949). Sinderella (B+W & Color, 1962) This amateur film produced by "Lorelei" is a faithful reenactment of the Brother's Grimm Cinderella... except with a handful of lovely drag queens playing all the parts. A rare document of the San Francisco drag scene in the early 60s, this gem is like a long-lost step sister to Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures. Don't miss the amazingly cheezy production values, awesome wigs, and high-handed bitch slapping that blows Di$ney right out of the water. Poor… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Trip Back: The Original San Francisco Psychedelic Freakout, an evening of 16mm short films shot in San Francisco in the late 1960s drenched in hippies and hallucinogens. This one of a kind program of rare experimental documents of the Summer of Love and beyond includes appearances by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jefferson Airplane, Diggers, banana skin smokers and more! The homegrown hallucinations include Be-In (1967) artistically documenting the human be-in in Golden Gate Park with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in… Read more
Oddball Films brings you Better Living Through Di$ney - Educational Shorts from the Magic Kingdom. While obviously more well known for their animated features, Di$ney (as Walt Di$ney Educational Media) has been making educational primers since the 1940s with audacious subject matter like menstruation, venereal diseases, war propaganda, drug abuse and more. This program features high/lowlights of Di$ney's educational side with shocking shorts, some animated, some live-action and all Di$ney. In the notorious pseudo-science film White Wilderness: Lemmings (1958), Di$ney filmmakers manufactured a… Read more
Trip Down Market Street Be-In Trips Festival Innocent Fair 1962 Blackie the Wonder Horse Groping Hand Hell on Frisco Bay Deconstruction of Playland Kodachrome 1972 Rails and re-bar and construction bulldozers disassembling the massive construction of Playland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco. Observers mill about watching the scene. Streets of San Francisco: One Last Trick 1977 The show revolved around two police officers who investigated homicides in San Francisco. The centre of the series was a veteran cop and widower, Lt Mike Stone (Karl Malden), who had more than twenty years of police… Read more
Oddball Films presents Buster Keaton Rides Again, a night of 16mm film shorts from the 1920s-1960s dedicated to that inimitable silent film star Buster Keaton with silent gems, terrific talkies, rarities, commercials, and an intimate documentary inside the mind of the comedic giant. A vaudevillian from the age of five, Keaton was given the name "Buster" by Harry Houdini and began his film career with Fatty Arbuckle at the age of 21, directing and starring in his own films a couple of years later. The films from this silent era are his most enduring--and are inventive, visionary, and as funny… Read more
Oddball films presents A Century of Drag Cinema, a night of 16mm film shorts from the 1910s-1970s demonstrating the progression of drag in film from a mere comedy gag to a transgressive movement. Drag got its start in pictures early on as a typical comedy gag with most of the major comedy stars of the day cross-dressing for laughs. See Charlie Chaplin in one of the earliest uses of drag in film, as he shaves his trademark mustache and dons a lovely frock to get a part in a film in the Keystone silent comedy The Female Impersonator AKA The Masquerader (1914). Gender bending is the norm in the… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 103, a monthly evening of newly discovered finds, old favorites and rarities from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 103rd program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 103: Cinemania, is an offbeat look at the origins and bizarre expressions of cinema through historical inventions, experimental innovations and hand-made films throughout the ages with a blend of documentary, animation, early cinema rarities and… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson's Final Exam: Shockucation's Last Hurrah, the 41st and final in a monthly series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic educational films, mental hygiene primers and TV specials of the collection. After 40 months of sex, drugs, and schlock and roll, we're retiring everyone's favorite educational programming with one final explosion of weird! Teen girls need to watch out for intruders, even when they inexplicably become your instructor of Self-Defense for Girls (1969). In the evangelical Charlie… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes artist, musician, and filmmaker Zach Von Joo for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. This month, Zach Von Joo will be joining us on the Oddball Cinestage presenting several of his recent films in tandem with evocative works from the archive that resonate on similar film frequencies. Von Joo's approach to filmmaking ranges from the hyper-kinetic to the pensive and dreamy with an ethereal feeling of other-timeliness and vintage nostalgia. Von Joo utilizes a variety of… Read more
Oddball Films presents Youth Gone Wild, a night of 16mm short films from the 1950s-1980s about juvenile delinquents - those teenaged hoodlums that shoplift, vandalize, do drugs and wield knives. The RKO Screenliner Teenagers on Trial (1955) warns parents and teens alike that overcrowded classrooms, vacant parenting and societal pressures can all lead kids down a road of juvenile delinquency. Kathy's parents have got to learn to deal with the fact that their 14 year old runaway daughter is dabbling with sex drugs and being a hippie in an episode of Catholic mental hygiene show Insight: No… Read more
Oddball Films presents Scientific Psychedelia, a program of eye-popping short science and nature films from the 1920s-1980s that capture nature's most surreal, kaleidoscopic and magnificent moments. From microscopic creatures and processes to a space landscape, to the intricacies of animal movement, these films will open your eyes to the natural wonders that lay within and beyond our own eyesight. The evening includes experimental space explorations by Scott Bartlett, cephalopodic inquiries by David Attenborough, mind-blowing hydro-animation from visionary Philip Stapp, evangelical science… Read more
Kindergarteners hand-draw the story of John and his search for an escape from his pain through drugs and alcohol in A Story About Feelings (1981). Marihuana Featuring: Degrassi Jr. High - The Experiment (Color, 1987) The Degrassi empire began in 1983 and continues to this day (with a few breaks and reimaginations along the way). With age-appropriate casting and a bent towards taboo subject matter (abortion, AIDS, vibrators, penis pumps, incontinence on top of a cheerleading pyramid) Degrassi has been pushing the envelope for 30 years. In this episode from the first season of Degrassi Jr. High… Read more
Oddball Films would like to welcome you to The Oddball OlympiXXX - 16mm Sports and Smut, a nutty night of antique bizarro sports newsreels, animated Lego Olympians, and sexy snippets from yesteryear. There will be baby races, dolphin basketball, scantily clad archers, figure skating penguins, naked pogo jumping, rollerskating chimps, bald head contests, nudie cuties, lady judo fighters, skinny dipping swimmers, gondola-jousting, and more stupid sports people did before the internet! Czech cartoon hero Mr. Koumal invents fire for the opening torch ceremony, but another man steals his glory in… Read more
Oddball Films presents Cinematic Synesthesia: A Sensory Overload, an evening of fascinating science docs divulging the secrets of the human senses and a handful of hyper-kinetic experimental shorts designed to overload your senses with barrages of sublime imagery. Enjoy the science spectacular Gateways to the Mind: The Story of the Human Senses (1958) - from the Bell Science series - about the glory and pitfalls of the human senses, hosted by Dr. Frank Baxter and featuring mind-bending sensory-deprivation animation from the legendary Chuck Jones. Find out what happens when your vision is… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 102 , a monthly evening of newly discovered, old finds and rarities from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 102nd program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 102: Experiments in Electronic Arts i s a heady, techno-cultural look at the art, sound and early electronic art forms that jump-started the 60s and transformed the way we create and experience art and technology. Films feature documentaries that survey… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes back Author and Film Historian Jim Morton for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Film historian and editor of ReSearch’s Incredibly Strange Films, Morton has turned his attention to the films of East Germany and discovered that they are every bit as odd as anything from the West. He will be at Oddball Films for one night only to discuss the films of the former German Democratic Republic, with clips from some of his favorites. Some of these films have not yet been released… Read more
Oddball Films presents Vintage Burlesque Bonanza!, a titillating night of burlesque beauties, oddities, and even animation from the 1930s-1950s all screened on 16mm film from the archive. These erotic and exotic artifacts of yesterday are tame by today's standards, but offer us a view into the buttoned-up sexuality of the mid-century man. The night features an array of lovely ladies (and a few strapping men) including the burlesque queens Sally Rand, Faith Bacon, Lili St. Cyr, Betty Dolan and more with more bubble and fan dances than you can handle. Behold the battle of the bubbles with three… Read more
Oddball Films presents Humanimation: Stop-Motion Pixilation, a super fun and funny program of stop-motion animation utilizing human actors as puppets, animated one frame at a time. Films include four shorts from Academy Award winning luminary Norman McLaren and the National Film Board of Canada: Neighbors (1952) a grim tale of two men feuding over a beautiful flower, Two Bagatelles (1953) with two delightful tales of men dancing and flying over a field of grass, A Chairy Tale (1957) featuring music by Ravi Shankar, and his hilarious Opening Speech (1961) with an out of control microphone.… Read more
