Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson Plays in Traffic: The Bloody Road to Shockucation , the 40th in a monthly 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 heading out on the highway to hell with a truckload of gory and kitschy pedestrian and driver safety scare films from the 1930s - 80s including tons of new discoveries from the archive. There will be dolls flying through windshields, little boys in pantaloons, animated drunk driving foibles… Read more
VD: Attack Plan (1972, color) “ Yes, it’s true. Walt D*sney Productions has made a significant contribution to the war against VD. “VD Attack Plan” – A fully animated Walt D*sney 16mm motion picture.” states the brochure accompanying this 16mm educational film. VD Attack Plan had some forward thinking and enlightening approaches (not just for D*sney but everyone else producing this type of film in 1973) to the subject of sexually transmitted diseases including promotion of condoms (instead of abstinence) and the fact that VD can be spread through same sex couplings. This “war against disease… Read more
Oddball Films presents Revolutionary Black Voices, an empowering and entertaining evening of 16mm film rarities documenting the history and enduring legacy of the Black musicians, poets, revolutionaries, protestors, and artists that stood up and sung out to change the world. Watch the Black Panthers (including Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver) protest, lay down their demands for a fair and just country, and even see Huey P. Newton speak from the Alameda County Prison in the radical and slightly experimental "Newsreel" Off The Pigs! (1969). In James Brown: The Man (1974), "Mr. Dynamite"… Read more
"Film for Projection" (B+W, 1940s) Learn how to show films correctly by choosing the correct projector, keeping the films and gate free of dust, and following appropriate rewinding techniques. You never know when you’ll be called upon to screen a film (perhaps tonight?) so pay attention! Behind Your Snapshots (Color, 1972) A short promotional film produced by Kodak that shines a light on the sheer scale, precision, and engineering might required to produce film and paper for nearly the entire planet at the height of analog photography's pre-eminence. This Kodak industrial short may start off… Read more
Oddball Films presents What the F(ilm)?! 17: Oddball's Strangest Ladies, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive stock footage collection. This time around, we're saluting the girls and women that make our archive so strange with a night full of lady wrestlers, derby dolls, psychedelic ice-skaters, little girl ventriloquists, singing and dancing celebrities, tiger burlesque numbers, talking horses and more feminine cine-insanity than you can handle. Get on the ice in a psychedelic skating segment from the bizarre TV-special Here's Peggy Fleming (… Read more
Oddball Films presents The Underbelly of the Bay: Dark Secrets of San Francisco, a program of short films, documentaries, TV programs, and film noirs revealing the dark side of the Bay Area from the devastating quake at the turn of the 20th century up through the dark arts resurgence of the 1970s. From Satanists to cults, murderers to earthquakes, bombings, crooks and more, this is one dark night in the San Francisco of yesteryear. We begin with the trailer for Hitchcock's quintessential San Francisco murder mystery Vertigo (1958). Films also include the classic 1906 San Francisco Earthquake… Read more
Getting Along with Parents B+W 1954 Six high school students plan to go to a night club after the junior prom dance. Describes five parental reactions to the plan showing how those reactions disclose varied family backgrounds and attitudes. Emphasizes that there are two sides to most problems and that both sides must have a chance to be heard. Post No Bills Color, 1968 Everett Aison A satire on the subject of commitment as revealed in an account about a man who destroys billboards as an act of civil disobedience, becomes a hero, and is exploited in an advertisement which is ironically put on… Read more
Oddball Films present The Bradbury Chronicles , a program of ultra-rare adaptations of the short stories of the literary giant Ray Bradbury from the 1950s-1980s all screened on 16mm film from the archive. 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 have never been the same. Join our host Fred Astaire in a future world of computerized justice and body swapping in an episode of the Hitchcock-produced series Alcoa Premiere: The Jail (1962), penned by Bradbury himself… Read more
Der Fuehrer’s Face The New Spirit Private Snafu: The Chowhound Who Died Soundies Mr. and Mrs. America 1940s bw World War II (WW II). President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) introduces the subject and tells why you and I - Mr. and Mrs. America - should not only buy war bonds now, but hold them until maturity. Combat shots of men in action / men in battle and of wounded men / injured soldiers. We are reminded that work and money and lots of it are needed to keep our giant industrial machinery operating. Economy. Investment. Patriotism. Supporting the war effort. World War Two Excerpts U.S. Navy big… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Clowns: A Creepy Shockucation, the 39th in a monthly 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 tapping into the most disturbing of subject matter yet: creepy creepy clowns! From evangelical clown shorts, to hallucinating clowns, to clown puppets, and even a little pantomime, it's sure to be the celluloid stuff of nightmares! Oddball favorite, Toothache of the Clown (1971) is one bad acid-trip to the… Read more
Oddball Films presents Unique New Yorkers: Big Apple Mini-Docs, a program of compelling, hilarious, inspiring and absurd character documentaries about some fascinating personalities from the NYC of yesteryear including break-dancers, Barbra Streisand enthusiasts, blues masters, and wild animal lovers with a patented Oddball smattering of vintage New York ephemera. Head out for a beer with a bull in the hilarious and horrifying documentary Manimals (1978), about people who keep exotic pets in their New York City apartments from Oscar-winner Robin Lehman. In I Remember Barbra (1980), Kevin… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes film collector, archivist, filmmaker and comic artist Ian Sundahl all the way from Portland for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. From his massive Portland vaults, Ian Sundahl comes with an insane mash-up of vintage bizarre 16mm television. From TV favorites to things you never knew existed, Sundahl brings a wide variety of the strangest TV had to offer. Come see the most unique and oddball TV films from his collection in a celebration of the old boob tube. Many of the… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly evening of old finds, rare gems and newly discovered films from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints-the largest archive in Northern California, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 101st program of offbeat, ethnographic, experimental and unusual films. Strange Sinema 101: Into the Ozone: Hobos, Hitch-Hikers, Gypsies and Road Runners is a genre-bending 16mm film program exploring global and pop cultural concepts of travel and nomadic life. This program was specifically curated for… Read more
Oddball Films presents Antiquated Sex Education, a program of 16mm sex ed shorts from the 1930s-1950s. These now laughable artifacts from "the good old days" feature an adherence to old-fashioned social mores and cringeworthy outdated medical advice while tackling subjects like teenage sex, puberty, stripping, pregnancy and VD. Check your privates, private in the Navy training film The Pick-Up (1944), starring an unlucky schmuck who picks up a nasty case of the clap just in time for his furlough. Mary and Jeff are just two teenagers in love, but parking and heavy petting just might lead to "… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Classic Cartoon Cavalcade, an evening of some of our very favorite classic cartoons hand-picked from the San Francisco Media Archive's massive collection. From the 1930s-1950s, from the silly to the sexy with a little Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies (including works by Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones), UPA, Terrytoons Fleischer Brothers, Walt Di$ney and imitators, just to name a few. This time around, we've got a triple shot of that beloved stuttering swine: Porky. He visits a house haunted with leprechauns and is… Read more
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… Read more
Oddball Films presents Visions of Dystopia, an evening of mind-bending 16mm short films - handpicked from the archive - that transport us into alternate realities; be it the bleak future, or a dark and dangerous fantasy realm. Chris Marker's enduring sci-fi experiment La Jetee (1962) utilizes still images to portray a post-apocalyptic world of time-travel, torture and lost love. Polish director Jan Habarta's dystopian masterpiece No. 00173 (1967) will blow your mind with it's eery depiction of a grim Kraftwerkian factory momentarily brightened by a colorful butterfly. In De Overkant (1966),… Read more
Oddball Films presents Film Under the Influence - Vintage Drug and Alcohol Scare Films, a program of mind-expanding, terror-intending and hilarity-inducing short 16mm educational films about the dangers of drugs. It's a night of drunk embarrassing moms, rats on drugs, LSD freak-outs, bongo-beating beatniks, piles of pills, afterschool specials, and tons of hilarious new finds from the archive. These classroom classics from the 1960s through the 1980s were meant to scare the pants off the junior-high set but probably encouraged as many to experiment with drugs and alcohol as it discouraged.… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 100, a monthly evening of newly discovered films, rarities and choice selects from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled this 100th (!) program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This 100 th program is a celebration of mesmerizing, hypnotic films, designed to push your perceptual boundaries . Strange Sinema 100: Hypnotica features a stunning, genre twisting mix of seminal, awe inspiring films, from trance-inducing visual poems, stunning Czech stop… Read more
