Oddball Films invites you to a unique evening of punks, zines and mixtapes with visiting filmmaker and editor of Unsound Magazine, William Davenport for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Davenport will be showing a sneak preview of his latest film Media About Media About Media: Negativland Story about the internationally known iconoclastic "culture jamming" performance and musical group, as well as discussing and presenting clips from “Unsound Redux”, the docu-series that reveals a story told… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Rod Serling: Beyond the Twilight Zone, an evening of 16mm films from the archive all featuring that shiver-inducing host: Rod Serling. While best remembered for his TV terrors, Serling also lent his inimitable voice to documentaries, PSAs and educational films, all of which we will be sampling. The night will include a devilish episode of The Twilight Zone: Of Late I Think of Cliffordville (1963), starring Julie Newmar as Miss Devlin who offers the man who has everything a chance to start all over again. Serling narrates the haunting and… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Aliens: An Extraterrestrial Shockucation, the 38th 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 are headed out of this world and out of our minds with one of the most bonkers and baffling installments yet with all the best/worst low-budget aliens you've never seen teaching you lessons in safety, grammar, peer pressure, and inappropriate touching. Meet Bub from the planet Bubbylonia - a woman… Read more
Oddball Films presents Metamorphic Cinema: Meditations on Transformation, a multi-genred evening of 16mm short films and animation reflecting on mutations and transfigurations. From mesmerizing time-lapse nature films to jaw-dropping animation, evolutionary musings to early cinema magic - including several new dazzling films from the depths of the archive - it's a one of a kind program celebrating the beauty of change. Films include legendary outsider filmmaker Sid Laverents' homegrown nature film The Butterfly with Four Birthdays (1965) in which shedding the cocoon is likened to getting "… Read more
Oddball Films brings you Totally Strange 80's - Sex, Spandex, and Roller Skates. This bizarre and over-the-top evening features the oddest shorts of the 1980s, a decade known for its over-indulgence, bright colors, big hair, spandex and roller skates...roller skates! Get rappin' about fast food and vegetables in the gut-busting craptacular Fast Food: What's in it for You? (1988). Kids get creepy with grandma and her walkie-talkie-controlled robot when their picture book points out their body parts in Bellybuttons Are Navels (1985). Tag along with a couple of spandex-clad Calendar Control… Read more
Oddball Films presents All That Jazz: Jazz Cartoons and Shorts, a 16mm cinematic screening swinging with a heady and hip sound called Jazz. The evening features antique musical shorts with tons of jazz greats like Maurice Rocco, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway and Ivie Anderson as well as a handful of animated films that feature jazz soundtracks and influence. We kick off our set with a classic of jazz cinema, Jammin' the Blues (1944), which features the coolest of cats, Lester Young, sitting in a relaxed slouch with his sax slung to his side as he wails a languorous… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Erotic Oddities with the most bizarre and offbeat smut, burlesque and erotica of the collection. From insane pornographic cartoons to marionette strippers to bizarre stag films, this is one night of the strangest smut you'll ever see. In one of the earliest stag films, Getting his Goat (1923), a man is in for a surprise when he propositions sex through a hole in a gate. Eveready Hardon heads to the beach in the outrageous cartoon Buried Treasure (1928). Get ready for the disgusting pornographic animation featuring music by the Beach Boys and a… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 99 , 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 his 99th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. For Strange Sinema 99: Psycho Science Stephen Parr is featuring some of the most way-out and weird science films from the archive. Tonight’s program is anchored by the hilarious and bizarre Moody Institute of Science films, the Christian cult crackpot science company as well… Read more
Insomnie (Color & B+W, 1963, Pierre Etaix) A delightfully comedic send-off to the vampire-melodrama written by, starring and directed by French clown, comedian, and acclaimed filmmaker Pierre Etaix. A man (played by Etaix) is having trouble sleeping. He takes pills, settles in and yet, nothing. He begins to read a vampire novel, fading in and out of the narrative (and even playing the head vampire as well) as he gets more and more insomniomatic. As daylight enters the story and "real" life as well, the man finally falls asleep, only to realize the blood-sucking has only just begun! Anemic… Read more
Oddball Films presents Antique Animal Antics!, a program of vintage 16mm films full of adorable, hilarious and anthropomorphic animals from the 1940s-1970s. Decades before youtube, CGI, and the Buddies franchise, these furry film stars were doing tricks, wearing clothes, talking, singing and raising hell! This time around we've got singing bears, car-racing capuchin monkeys, hibernating hamsters, daring dachshunds, a talking horse (of course) and so much more. Find out whether a bear or a hippo might be the perfect pet for you - and hear it from the hippo's mouth - in the Speaking of Animals… Read more
Oddball Films invites you to a unique evening with author and musicologist Richie Unterberger for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Unterberger will be here to present film clips of rock performers based in Asia, as well as rock by Asian Americans and others of Asian descent from the 1960s to the present. It’s not possible to cover every Asian territory from which rock musicians have emerged or descended, but this program features artists based in or descended from more than half a dozen… Read more
Oddball Films presents Future News: Walter Cronkite's 21st Century, a program of episodes and highlights from the short-lived CB$ News show The 21st Century hosted by the legendary Walter Cronkite from 1967-1969. The show was a spin-off of The 20th Century that focused on the possibilities for the coming century including advances in utopian ideals as well as technology like computers, lasers, robotics, machine-made art, and even predicting 3D TVs and the inflatable furniture trend. The program often featured visionaries, sci-fi authors, and scientists postulating on the future of work,… Read more
Oddball Films presents Busby Berkeley: Sex, Surrealism, and Song, a night of mind-blowing musical numbers from the wildest imagination in Hollywood choreography all on 16mm film from the archive. Clearly influenced by the concurrent surrealist movement in art and avant-garde cinema, Busby Berkeley numbers transformed masses of chorus girls into kaleidoscopic geometric patterns; blending dozens of bodies into one fleshy piece of moving art. The evening features some of Berkeley's most iconic and insane work including three scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933): Ginger Rogers sings We're in… Read more
Oddball Films presents What the F(ilm)?! 16: You Can't Handle the Spoof!, an evening of some of the most bizarre, hilarious and insane films from our massive 16mm collection. This month, we're making a mockery of ourselves by offering you gut-busting parodies of Fellini, Bergman, Coppola, Lucas and more. May the farce be with you in the ridiculous Star Wars parody Hardware Wars (1978) replete with flying toasters, puppets, and z-grade special effects. See the horror, the horror of Porklips Now (1980) shot in San Francisco and featuring a war between butchers in Chinatown and a spot-on Brando… Read more
Oddball Films presents Czech Please! an evening of mind-blowing animation from the former Czechoslovakia. From stop-motion puppets to cell-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 great Czech animators. Films include Jiří Trnka's exquisite parable of totalitarianism and named one of the top five animated films of all-time: The Hand (1965). Jiří Brdečka's Blessings of Love (1966) is a sublime tale of love and longing. Get a triple dose of Zdeněk Miler's beloved Little Mole in three… Read more
Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Learn Your Lesson from Sid Davis , the 37th 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 are celebrating the career of the master of the educational s care film who would be turning 100 today. Sid Davis films were famously funded by an initial $1000 donation by John Wayne. He went on to produce numerous classics of the educational scare film genre, priding himself by making each one for $1000- a miniscule amount… Read more
Oddball Films welcomes film collector, filmmaker and found footage expert Anthony Buchanan all the way from Colorado for our Cinema Soiree Series, a monthly soiree featuring visiting authors, filmmakers and curators presenting and sharing cinema insights. Buchanan will be swinging into Oddball to unspool some of his new super8 films--predominantly found footage--which deal with issues of media hypnosis, distorted perception in American life, satirical but poignant commentaries on home movie traditions and ideologies, and other American mythologies. Source material for the films include orphan… Read more
Oddball Films presents Coming Attractions from Hell: Horror, B-Movie and Exploitation Trailers a 16mm program of rare B-Movie, “Art Film”, Horror, Suspense, and vintage XXX trailers from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. Many of these films sank without a trace, but their garish promotional trailers live on in the massive archives of Oddball Films. Ranging from 30 seconds to several minutes in length, these promotional shorts for coming attractions were often much more entertaining than the features they promote. From the silent cinema trailers featuring Lon Chaney Sr. as Quasimodo in the Hunchback… Read more
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 98 , 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 98th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 98: “Ecstatic Motion” - High-Wire Feats, Wild Horses, & Speed Wizards features a sampling of films that stretch the boundaries of cinema while serving to bring a sublime ecstasy to the viewer. From famed director Claude LeLouche’s ( A Man… Read more
Oddball Films presents Sexperimental Cinema, an evening of 16mm films that blur the line between experimental film and erotica. From the sensuous to the bizarre, this program features avant-garde and experimental works as well as post-modern erotica, animation, art, documentary and more. Films include Orange (1971) experimental filmmaker Karen Johnson’s abstract and erotic short consisting of extreme close-up shots of an orange being peeled and eaten, Fuck Horray (1970) an anonymous highly-edited slice of subliminal sex, Peter Foldes' eye-popping rare animation Go Faster (1971) with a man who… Read more
