Universal Rhythms: The Pulse of Time - Fri. Feb. 21 - 8PM

Oddball Films Media • Feb 16, 2014



Oddball Films and guest curator Louis Steven present Universal Rhythms: The Pulse of Time, a cinematic exploration where mechanized time is an additive practicality but ultimately just one of the rhythms along which we experience life. Through scientific and cultural research Of Time, Work and Leisure (1962) paints an amusingly dystopian picture of the pressures and speed on modern man; meanwhile What Time is Your Body?(1973) shows a series of unsettling experiments where willing participants are isolated away from any external means of telling time while their daily cycles are continuously monitored; and through wonderful animation and soothing narration Universal Rhythms (1979) reveals the beauty in the physical rhythms surrounding us but are too small, large, or slow and fast for our perception.  Local filmmaker Bauer Byron's The Icarus Wish (1972 uses multi-screen images to glance upon a child's innocent wish, fear and fantasies. Frank Mouris's Frank Film (1973) and Maya Deren's The Ritual of Transfigured Time (1946) use playful and unsettling techniques to distort the rhythm of the clock and so reveal the stable rhythm of seconds, hours, and years as illusory. In Skaterdater(1965) we find a unique and intoxicating 60s SoCal wave-after-wave rhythm where the summer seems eternally flowing with youthful joy of skating, goofing around and falling in love. Come and lose yourself in the “vibrant rhythm of all matters. Where our physical world is in constant motion and everything is energy and rhythm, everything music and dance.” 



Date: Friday, February 21st, 2014 at 8:00pm


Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2014/02/universal-rhythms-pulse-of-tim…


Featuring:


Of Time, Work and Leisure (B&W 1962)
With help from the bow tied Professor De Grazia and humorously dramatic reconstructions this film examines the relationship between time, work and leisure in industrialised society. It is a somewhat dystopian vision, where the lives and routines of American's are shown to beunder the dictatorship of the ticking clock. Is this a charmingly dated pessimism or more strikingly relevant now than ever?

What Time is Your Body? (Color, 1973)
What happens to your daily rhythm when all external means of time keeping are removed? Found out in this fascinating and unsettling BBC Time Life film where see a variety of dark scientific experiments on our 'body's clock'. Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany conduct studies of circadian rhythm on human subjects kept in unchanging cells for months on end, and deliver some surprising results.

Ritual in Transfigured Time (B&W, 1946, Maya Deren)
Through stuttering freeze frames, time reversals, and shifting camera speeds Maya Deren distorts rhythms to reveal the dance within our everyday acts and motions. An elegant, intriguing film by an early female visionary in art cinema.

The Icarus Wish (Color, 1972, Bauer Byron)
Mysterious filmmaker Bauer Byron (beyond demonic reach of a google search) uses multi-screen images to gain access to the multiplicity of time and place and person by focusing upon the youthful yearning to fly.

Frank Film (Color, 1973)
An experimental autobiography of Frank Mouris. Life is condensed down into chaotic and conflicting rhythms in Frank and Caroline Mouris's brilliant, rapid animation, art film. Brace yourselves for an eye-popping compilation of images collected and interwoven along with a soundscore created by Tony Schwartz and two competing narrative overdubs. The film won the 1974 Academy Award for best short film.
Universal Rhythms (Color, 1979, Dov Jacobson and Judy Kreijanovsky)
Discover life in all its beauty and complexity in this euphoric animated exploration into the rhythms of the physical world. Through a perfect balancing the poetic and scientific, we find “our physical world is in constant motion. Everything is energy and rhythm, everything is music and dance.”

Skater Dater (Color, 1965, Noel Black)
With sidewalk surfing action, SoCal sky, matching racing stripe jackets, white jeans, first love, a boss surf rock soundtrack and a downhill finale Skater Dater shows youth at is most carefree and leisurely.. These skaters rebelliously re-appropriate the suburban landscape. They carve down concrete hills they are also carving a life not bound by time, where the summer never ends. We see the full immortality of youth and the joyful timelessness of summer.  Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1966 and nominated for an Academy Award, Featuring riders from the Imperial Skateboarding Club out of Torrance, CA.




About the Curator:

Louis Steven is not of this timezone. A former intern at Oddball Films who is in the Bay Area to visit the many wonderful people who met while studying abroad here. At Manchester University he graduated with a thesis on Moby Dick which examined the representation of time as experience at sea. Soon to be moving to Germany where he hopes to live a well paced life in moderately sized city.



About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.