Oddball Films Media
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May 27, 2012
Oddball Films presents Shot in San Francisco. This program features vintage 16mm films focused on our beautiful city by the bay. Long lost sights and sounds, rare early color cinematography and everywhere parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in their prime. Highlights include: G, by Edward Demartini, a rare portrait of San Francisco Garbage collectors in 1963, 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (1939), astounding color scenes from the ’39 World’s Fair held on the newly constructed Treasure Island; Trojan Horse (1967), follow eccentric artist Fredric Hobbs all around “Summer of Love” San Francisco in his wild art car; San Francisco in Cinemascope (1961), beautiful sights, cars, scenes and people captured in widescreen color!; 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (1906), see it all come tumbling down and determined folks ready to rebuild; plus China Clipper ships off Alameda in 1935, the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges under construction, a wild bicycle stunt on top of the Palace of Fine Arts and more. See the city that knows how- when it knew how!
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Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117
Highlights Include:
1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (Color, 1939, Silent)
Absolutely stunning color scenes from the World’s Fair held on Treasure Island. The Golden Gate International Exposition celebrated the modern industrial west, best symbolized by the completion of two engineering marvels—the Golden Gate and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges. The fair was staged on another feat of modern engineering, the manmade Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The exposition’s “Pacifica” modern style, developed largely by San Francisco architects, merged western architecture with an interpretation of the buildings of Asia and South America.
Highlights most of the major sights, including the incredible Cavalcade of the Golden West with casts of 300, horses, wagons, and costumed actors re-enacting historic events, Count Basie and Harry Owens performing in the Temple Compound, and the famed “Gay Way” featuring an uncensored look inside the “Artists Models Studio” and much more- the next best thing to being there!
Trojan Horse (Prod. Ronald Bostwick/Robert Blasdell, Color, 1967)
Documents the creation of the amazing rolling sculpture designed by outsider artist Fredric Hobbs, unleashed on San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Clad in an orange jump suit, Hobbs drives his creation all over our beautiful city from Haight Ashbury to North Beach, Lincoln Park to downtown, culminating in a final, ignominious act: the issuance of a parking ticket by one of San Francisco’s finest.
Arriving in San Francisco in the late 1950’s after studying in Madrid, artist Fredric Hobbs Goya-inspired paintings “were populated with demons performing sacrifices and contemporary witches’ Sabbaths… his grotesque figures gradually became translated into sculpture. In the early 1960’s- inspired by the folk idols used in pagan rituals and primitive religious processions- Hobbs began adding wheels to his mutilated Everyman and deformed Earth Mothers and rolling them about the streets. His most ambitious “parade sculpture” was The Trojan Horse, a horrendous tableau of mythological monsters that rose from Procrustean slags of plexiglass attached to a stripped-down auto chassis. Wearing an orange jump suit, Hobbs drove the creation to Los Angeles, where it exhibited at several locations”. (Thomas Albright- Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980).
Hobbs went on to make several insanely bizarre, Bay Area-based cult films in the early 1970’s, including Roseland, Alabama’s Ghost, and Godmonster of Indian Flats.
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Another amazing document of our beautiful city by the bay- this time shot by a professional “amateur” in widescreen cinemascope. Captures the city, the sights, the autos and the people going about their daily routine circa 1961- mesmerizing! A recent (shortened) clip of this on youtube had friends and fans waxing eloquent- now see it on the “big” screen!
1906 San Francisco Earthquake (B+W, 1906, Silent)
Footage of the city in ruins after the 1906 earthquake. Shots of burned, collapsed, smoldering buildings, remaining walls falling down. St. Patrick’s church destroyed in the Mission. Meals cooked, served, and eaten in the streets, relief workers eating and drinking in front of the wreckage. At the intersection of Market and Powell- wagons, horses, early autos, a very busy street and packed cable cars (fixed or still intact?). Finally a sequence showing refugees on ferryboats shuttled over to Oakland. They didn’t waste any time moving on and rebuilding!
Plus! Rare shots of the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge under construction, famed Pan American Airlines China Clipper Ship in action off Alameda (1935), a wild bicycle stunt- on top of the Palace of Fine Arts!! and more!