Date: Thursday,
June 25, 2015 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
Featuring:
Kinetic Art in Paris (Color,1971)
The works of Kinetic artists Julio Le Parc, Victor Vasarely,
John Rock Yvar aren’t the only things explored in detail in this ultra rare,
quirky documentary that features music from the short-lived cult British pop
duo White Trash. Viscerally challenging, this kaleidoscopic homage to light,
sound, motion and restraint is quintessential viewing for anyone with a desire
to be fascinated by anything…even if just for a moment. Don’t miss this!
Lapis (Color, 1965)
Cinema pioneer James Whitney’s film consists entirely of hundreds
of constantly moving points of light. Lapis performs such marvelous
transformations of positive and negative space, projected color and
after-image, similarity and difference, that the viewer cannot help but
contemplate the relationships of the unit to the whole, the individual
consciousness to the cosmos, of space to time - and not a dry, forced
meditation, but a supremely sensual, purely visual dialogue.
Like a single mandala
moving within itself, the particles surge around each other in constant
metamorphosis, a serene ecstasy of what Jung calls "individuation."
For 10 minutes, a succession of beautiful designs grows incredibly, ever more
intricate and astounding; sometimes the black background itself becomes the
pattern, when paths are shunned by the moving dots. A voluptuous raga
soundtrack by Ravi Shankar perfectly matches the film's flow, and helped to
make LAPIS one of the most accessible "experimental films" ever made.
The images were all created with handmade cels, and the
rotation of more than one of these cels creates some of the movements. John
Whitney, his brother had built a pioneer computerized animation set-up—the
prototype for the motion-control systems that later made possible such special
effects as the "Star Gate" sequence of 2001. James used that set-up
to shoot some of his handmade artwork, since it could ensure accuracy of
placement and incremental movement.
Ritual in Transfigured Time (B+W, 1946)
*For more information about James Whitney’s work:
Art for Tomorrow (Color, 1969)
“The artist is
beginning to react to the impact of science and technology and beginning to
come to terms with it. The artist better be rather careful or he will be losing
his job and the engineer will become the artist of the future.”
In this film, from the Twentieth Century television program
narrated by Walter Cronkite the art of the future is foreseen in new techniques
demonstrated by artists and engineers using distinctive methods and new
technology including computers, cybernetics, heart beat triggers, invisible art
by magnetism, prisms, lights, moving objects, converging lines, and number
patterns. This fascinating look at the “future past” features a kaleidoscopic
portrait of avant-garde art works by Yaacov Agam (who uses strobe lights),
Wen-Ying Tsai (vibrating steel rods), John Mott-Smith (computer-generated
ideas), *Jean Tinguely (machine-made sculpture), Victor Vasarely’s early
experiments with IBM computers, Jean Dupuy and many more.
*Here’s a link to a clip from Tinguely’s mind-blowing Homage
to New York (1960) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MqsWqBX4wQ
Free Fall (B+W, 1964)
Free Fall features dazzling pixilation, in-camera
superimpositions, percussive tribal music, syncopated rhythms and ironic
juxtapositions. Using a brisk “single-framing” technique, Arthur Lipsett
attempts to create a synesthetic experience through the intensification of
image and sound. Citing the film theorist Sigfreud Kracauer, Lipsett writes, “Throughout this psychophysical reality,
inner and outer events intermingle and fuse with each other – 'I cannot tell
whether I am seeing or hearing – I feel taste, and smell sound – it's all one –
I myself am the tone.'”
*Note: Free Fall was intended as a collaboration with
the American composer John Cage, modeled on his system of chance operations.
However, Cage subsequently withdrew his participation fearing Lipsett would
attempt to control and thereby undermine the aleatory organization of audio and
visuals.
Ritual in Transfigured Time (B+W, 1946)
Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time is a
formalized, aesthetic composition of regimentation and studies of dynamic human
forms that prefigure the films of such diverse filmmakers as Yvonne Rainer
and Claire Denis. Deren incorporates representational performance art into
abstract, non-narrative filmmaking through intersecting currents of
subconscious, parallel realities, revealing the film's tone and intrinsic logic
through the choreography of organic bodies in performance of ritual, and in the
process, creates a haunting and sublime exposition on the spatial (rather than
linear) dimensionality of time, synchronicity, and the potentiality of fate.
With Rita Christiani, Maya Deren, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal and Frank Westerbrook.
Allegro Ma Troppo (Color, 1963)
A Parisian evening, conveyed through automatic cameras and
imaginative cinematography of the life of Paris between 6PM and 6AM shot at two
frames per second utilizing automatic cameras.
From strippers to car crashes, Paul Roubaix’s Allegro Ma Troppo evokes
the intensity and variety of nocturnal life in the City of Light through
speeded-up action, freeze-frame, and virtuoso editing.
A Chairy Tale (B+W, 1957)
The Wizard of Speed and Time (Color, 1979)
A Chairy Tale (B+W, 1957)
Shot partly with pixilation and partly at 12 frames a second
this surrealistic fable is the directorial collaboration of three of the
geniuses of the National Film Board of Canada; Norman McLaren, Claude Jutra and
Evelyn Lambert. The musical accompaniment is by Indian musicians Ravi Shankar,
Chatur Lal, and Modu Mullick. In this film, a chair, animated by Evelyn
Lambart, refuses to be sat upon, forcing a young man to perform an acrobatic
and comedic dance with the chair.
“A Chairy Tale” won the Canadian Film Award for Best Arts
and Experimental Film, as well as a BAFTA Special Award, and earned an Academy
Award nomination for Live Action Short Subject.
The Wizard of Speed and Time (Color, 1979)
A young man in a green wizard costume runs throughout
America at super speed. Along the way, he gives a pretty girl a swift lift to
another city, gives golden stars to other women who want a trip themselves. He
then slips on a banana peel and comically crashes into a film stage,
which he then brings to life in magical ways.
Jittlov is a special effects technician, and
produced all of the special effects in the film himself, many through stop
motion animation.
This short film originally was shown as a segment of an
episode of
The Wonderful World of
Disney. The film segment then began to be shown at science fiction
conventions around the country, gaining popularity, prompting Jittlov to eventually
create a (semi) fictionalized account of how this short film came to be, in the
form of a feature film.
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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.