"Altered States" Surrealism, Ritual & Trance at Oddball Films December 5, 2009

Event: Altered States, a program exploring surrealism, ritual and trance in a variety of cinematic styles through the eyes of 20th century avant-garde and ethnographic filmmakers. This program showcases altered states through the eyes of the filmmakers witnessing or by their hands creating.  Films include: Norman McLaren’s Phantasy, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, Invocation of my Demon Brother by Kenneth Anger, A Study in Choreography for the Camera, by Maya Deren, Trance and Dance in Bali by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Tanka by David LeBruun and many more.
Date: Saturday, December 5th  at 8:30PM.
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/altered_states.pdf

Surrealism, Ritual and Trance

Altered States
Screens at Oddball Films

On Saturday, December 5th at 8:30PM Oddball Films presents Altered States, a program exploring surrealism, ritual and trance in a variety of cinematic styles through the eyes of 20th century avant-garde and ethnographic filmmakers. This program showcases altered states through the eyes and hands of the filmmakers creating or documenting altered realities. The event will take place at Oddball Films, 275 Capp St, San Francisco. Admission is $10.00. Limited Seating RSVP to [email protected] or phone 558.8117.

Films Include:                 

Sacred Trances in Bali and Java ( Color, 1974)
Through the observance of Hindu, Muslim and animistic rites in the sacred trance rituals of Bali and Java, spirits are brought down to enter the bodies of those in trance. Spirits are invoked and enter bodies when in trance, allowing participants to walk on fire or roll on broken glass. This film is an extraordinary example of altered states of consciousness achieved in this blend of animistic, Hindu, and Moslem rites. Produced by award-winning filmmaker Elda Hartley.
“Fantasy” (Color, 1976)
A hallucinatory handmade animated film from San Francisco animation legend Vince Collins evokes his particular brand of surrealist psychedelia.
Trance and Dance in Bali (B+W, 1937-39)
The film was produced by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and records a performance of the Balinese ceremonial kris (dagger) dance-drama, which depicts the never-ending struggle between witch (death-dealing) and dragon (life-protecting), as it was given in the village of Pagoetan in the late 1930s. The dancers experience violent trance seizures, turn their krises against their breasts without injury, and are restored to consciousness with incense and holy water. Narrated by famed anthropologist Margaret Mead against a background of Balinese music. This “ecstatic ethnography” was an extraordinary effort to use film and photography in the field, and the precursor to much of the visual anthropology that has gone on since then.

Binary Bit Patterns (Color, 1969)
The spectacular, fast-paced film features quilt-like tapestries of polyhedral and crystalline figures pulsating and multiplying with a kind of universal logic eliciting a hypnotic, trancelike effect from the viewer. This film echoes a preoccupation with the mandala image and the interest in Eastern meditative philosophy that is seen in the work of the whole Whitney family. With original sound score.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (Color, 1969)
In Invocation of My Demon Brother filmmaker Kenneth Anger creates an altered state of consciousness through the use of cinematic and psycho-spiritual magick techniques.
The film is described by notorious avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger as “An assault on the sensorium” features “underworld powers gathering at a midnight mass to shadow forth Lord Lucifer in a gathering of spirits”. Invocation is a quintessential late 1960 freak-out, containing a montage of drug use, pagan rituals, an albino, stock footage of the Vietnam War, the Rolling Stones in concert and abstract imagery all played  back at various speeds. The film is accompanied by a repetitive, droning Moog musical score created by Mick Jagger. In the words of avant-garde film critic P. Adams Sitney “It is Anger's most metaphysical film: here he eschews literal connections, makes images jar against one another, and does not create a center of gravity through which the collage is to be interpreted... the burden of synthesis falls upon the viewer.”’

A Study in Choreography for the Camera (B+W, 1945)
Maya Deren was one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century working and spending time with such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, John Cage and Anaïs Nin . In A Study in Choreography Maya  Deren's 16mm Bolex becomes a performer equal in significance to the star of this film, Talley Beattey. In the opening sequence Deren's camera rotates more than 360 degrees, scanning past the figure in movement. In this film Deren articulates the potential for transcendence through dance and ritual. Deren writes, “The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places -Wendy Haslem
A Phantasy (Color, 1952)
A surrealist abstract art film, with pastel drawing and cutout animation by animation legend Norman McLaren, is cut to music for 4 saxophones and synthetic sound (i.e. sound created by drawing directly on the soundtrack) by Maurice Blackburn.  In this dreamlike landscape, inanimate but familiar objects come to life to disport themselves in grave dances and playful ritual.

Arabesque (Color, 1975)
John Whitney ‘s Arabesque, is considered  by many to be the seminal computer film.  Set to the music of Manoochelher Sadeghi, and created during a residency at IBM Whitney balanced science with aesthetics as he experimented with the eccentricities of Islamic architecture creating whirling, exotic flows of computer generated images. Arabesque  was one of the first computer-generated films that married technology and art in a focused, cinematic manner. Working with his early homemade computerized motion-control set-up, Whitney could produce a variety of innovative designs and metamorphoses of text and still images creating new worlds of electronic images.
Un Chien Andalou (“The Andalusian Dog”, B+W, 1928) Made in France by the brilliant Spanish director Luis Buñuel and the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. Un Chien Andalou is one of the best-known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920s. It uses dream logic that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes that attempt to shock the viewer's inner psyche. Its opening scene is one of the most famous in cinema history.

Tanka (1976) “An extraordinary film”-Melinda Wortz, Art News
Tanka means, literally, a thing rolled up. David LeBruun’s Tanka is brilliantly powered by the insight that Tibetan religious paintings are intended to be perceived in constant movement rather than repose. The film, photographed from Tibetan scroll paintings of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is a cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, wild revels, raging fires and sea battles with monsters-an animated journey through the image world of the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”.

Plus!

Spacy (Color, 1980-81)
Hypnotic avant-garde rarity by Takashi Ito.  This experimental stop-motion film takes place in a gymnasium: we approach a picture on a frame, which turns out to be a picture of the gymnasium. We enter the picture and approach another frame, which turns out to be a picture of… and so on.  A mesmerizing electronic soundtrack completes this trance-inducing meditation on time and space.

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, educationals, 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.

Official Website: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/altered_states.pdf