"Lost Animation V" at Oddball Films November 5, 2010

Event: “Lost Animation V” Guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rarely screened classics and obscurities of world animation. Most are quite scarce- despite scads of accolades and international awards. Films include: “Nightangel”, beautiful and touching puppet and pinscreen technique; “Animated Cartoons: The Toy That Grew Up”, fascinating 1947 documentary on early animation; “Adventures of an *”; jazz and innovotion from John and Faith Hubley; “Symposium on Popular Songs”, from ragtime to rockabilly- rare D*sney; “The Hand”, genius puppet animation from Czech master Jiri Trnka; “Seven Arts”, the story of the arts- caveman style; and “6 Short Films”, stream of consciousness line animation from CalArts pioneer James Gore.
Date: Friday, Novemeber 5, 2010 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 94110
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Lost_Animation_5.pdf
"Lost Animation V”
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, November 5, Guest Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rarely screened animated shorts- both classics and obscurities. Several of these shorts won or were nominated for international awards and all showcase inventive, wild imagination- from the simplest line drawings, to mid-century modern classics, obtuse international favorites, and masterful puppet animation.
Show time is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Films Include:

Nightangel (Color, 1986)
A seamless blend of puppet animation and the pinscreen technique is used in this evocative, romantic story by Břetislav Pojar of a man's obsession with a mysterious and benign spirit. When tragedy befalls him, he finds refuge in the love this nightangel has shown him. Winner of the L.A. Film Critics Award.

About Pin Screen Animation:
Pin screen animation is made using a screen pierced by thousands of headless pins. The animator creates images on the screen by pushing the pins into the screen. When the screen is lit from the side, each pin casts a shadow – the deeper the pin is pushed, the smaller the shadow, which made it possible to create images with the subtlest of tones, rather like a delicate charcoal drawing. This techniques was invented by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker in the 1930′s.

Animated Cartoons: The Toy That Grew Up (B&W, 1947)
The history of the animated cartoon from the traumatope through the zoetrope and praxinoscope. Traces the development of the animated cartoon from a 19th-century children's toy to modern cartoons. Includes a complete animated show as it would have looked in the 1890's. The traumatrope, a child's toy, led Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau to study persistence of vision and to make a machine that animated static drawings. Emile Reynard developed it further and was the first to show animated cartoons.

Adventures of an * (Color, 1956)
The first film John and Faith Hubley produced together commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, with music by jazz great Benny Carter. “They violated all the rules”, remembered once animator William Littlejohn, “They threw dust on the cels, and they worked with grease so the paint would run. It came out beautifully: everybody was awestruck that such a thing would work”.

“We decided to do a film with music and no dialogue and to deal with abstract characters. We wanted to get a graphic look that had never been seen before. So we played with the wax-resist technique: drawing with wax and splashing it with watercolor to produce a resisted texture. We ended up waxing all the drawings and spraying them and double-exposing them. We did the backgrounds the same way. It photographed with a very rich waxy texture, which was a fresh look” – John Hubley

Symposium on Popular Songs (Color, 1962)
Special cartoon featurette made by D*sney features songs written by the Sherman Brothers with music arrangements by Tutti Camarata. Ludwig Von Drake invites the audience into his mansion where he tells all about popular music through the years, introducing several songs illustrated with great stop-motionanimation. Nominated for an Academy Award as Best Cartoon Short Subject.

The Hand (Color, 1965)
Jiri Trnka (1912 – 1969) was indisputably one of the greatest animated filmmakers.
The brilliant puppet animation Ruka (aka The Hand) is the last film he made before his death in 1969 and reflects Trnka’s own struggle to create art under a totalitarian regime. Made to take advantage of the post-1964 political thaw, The Hand was banned in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion, and no wonder: no amount of spin can dilute the moral force of Trnka’s message - or his sly satire of mass popular culture: is it a coincidence that one of the hand’s vehicles of totalitarian control is a television set?

Seven Arts (Color, 1958)
The development of human culture by the first caveman, who, frightened by his own shadow, attacks it with his axe to create the first work of art. By accident, the first examples of architecture, drama, literature, and music come into existence. From Romanian animator Ion Popescu-Gopo

6 Short Films (Color, 1974)
Stream of consciousness inspired line animation from Cal Arts pioneer James Gore.

Curator Biography
Pete Gowdy (aka DJ Chas Gaudi) is host of San Francisco’s Shellac Shack, a weekly 78 rpm listening party and a DJ specializing in vintage sounds: soul, jazz, country, punk and new wave. A graduate of the Vassar College Film Program, he is an associate producer of Marc Huestis Presents, the long-running movie legend tributes at the Castro Theatre.

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://mim.io/d9ba6