“Roaring 20’s and Quirky 30’s” at Oddball Films February 5, 2010

Event: “Roaring 20’s and Quirky 30’s” - With Live Performance by “The Dimestore Dandy”! Guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare Jazz Age Era 16mm films, clips and trailers. The 20’s and 30’s, collectively known as the Jazz Age, was a time of extremes: bold experimentation, prohibition boozing and wild abandon in the 20’s followed by the Great Depression, quirky resilience and wrap-your-troubles-in-dreams fantasy. Films include: The Singing Brakeman, featuring Yodeling Jimmie Rodgers; Anemic Cinema, Marcel Duchamp’s Dada classic; Streets of Paris, with burlesque queen/local legend Sally Rand; Pacific 231, brilliant machine age short by Jean Mitry; L’Etoile des Mer, Man Ray’s surrealist masterpiece; also- rare Prohibition clips featuring nutty preachers and wacky teetotalers, banjo maniac Eddie Peabody and more! Plus, a live performance by Tin Pan Alley troubadour The Dimestore Dandy, aka Rick Quisol of the Frisky Frolics. Expect to hear tunes from the golden age of modern popular music including “Cake Eatin’ Man”, “Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of My Jellyroll”, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and more!
Date: Friday, February 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/Roaring_20s_PR.pdf

Roaring 20’s and Quirky 30’s
1920s/1930s Popular Music and the Avant Garde
Plus! Live Performance by Tin Pan Alley Troubadour
The Dimestore Dandy at Oddball Films

On Friday, February 5, guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare Jazz Age Era 16mm films, clips and trailers with a live performance by Tin Pan Alley song stylist The Dimestore Dandy, aka Rick Quisol of the Frisky Frolics. The 20’s and 30’s, collectively known as the Jazz Age, was a time of extremes: bold experimentation, prohibition boozing and wild abandon in the 20’s followed by the Great Depression, quirky resilience and wrap-your-troubles-in-dreams fantasy. Come “travel back in time” to an era when the harsh realities of the Depression were temporarily softened by snappy tunes, droll lyrics, the occasional ferocious kazoo solo and the bizarre avant garde. All Bohemians, Surrealists, Dandies, Fops, Vamps, Vixens and Flappers encouraged!!
Showtime is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Films Include:

The Singing Brakeman (Dir. Basil Smith, B+W, 1929)
The only film appearance by Jimmie Rodgers, The Father of Country Music, who died of tuberculosis in 1933. Jimmie yodels his way through three classics: “Waitin’ For A Train”, “Daddy and Home” and “Blue Yodel #1 (T For Texas)”.

Anemic Cinema (Dir. Marcel Duchamp, B+W, 1926)
This is the only film directed by French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose name is associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. As with similar avant-garde works made by Man Ray, Hans Richter or Fernand Léger, there's no plot, only moving shapes and objects, in an attempt to deny the vision of art as contemplation and ecstasy. This characteristically dada film by Marcel Duchamp consists of a series of visual and verbal puns with nonsense phrases inscribed around rotating spiral patterns, creating an almost hypnotic effect; an exploration of wordplay intermixed with optical illusions.

Streets of Paris (Dir. Burton Holmes, B+W, 1933)
A tour of the Paris pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair exposition in Chicago features Sally Rand and her famous Fan Dance.

“Sittin’ On A Backyard Fence” (Busby Berkeley, B+W, 1933)
Clip from the great Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade- Human kitties and a mouse get frisky and frolic to the Tin Pan Alley favorite.

Pacific 231 (Dir. Jean Mitry, B&W, 1949)
Masterfully edited ode to the machine age steam engine train cut to the 1923 symphonic movement by Arthur Honneger. Winner of the Cutting Prize at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival.

L’Etoile des Mer (Dir. Man Ray, B+W, 1928)
A classic of Surrealist cinema, Man Ray’s L’Etoile des Mer (Starfish) is a haunting, dreamlike ode to subconscious sexual desire, inspired by a poem from Robert Desnos and starring the iconic Kiki of Montparnasse.

Tin Can Tourist (Dir. Mannie Davis, B+W, 1937)
Farmer Al Falfa and his dog hit the road in their modern, gadget-loaded trailer home. “Riding along with a trailer / Happy as can be, / No rent to pay, no landlords, / No-sir-ee!”

PLUS- Prohibition and Pot: astounding original stock footage of prohibition era propaganda, hyperbole and hijinx; trailers for mid 1930’s exploitation flix Marijuana and Maniac, mind-bending Eddie Peabody and his banjo and more!!

Links to The Dimestore Dandy:
Info: http://www.thefriskyfrolics.com/
Sounds: http://www.last.fm/music/The+Frisky+Frolics

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.

Upcoming Programs
Thu Jan 28 – Lost Animation Fest - The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne (1957)
Fri Jan 29 - Lost Animation Fest – 2 programs! (8:00PM Eastern Europe/Soviet Bloc and 10:00PM American Animation)
Sat Jan 30 - Lost Animation Fest – 2 programs! (8:00PM World Animation/10:00PM Banned! & Censored!)
Fri Feb 5 – Roaring 20s and Qiurky 30’s w/ The Dimestore Dandy Live!
Sat Feb 6 – The Art of Film
Fri Feb 12 – Weirdsville 11
Sat Feb 13-Love, Sex and VD
Fri Feb 19 - Mardi Gras New Orleans Gumbo
Sat Feb 20th - Strange Sinema

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.flarerecord.com/?p=487