"Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs” at Oddball Films February 18, 2011

Event: “Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs: Diggers, Shooters and Wirewalkers”. Guest curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of documentary films profiling exceptionally eccentric free thinkers, artists and radicals. The exceptionally rare Nowsreal (1968) is the abstract film document of the final days of the San Francisco Diggers movement; Chris Burden (1989), the infamous performance and installation artist who explores ideas of personal (and interpersonal) danger and the taboo; and High Wire (1984), an early profile of high wire artist Philippe Petit (subject of the 2008 film Man On Wire).
Date: Friday, February 18, 2011 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/Eccentrics_3_PR.pdf

"Kooks, Eccentrics and Oddballs”
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, February 18, Guest Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of films focused on those lovable kooks, eccentrics and oddballs that make the world a bit more interesting. Some may be geniuses, others are just a bit off- but they all are fascinating subjects. Showtime is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Highlights Include:

Nowsreal (Color, 1968)
A beautiful print of this super rarity filmed in and around San Francisco in the Spring of 1968, documenting in abstract fashion the “end” of the Digger movement- the loose collective of artists, radicals and free thinkers who were closely associated with and shared a number of members with a guerilla theater group the San Francisco Mime Troupe. They envisioned a society free from private property, and all forms of buying and selling (actor Peter Coyote was a founding member of the Diggers).

We moved the Diggers onto the City Hall steps and occupied them for three months, giving out food to city employees, washing our hair in the fountain, reading poetry on the steps. We made a film about that titled Nowsreal. We made a decision that the Diggers would end when the event ended on the summer solstice. On the last day, we put “San Francisco is Entering Into Eternity” on a theatre marquee. We held events in five different parts of the city, watched the sun go down, and asked each other: “What are we going to do now? - co-producer Peter Berg in conversation with Ron Chepesiuk from the book “Sixties Radicals, Then and Now”

Chris Burden (Dir. Peter Kirby, Color, 1989)
One of the most intriguing, sensationalist performance artists of the 1970’s and thought-provoking installation artist of the 1980’s, this 30 minute documentary covers all his major events and installations up to 1989. Burden, critics and friends are interviewed, revealing the ideas behind such infamous performances such as Shoot (Burden is shot with a .22 rifle), Transfixed (Burden is crucified atop a VW Bug) and installation pieces The Reason For The Neutron Bomb (50,000 nickels with match heads- each representing the number of Russian tanks along their eastern border) and Samson (a 100-ton jack that that slowly pushed against the load-bearing walls of the museum, activated by visitors entering via turnstile) and many more.

High Wire (Color, 1984) Directed by Sandi Sissel. Philippe Petit (the recent subject of the doc “Man on Wire”) is a French high wire artist who gained fame for his spectacular walk between the Twin Towers in New York City on August 7, 1974. Here he metaphorically bridges the ancient and modern as he walks a high wire suspended between the towers at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and a sixteen story high-rise building across the street. With sound score by composer Phillip Glass.

Further Reading:

The Diggers
http://www.diggers.org/overview.htm
http://winwingames.blogspot.com/2009/12/digger-games.html

Chris Burden
http://www.volny.cz/rhorvitz/burden.html

Philippe Petit
http://longliveirony.com/Petit.html
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/38bed