"Time, Space and Movement" at Oddball Films April 30, 2010

Event: “Time, Space, Movement”.  Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare 16mm films that explore the themes of Time, Space and Movement (the representational essence of film). By slowing and accelerating time, compressing and distorting space (and distance), arresting and suggesting movement, these filmmakers explode the boundaries of conventional film, inducing a meditative, trance-inducing and in some cases a near-epileptic response in the viewer. Films include: Spacy, a stunning, hypnotic experimental short by Takashi Ito; Powers of 10, the landmark film by Charles and Ray Eames; USA Film, drive across the USA in 17 minutes; Allegro Ma Troppo, the astonishingly beautiful ode to Paris; The Story of Time, a beautiful 1949 film about time sponsored by Rolex; Cosmic Zoom, similar to Powers of 10 from Canadian animator Eva Szasz; Rendezvous, across Paris by sports car at real–time high speed (an oddball favorite- double projection!), Fantasy, wild animation freak-out by Vince Collins; The Wizard of Speed and Time, hilarious/ridiculous short by Mike Jitlov (the original short, later turned into a feature film); and more!
Date: Friday, April 30, 2010 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/TSM_PR.pdf

"Time, Space and Movement”
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, April 30, Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of intriguing short experimental/art/animation films that explore the themes of time, space and movement. This promises to be an eye-popping, mind-expanding, trance-inducing evening!
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:

Spacy (Color, 1980-81, Takashi Ito)
Hypnotic avant-garde rarity by Japan’s celebrated avant-garde filmmaker 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.

The Story of Time (Color, 1949)
Sponsored by the Rolex watch company this truly unique Technicolor short pulls out all the stops in its history of time telling from prehistory through the modern age. With music from the London Philharmonic Symphony in the background The Story of Time utilizes surreal stop motion claymation, optical printing and over-the-top narration to give us a dazzling perspective on time through the ages.

Rendezvous (Color, 1976, Claude Lelouch)
Brilliant, high-speed drive across Paris via sports car. Director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman) mounted a camera to the bumper of his Mercedes 450SEL and zooms through the early morning streets of Paris at speeds up to 140mph, narrowly missing several stunned pedestrians (he was arrested immediately after the first screening). One take, real time- you won’t believe your eyes. Oddball has several copies of this gem; tonight we will be showing a simultaneous double projection- stereo mayhem!

USA Film (Color, 1977, Eric Martin)
Directed by Eric Martin at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University the film collapses 4,000 coast-to-coast miles (From Washington DC to San Francisco) into a high speed 17 minute single-framed opus incorporating found sound and radio broadcasts, creating a jittery, pulsating whirlwind of images.

Powers of Ten (Color, 1968, Charles and Ray Eames)
Undoubtedly the most famous of the Eames Films, Powers of Ten is probably one of the most watched short films of the post-war era. It presents the profound idea of orders of magnitude, with the subtitle of the film being: A Film Dealing With the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.
Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out, until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward--into the hand of the sleeping picnicker--with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. It is all done in a single, continuous, seamless shot. It’s also one of the most ambitious tracking shots in the history of cinema. The Library of Congress has chosen Powers of Ten for the National Film Registry.

Allegro Ma Troppo (Color, 1963, Paul Roubaix)
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.

Cosmic Zoom (Color, 1968, Eva Szasz)
The film starts with an aerial image of a boy rowing a boat on the Ottawa River. The movement then freezes and view slowly zooms out, revealing more of the landscape all the time. The continuous zoom-out takes the viewer on a journey from Earth, past the Moon, the planets of the Solar System, the Milky Way and out into the far reaches of the known universe. The process is then reversed, and the view zooms back through space to Earth, returning to the boy on the boat. It then zooms in to the back of the boy's hand, where a mosquito is resting. It zooms into the insect's proboscis and on into the microscopic world, concluding at nucleolus level. It then zooms back out to the original view of the boy on the boat.

The Wizard of Speed and Time (Color, 1979, Mike Jitlov)
A young man in a green wizard costume runs throughout America at super speed, much like the superhero The Flash. 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 and then slips on a banana-peel, and comically crashes into a film stage, which he then brings to life in magical ways.

Fantasy (Color, 1975, Vince Collins)
A hallucinatory handmade animated film from San Francisco animation legend Vince Collins evokes his particular brand of surrealist psychedelia. Mind-blowing!

PLUS- slo-mo car crash tests and more!

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.