"Weirdsville 20" at Oddball Films November 12, 2010

Event: “Weirdsville 20: Oddities from the Archives”.  Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare, weird and some highly entertaining 16mm shorts, movie trailers and commercials culled from the 50,000+ archive at Oddball Films.  Highlights include: The Magician (1962), disturbing, super-rare anti-war/fascism film from Poland; Tumbleweed: An Odyssey (1972), tumbling tumbleweed hits the Big City; Replay (1970), sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll and the generation gap; Arabesque (1975), pioneering computer-generated trance film; Toothache of the Clown (1972), clown goes to the dentist in this bizarre educational film; Are You Popular? (1947), post-war conformity education!; Plus, wild movie trailers, krazy commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Date: Friday, November 12, 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/Weirdsville_20_PR.pdf
"Weirdsville 20”
Oddities From The Archives
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, November 12, Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of the strange, the bizarre, and the sometimes baffling short films, commercials and trailers from deep within the Oddball archive. These “found” films surface in the process of research for other programs: too good to languish on the shelves, they demand to be screened! Weirdsville is a monthly companion program to the Strange Sinema series. 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:

The Magician aka Czarodziej (B+W, 1962)
Directed by Tad Makarczynski; produced by Semafor Studios in Poland, this remarkable rarity is a grim, savage and unpleasantly effective little anti-war allegory, cleverly conceived and beautifully executed. “The Magician” recruits a small group of young boys to become little soldiers… Not much information on director Makarczynski,- he most certainly lived through the horror of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the Warsaw Uprising, and in addition to many documentaries about the war he collaborated with “On The Bowery” director Lionel Rogosin on the anti-war film “Good Times, Wonderful Times”.

Tumbleweed: An Odyssey (Color, 1972)
Follow a lonely little tumbleweed as it rolls along the desert landscape- then hits the big city for unforeseen adventures!

Replay (Color, 1970)
The old folks have a thing or two to say about the long hairs in this debut little gem by director Robert Deubel (Girls Nite Out). The generation gap was never more apparent in 1970 as the free-loving hipsters clashed with the “Greatest Generation”. Music by composer Charles Strouse, who re-used the melody of the title song several years later, as "Tomorrow" from the musical Annie.

Arabesque (Color, 1975)
Early abstract computer-generated film by pioneer John Whitney- shimmering lines and waves of oscillating color dance to the music of Eastern rhythms and evolve from randomness to patterns inspired by 8th century Persian designs. Inspired by his 1974 visit to the city of Isfahan in Iran, Whitney found a relation between the formal and visual tradition of Islamic art and architecture and his own computer graphic study.

Whitney famously collaborated with Saul Bass on the title sequence to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Toothache of the Clown (Color, 1972)
Sad circus clown has a toothache, goes to the dentist where little kids brush, floss and pull whole candy pieces out of giant teeth. I’ll never go to the dentist again!!

Are You Popular? (B+W, 1947)
One of the best examples of post-war conformity/educational films- “good girls” and “bad girls”, proper dating etiquette courtesy and more. A beatnik’s nightmare!

PLUS- wild movie trailers, krazy commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
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/cc7d6