"Weirdsville 12: Oddities From The Archives" March 12, 2010

Event: “Weirdsville: 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.  This month’s highlights include: “Be-In”, (psychedelic visual document of the 1st Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park with music by Blue Cheer; “Rolling In Style”, a fashion caravan tours Amish farms and factories; “Allegro Ma Troppo”, a stunning stop motion portrait of Paris; “Now What?”, psychedelic, anti-materialism short made by the Lutheran church; “Discovering Electronic Music”, made during the height of 1980’s synthesizer mania; “Up”, an Oscar-winning hang glider/spirit animal short; plus movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Date: Friday, March 12, 2010 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or info@oddballfilm.com Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Weirdsville_11_PR.pdf
"Weirdsville”
Oddities From The Archives
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, March 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: info@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117.
Highlights Include:

Be-In (Dir. Jerry Abrams, Color, 1967)
An impressionistic document of the January 14, 1967 San Francisco Human Be-In, held in Golden Gate Park, that solidified the psychedelic movement. Captured in the moment are Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Allen Ginsburg, Michael McClure Lenore Kandel and Timothy Leary, with glimpses of the Grateful Dead and 10,000 peace and lovemaking freaks. Music by psych-blues heavies Blue Cheer (named after a particularly heavy batch of LSD).

Rolling In Style (B+W, 1954)
The proverbial farmer’s daughter is swept up in a rolling fashion caravan that travels the back roads to fashion-deprived spots from an Amish community(!) to very attentive factory towns.

Allegro Ma Troppo (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.

Now What? (Color, 196?)
Bizarre anti-materialism short produced by the Lutheran church utilizes crude animation mixed with live footage that also clearly illustrates the pop-culture/hippie threat.

Discovering Electronic Music (Dir. Bernard Wilets, Color, 1983)
The 1983 film "Discovering Electronic Music" is an introduction to the synthesizers and computers used to create electronic music. The film explains the basics of how sound is converted into electrical signals, the functions of oscillators, envelopes and filters, and the roles of samplers and sequencers. Alas, Kraftwerk is not interviewed…

Up (Dir. Mike Hoover, Color, 1967)
Not the 2008 Pixar film- made by Mike Hoover (camera for the mountain sequence in The Eiger Sanction and Endless Summer 2) in 1984, this Oscar-winning short contains stunning pov hang glider shots.
After releasing his pet eagle to the wind, the young handler slips into a reverie that he, too, is high in the air on his hang-glider. In his mind, he skims the ripples of a lake, dives with Yosemite's giant waterfall, and perches atop Monument Valley's Totem Pole Rock until…

PLUS- a stunning Technicolor clip from Blame It On The Samba, movie trailers, 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.

Upcoming Programs
Fri March 5 – Hot Wheels!
Sat March 6 - Fantasy+Fairy Tale
Fri March 12 - Weirdsville 12
Sat March 13 – 2 Shows! 8:00PM “Beyond Edification: National Film Board of Canada” 10:00PM "Let’s Get Schooled!" Weird and Wonderful Educational Films from the Archive

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=546