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Oddball Films presents Buster Keaton Rides Again, a night of 16mm film shorts from the 1920s-1960s dedicated to that inimitable silent film star Buster Keaton with silent gems, terrific talkies, rarities, commercials, and an intimate documentary inside the mind of the comedic giant. A vaudevillian from the age of five, Keaton was given the name "Buster" by Harry Houdini and began his film career with Fatty Arbuckle at the age of 21, directing and starring in his own films a couple of years later. The films from this silent era are his most enduring--and are inventive, visionary, and as funny as anything that has followed. Unlike his contemporaries Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, Keaton does not mug; he does not implore his audience; he watches calmly along with the audience as chaos unfolds and reacts with his trademark smarts, physical skill and elegance. Films include Cops (1922), a Kafka-esque story of a man on the run from the entire police force; The Balloonatic (1923) with gags galore, this film finds Buster bumbling through each frame, finally whisked away by a rogue hot air balloon and dropped into the woods to fend for himself; Grand Slam Opera (1936) with Keaton performing his juggling act over the radio; the rare documentary Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965) which gives you a rare look behind the scenes of his trademark slapstick style a mere year before his death, and The Railrodder (1965), a modern salute to classic Buster made by The National Film Board of Canada (1965). Plus, Vintage Keaton Commercials and early birds will get the opportunity to see an episode of The Misadventures of Buster Keaton (1950s). Everything screened on 16mm film from our stock footage archive. Date: Thursday, September 1st, 2016 at 8:00pm Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilms.com or (415) 558-8117 Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com Featuring: Cops (B+W, 1922) One of Buster Keaton’s most iconic and brilliantly constructed films it tells the Kafka-esque story of a man who accidentally gets on the wrong side of the Los Angeles Police Department by accidentally throwing a bomb into a police parade and gets chased all over the city by the entire police department. Keaton's efforts to elude them are both inventive and funny. This short also contains the classic sequence with a horse and an overfull wagon load of furniture. One of Keaton's most iconic and brilliantly-constructed short films, “Cops” was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry in 1997.