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Strange Sinema 88: Groundbreakers of the Avant-Garde with Live Accompaniment by Bohdan HilashPost an Event »
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 88: Groundbreakers of the Avant Garde - a once monthly evening of newly discovered and avant-garde rarities from the stacks of the archive. Drawing on his collection of over 50,000 16mm film prints, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has compiled his 88th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This program features a wide array of films focused on groundbreaking, avant-garde and experimental filmmakers and artists that have shocked, thrilled, mesmerized, bored and disrupted conventional cinematic aesthetics. Additionally, selected shorts will be accompanied live by NYC multi- instrumentalist and woodwind player Bohdan Hilash (Meredith Monk). We lay the groundwork for this evening’s strangeness with Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926), a hypnotic exploration of wordplay intermixed with optical illusions followed by The Life And Death Of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927), Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s legendary masterpiece of low budget art and early Hollywood cynicism, Un Chien Andalou (“The Andalusian Dog”, 1928), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s shocking and best-known surrealist films, with the most famous opening scene in cinema history, Buried Treasure (1928), this anonymous (and infamous) erotic curiosity is considered the granddaddy of animated smut, Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945), articulates the potential for transcendence through dance and ritual, while her extraordinary Meshes in the Afternoon (1943), one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema, attunes itself to the unconscious mind caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality, Merce Cunningham (1964), a very rare French-made poetic montage of movement pioneer Merce Cunningham’s dance performances and collaboration with life partner and sound composer John Cage featuring “found object” sets by radical pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. Finally, we close with Chris Marker’s legendary apocalyptic opus La Jetée (1962), a mind-bending reflection on time, memory, and man at the end of it all and one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made. Plus: A rarely screened NET documentary of seminal pop artist Robert Rauschenberg showcasing a young Rauschenberg’s innovative “Revolvers” or “Combines”- multilayered painted sculptures that expand the boundaries of art. Date: Friday, May 22nd, 2015 at 8:00PM Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117 Web: http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com