Event
Strange Sinema 89: Visionaries of Time and SpacePost an Event »
Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema, a monthly screening of new finds, old gems and offbeat oddities from Oddball Films’ vast collection of 16mm film prints. Drawing on his archive of over 50,000 films, Oddball Films director Stephen Parr has complied his 89th program of classic, strange, offbeat and unusual films. This installment, Strange Sinema 89: Visionaries of Time and Space, explores artists working with speed and light, time and space. 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.Other artists use new technologies creating invisible art by magnetism, prisms, lights, moving objects, converging lines, and number patterns.
Films include the mesmerizing documentary Kinetic Art in Paris (1971), a viscerally challenging, kaleidoscopic homage to the future of perception, featuring some of the world’s foremost kinetic artists; Lapis (1965), made by cinema pioneer James Whitney consisting entirely of hundreds of constantly moving points of light and one of the most accessible experimental films ever made; Art For Tomorrow (1969) an eye-popping exploration of experimental tech-oriented art incorporating early IBM computers, cybernetics, heart beat triggers, and invisible art by magnetism all narrated by Walter Cronkite; Free Fall (1964) famed Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett creates a synesthetic experience through the intensification of image and sound utilizing single-frame editing and tribal music.
Maya Deren’s A Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) incorporates film techniques -reprinting, varying camera speeds, and direction and movement of the camera-integrating representational performance art into abstract, non-narrative filmmaking through intersecting currents of subconscious, parallel realities; Paul Roubaix’s Allegro Ma Troppo (1963) is a hyperkinetic vision of Parisian nightlife between 6PM and 6AM, shot at two frames per second utilizing automatic cameras; A Chairy Tale (1957) the surrealistic virtuoso collaboration of three of the geniuses of the National Film Board of Canada; Norman McLaren, Claude Jutra and Evelyn Lambert, about a chair that refuses to be sat upon, forcing a young man to perform an acrobatic and comedic dance with the chair, with music by Ravi Shankar; and The Wizard of Speed and Time (1979) Mike Jitlov’s legendary high speed mind-blowing special effects short.
Date: Thursday, June 25, 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/2015/06/strange-sinema-89-visionaries-of-time.html