Machine Project

“Sonic Oddities” a trek though the auditory oddities of film history.
Thursday, December 13th at 8:00PM
Free. Limited Seating

“Sonic Oddities” is a collision of film shorts, clips, fragments and reprocessed sounds features bizarre “sound-cinema” shorts, 1960s commercials, 40s B+W jukebox Soundies, bizarre cold war animation and other sound-based visual oddities from the Oddball Films Archives. Projected in 16mm, this event features a special cinema-sound collaboration with Marshweed’s (Heather Lockie) from Listing Ship playing solo banjo and viola, and possibly some special musical guests. Curated by Oddball Films Director Stephen Parr.

Drawing on the cinematic stimuli explored in his last major film program “Psychoactive” Stephen Parr excavates and synthesizes more way-out-and-wild “sound-cinema” from his archive of over 45,000 film and media elements. Rare commercials such as “Magic Ride”, GM’s Daliesque Chevrolet tour with its pre synthesizer blips and bleeps collide with silent scenes of sunken jetliner wrecks, audio test tones and over-the-top Italian TV stars.

Watch beauty queen Anita Bryant sing the praises of the “Florida Sunshine Tree” while “The Media and the Military” showcases jar-headed GIs listening to Shakespeare and San Francisco beatnik poetry in the classroom. See, “Queer Birds”, one of the most bizarre and endearing cold-war animated shorts in the Oddball archives screen with Philip Stapp’s hallucinatory “First Americans and Their Gods”. Other shorts include “Eucharist”, the 60s neo-psychedelic short produced by the Lutheran Church and “Gumby Concerto”, showcasing our TV rubberman’s improvised sound spree. Incarnations of “Sonic Oddities” have screened at C-Level in Los Angeles, the Fast Forward Rewind Festival in Miami and Anthology Film Archives in NYC.

Also performing in a special cinema-sound collaboration will be Marshweed’s Heather Lockie ( also of Listing Ship) playing solo viola+more to Stephen Parr’s offbeat images. More information about Marshweed

Stephen Parr’s cinematic and sound experiments began in the 70s when he videotaped performers as diverse as John Cage and the Ramones, later creating unique signature montages he screened around the world. From New York’s club Danceteria to the Moscow Cinemateque his burlesque dancers and female contortionists gyrated over teeming tornadoes and atomic disasters.

His previous programs have explored the erotic underbelly of sex-in-cinema (The Subject is Sex Parts 1+2), the offbeat and bizarre (Oddities Beyond Belief), the pervasive effects of propaganda (Historical Hysterical!), and more. Recently he performed in a program entitled “Cinematic Soundscapes” with NYC multi instrumentalist Bohdan Hilash and mezzo-soprano Silvie Jensen. He is the director of Oddball Film+Video, a San Francisco stock footage company and Oddball Films a screening series.

For more visuals and additional information about “Sonic Oddities” visit: http://www.oddballfilm.com/resources/events_parent.html