A Celebration of Oddball Films with Marc Capelle’s Red Room Orchestra
Description
Formed by San Francisco producer and multi-instrumentalist Marc Capelle in 2017, the Red Room Orchestra is a collective of popular, jazz, classical electronic, composers, and performers who’ve played and recorded alongside the Bad Seeds, the Plastic Ono Band, Cibo Matto, Oingo Boingo, Sonic Youth, CAKE, American Music Club, Lou Harrison, Aesop Rock, the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Nels Cline Singers, Rodriguez, Iggy Pop, Tune-Yards, Bill Frisell, and more. They’ve offered live renderings of the music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, as well as reinterpreting the soundtracks of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). For this special Oddball Films presentation, the Orchestra promises to commemorate and confound with a No Wave/disco score that features as much ABBA as Albert Ayler.
The reels in Stephen Parr’s Oddball Films collection are said to number 50,000, but their impact on screens and filmmakers is exponentially greater. Elements of Parr’s archive of industrials, educational films, and, yes, oddities of all kinds found their way into the hands of filmmakers near and far, from Bay Area documentarians like Jennifer Kroot to A-list Hollywood directors like Ridley Scott. The in-house screenings upstairs in his Mission hideaway headquarters were not-to-be-missed (or replicated) events that demonstrated his long-practiced art of remixing, recontextualizing, bewildering, educating, and delighting his audience. SFFILM pays tribute to this sui generis collector who passed before his time this past year with a screening of work from Oddball Films’ archive accompanied by live music.