Date: Thursday, October 4th, 2012 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
“The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her 'beauty.'"
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women
Featuring:
Frederick's Of Hollywood (Color, 1970s)
The appeal is sex. We see models prancing around in ridiculous lingerie, and extolling the miracle of padding in all of the right places, old ladies opening mail in the mail order department and couples trying selecting sexy underwear. The clothes are designed to please men; to put a man in their life and a little life in their man. Since women aren't born equal its Frederick's of Hollywood's job to make them more equal. Does Frederick's of Hollywood treat women like sex objects? Of course, that's the point.
Accent on Beauty (B+W, 1930s)
A beautiful young lady demonstrates her makeup routine, while the audience gets a behind the scenes look at how makeup is made, or rather, how it was made in the early '30s.
An unintentionally hilarious long-form commercial presented by Monsanto and J.C. Pennies. See America in style with Jan, Jill and Amy, three gals crossing the country, but always making sure to dress their best. The ladies take a ride on the Delta Queen river boat in their sporty twinsets. They tour a plantation in long evening gowns. One meets a gambler with an eye patch and plays blackjack. They change into short cocktail dresses and go to a nightclub in the French Quarter to listen to ragtime and jazz. They take a drive through Pikes Peak National Forest in a convertible and wear cowboy hats. They go to a beach in California, model their bathing suits, then build a bonfire in cable knit sweaters. They drive the convertible to San Francisco and stay at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. They ride a cable car in stylish daytime suits and dresses and go to the Japanese Tea garden, and drive down Lombard St. They fly home in style on an American Airlines jet, undoubtedly to buy more stylish clothes from Penney's.
Behind Every Good Man… (B+W, 1966)
Decades before RuPaul became a household name and before the Stonewall riots that launched the gay rights movement, this doc short features an African American drag queen pushing gender roles in a society barely out of the repressive 1950s. This very rare film (possibly one of the first documenting a black gay male) directed by Nikolai Ursin, then a film student at the University of California, Los Angeles records our subject’s meditations on love, gay life in the early 1960s, and gender transgression. The film and its subject avoid period cliches about homosexuality and point to hopeful possibilities. “I’d like to live a happy life, that’s for sure,” he says, and one not only wants him to, but believes that it really could happen.
 Battle of the Bulge (B+W, 1950)Part of the Variety View segment, this antiquated and offensive short aims to keep women in their place by joking about their rotundness and their men's displeasure. The narrator follows several women who are overweight and offers various advice and instructions on how to thin down. With various footage of women engaging in “weight-reducing” activities, like passive exercise machines, a treadmill, exercise, steam baths, even a hilarious bit on facial yoga. Constant juxtaposition between the fat woman who resorts to machines and the thin beautiful women who engage in physical exercise for weight loss. Overall, the narrator is poking fun at the ridiculous methods which women will resort to achieve beauty.  Red Hot Riding Hood (Color, 1943)Tex Avery's sensual adaptation liberates its characters from their Disney-style forest and slaps them in the middle of swanky Manhattan. Grandma's a nymphomaniac swinger, and her rustic cottage home a hip penthouse pad. Little Red has become a red-hot singer-stripper; the Wolf is a model of lupine lechery; and the forest is supplanted by a big-city nightclub as the enchanted place of forbidden sexuality. The Wolf tries to pull the old Red Riding Hood gag in order to meet up with Little Red, but Grandma has other ideas.  Beauty for a Career (Color, 1962)
Cindy is sad, she's all alone now that her best girlfriends have all left town after graduation to study in their chosen fields (you know, secretarial and teaching of course). But Cindy doesn't have a career path, just a great hairdo. That is until Cindy meets with an older friend who's having a fabulous time in Beauty School. Suddenly, the path becomes clear, and Cindy enrolls the very next day. See what she learns to make every woman as beautiful as she can.
Curator's Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009.
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