Believe it or Not

Secret Cinema hosts a holy night of mad science from the Moody Institute.

by Shaun Brady

[ film ]

For nearly 12 minutes, the 1954 film The Electric Eel is indistinguishable from any other educational short of the era. A lab coat-clad, Brylcreemed "scientist" offers basic facts about our friend the eel in a dry but avuncular tone ("Here at the lab, we just call him Joe"). Even the offbeat moment where he has five volunteers hold hands to be shocked by the eel's charge is typical of the camp humor of the form. It's not until the film's closing moments that something seems off, as our heretofore facts-and-figures host suddenly thanks Joe the Eel for "giving us a new understanding of the God who made us all."

This was the M.O. for the Moody Institute of Science, which produced hundreds of classroom films offering an intel­ligent design slant on science decades before that term came into vogue. An offshoot of the Moody Bible Institute, the MIS typically featured the Rev. Erwin Moon (the "scientist" of Electric Eel ), who preached "Sermons from Science" before packed audiences at state and world fairs beginning in the late '30s. Part evangelist and part snake-oil salesman (if such a distinction can be drawn), Moon was a holy huckster who preached the gospel with a healthy dose of cornball spectacle.

As a unique Halloween offering, the Secret Cinema will host a program of Moody Institute of Science shorts, "Secret Science and Bizarre Beliefs," curated by Stephen Parr of San Francisco-based archival footage company Oddball Film + Video.

"The Moody Institute of Science was basically a religious institution with a science bent," Parr explains. "They made these really way-out crackpot films using surplus military equipment and stock footage to create a 'God-in-science' model of the world. It's campy, it's hokey, it shows enough science to have a certain level of validity and somehow make it into the classroom, but God's hand is always somewhere in the picture."

Parr's program is scheduled to include The Electric Eel , the relativity-themed Mystery of Time, Facts of Faith (in which Moon takes the voltage himself, via Tesla coil), Freedom in Flight ( contrasting man's law with God's via the downed WWII bomber Lady Be Good) and Blind As a Bat , which explores bats' "radar" through a series of bizarre experiments. ("Obviously a part of an intelligent plan. But, uh ... whose intelligence was involved? The bat's?")

"They blindfold the bat, they tie its wings," Parr laughs. "They do all this mammal abuse in the guise of science, but in a really naïve, almost dumb way."

Parr is a filmmaker and collector who got his start in the 1970s, creating visual backdrops at nightclubs and shooting footage of musicians from The Ramones to John Cage. Oddball has provided footage from its 50,000-film archive for movies like Sean Penn's Milk and the documentary The Weather Underground, and worked with the likes of Kiss and Iggy Pop. He also hosts a regular screening series from his unique collection in San Francisco.

"When most people think of a film," Parr says, "they think of a feature film, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Most people don't see the other uses of footage: educational films, medical films, home movies, technical films, adult films, blue movies, nudies, burlesque films. And I think those films are like a cement that holds the rest of the culture together. There's a place for popular films — maybe not in my collection, but in everybody else's. But these are things that people just don't ordinarily have an opportunity to look at."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Fri., Oct. 29, 8 p.m., $7, Moore College of Art & Design, 1916 Race St., 215-965-4099, thesecretcinema.com.