August 31 - George Kuchar

 

Happy Birthday, George Kuchar! Born today in 1942 as George Andrew Kuchar, this American teacher, painter, video artist and underground film director was known for his "low-fi" aesthetic. 

Born in New York, New York, Kuchar, years later, trained as a commercial artist at the School of Industrial Art, now known as the High School of Art and Design, a vocational school in New York City. 

He eventually graduated in 1960 and later drew weather maps for a local news show. 

During this period, he and his twin brother, American underground filmmaker, actor and artist Mike Kuchar, were making 8mm films, which were later showcased in the then-burgeoning underground film scene. 

After leaving New York City for San Francisco, California, Kuchar prolifically produced video diaries, the true quantity of which remains unknown.  

Varying in duration from five to ninety minutes, Kuchar's video diaries inflect his everyday life with familiar themes of his oeuvre. 

These included appetite, voluptuousness, the hilarity of bathos, campy appropriation, flatulence, the weather, urination, friendship, love, and the artificiality of cinema itself.  

The most well-known of Kuchar's video diaries are his Weather Diary Series. These chronicle Kuchar's annual pilgrimages to El Reno, Oklahoma to observe tornadoes. 

In response to changes in media technology, Kuchar's video diaries increasingly applied the tactics of camp appropriation to the stuff of the digital age.  

Kuchar's later video diaries made use of consumer grade digital effects to generate something like postmodern psychedelia. His entire output of video work is archived at the Video Data Bank. Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) also has a selection of titles. 

In San Francisco, Kuchar later became involved with underground comics via his neighbors. 

These included American cartoonist, editor and comic's advocate Art Spiegelman and American cartoonist Bill "Are we having fun yet?" Griffith. They both wound up in his films and Kuchar wound up in their publications. 

Kuchar directed over two hundred films and videos (including over fifteen with Mike), many of them short films by students in his courses at the San Francisco Art Institute.  

Of these, Kuchar is best known for writing, directing and starring in the seventeen-minute 1966 American short comedy/drama film 'Hold Me While I'm Naked'. Also known as 'Color Me Lurid', it is shot on 16mm film. 

Shot in color, the short is about a depressed independent director (Kuchar, playing himself) who becomes awkward when he asks to film his actresses in the nude.

The film features partial nudity and sex scenes, as the director becomes jealous after seeing American underground film actress Donna Kerness and her boyfriend make love during a steamy session in the shower. 

According to Kerness, she got sick from all of the shower scenes in the film and had to quit. 

Instead, Kuchar rewrote the script to be about an actress walking off of the set of a film because she didn't want to do all of the erotic shower scenes. Kuchar afterwards dubbed all of Kerness' dialog as well. 

Canadian film critic Ken Kelman referred to 'Hold Me While I'm Naked' as "a perfect fusion of mock-Hollywood and mock-avant-garde styles". 

French-Canadian author Sébastien Lefait and French author Philippe Ortoli compared it to films such as American experimental filmmaker Ron Rice's 1960 American black and white underground film 'Flower Thief'. 

American filmmaker, actor and pioneer of underground cinema Jack Smith ('Flaming Creatures') said that it developed "bastard aesthetics-both in the sense of a degraded, lower quality version of Hollywood aesthetics, and as a more vulgar sexually explicit version of Hollywood plots". 

In 1973, 'Hold Me While I'm Naked' was exploited in France. This was as part of a programme titled "Cinéma Underground".  

Kuchar ranks as one of the most exciting and prolific American independent film and videomakers. 

With his homemade Super 8 and 16mm potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he became legendary as a distinctive and outrageous underground filmmaker whose work influenced many other artists, including David Lynch, John Waters ('Pink Flamingos'), and Andy Warhol ('Vinyl'). 

After Kuchar's 1980s transition to video, he remained a master of genre manipulation and subversion. 

He eventually created hundreds of brilliantly edited, hilarious, observant, often diaristic videos with an 8mm camcorder, dime-store props, not-so-special effects, using friends as actors, and the “pageant that is life” as his studio. 

A seminal influence amongst many other directors, Kuchar's uniquely irreverent films were at the forefront of the New York underground film scene alongside avant-garde filmmakers. 

These included Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs ('Blonde Cobra'), Stan Brakhage ('Dog Star Man'), and Kenneth Anger ('Scorpio Rising'). 

This also included Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist Jonas Mekas, who championed Kuchar in his influential Village Voice column. 

In the January 4, 2000 edition of Village Voice, 'Hold Me While I'm Naked' was voted 52nd in Village Voice's Critics' Poll of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century. 

A few years later, American film critic, author and associate professor of medicine at NYU Mark Siegel wrote his opinion of the short.

He called 'Hold Me While I'm Naked' "a charming and melodramatic tour de force of underground invention", which "attains a level of emotional seriousness that makes it stand out among the camp and trash Hollywood parodies to which it is inevitably compared." 

Siegel also praised the technical and creative skills of Kuchar, highlighting his "stunning title and production design, ingenious inventory of odd and unflattering camera angles and his insatiable talent at adapting the glamorous concerns and emotional extremes of Hollywood flicks to banal realities and human proportions of his neighborhood friends". 

On July 26, 2004, London-based author, cinema programmer and associate research fellow Deborah Allison wrote an article about the short for the Australian-based quarterly online film magazine Senses of Cinema, which stated: 

"Replete with "bad acting", glaring costumes, tacky décor and a soundtrack mixed from the cheesiest of flea-market vinyl, Hold Me While I'm Naked is a celebration of the intentionally and unintentionally camp.  

With even the women dressed in a drag-queen aesthetic and the props and music firmly placed in the so-bad-they're-good genre, the film revels in everything that bourgeois taste despises." 

In summary, the film is "a very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness", according to the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival, who screened it in 2012.

One year prior, Kuchar had passed from complications related to prostate cancer. This occurred in San Francisco, California on September 6, 2011. He was 69.

Before his passing, Kuchar began teaching at the San Francisco ArtInstitute. There, he collaborated with his students up until his death.   

Kuchar's video work has also clearly influenced the contemporary queer performance/video artists. 

These included American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin and American performance artist, video artist, writer and cultural critic Felix Bernstein. 

The roughly three hundred and fifty films and videos that Kuchar directed are consistently faithful to the low-fi intimacy of his early work. 

Today, his film and video work has been screened around the world in cinemas, festivals, and major museums.  

Kuchar had been active from 1956–2011. 

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