Las Vegas Weekly

Kuchar life lessons

What I learned from avant-garde filmmaker George Kuchar

Mike (left) and George Kuchar in It Came From Kuchar.

Cinevegas will pay tribute to brothers George and Mike Kuchar, DIY legends whose lo-fi film and video epics gave the ’60s art-film scene a much-needed shot of playful subversion. Thirty years later, those same films upended my own ideas about art and film, and ultimately my life—when I was 20, I moved nearly clear across the country to enroll in the San Francisco Art Institute, primarily so I could have George Kuchar as a teacher. I eventually traded making films for writing about them, but my time in Kuchar’s orbit left as lasting an impression on my life and work as it did on filmmakers like Guy Maddin and John Waters (both of whom show up in the excellent documentary It Came From Kuchar, also screening at CineVegas, and directed by another of George’s pupils, Jennifer M. Kroot). I racked up the art-school tuition bills so you wouldn’t have to: Here are three most important things I learned from the man who made Hold Me While I’m Naked.

Art doesn’t have to be boring (or, mainstream culture is not the enemy) There’s a great line in Kroot’s film about why Mike and George’s work popped out of the pack of the ’60s New York scene, because in art and avant-garde film “nothing happened,” but the work of the Kuchars “reflected Hollywood, where everything happens.” Their absurdist mini-melodramas riffed on major motion picture (in George’s Bronx accent, “pik-tcha”) clichés, amplifying the sex and the grotesque, laughing at both without denying the true emotion underneath. Somehow, these scrappy little movies full of sub-amateur actors (dumb hunks, old ladies in 10 layers of lipstick) often offer the same extreme pleasures as midcentury mainstream cinema, but with a wink.

You don’t need to literally put your blood into it to make it personal Art schools are full of 19-year-olds who think it’s legitimately worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to be told that their every creative impulse is valid; in one of my classes at SFAI, a student presented a loaf of challah made with her own menstrual blood (get it? Because the blood has eggs in it!), and got a straight-faced critique. George’s work is the perfect antidote to this kind of delusional narcissism. As Kroot’s film shows, he’s been able to work out deeply personal issues (his relationship to his mother, his attraction to men) in his films without hyperserious “look at me” navel-gazing. In fact, if you’re looking at a George Kuchar film with a straight face, you’re probably looking at it the wrong way.

It’s only a movie George is so incredibly prolific that any attempt to compile his definitive filmography would be futile. Video has given him the freedom to work constantly, but he wouldn’t be able to put it all out there if he weren’t completely lacking in self-consciousness over each piece’s reception. This ability to keep looking forward may be the most useful of the Kuchar life lessons: No matter what happens today, tomorrow is another movie.

Kuchar to watch online UbuWeb a site devoted to art film and video, has Quicktime files of a number of George Kuchar classics, some with production notes from the director himself. In the blurb for Pagan Rhapsody (1970), Kuchar notes that while he had to keep one of his actress’ pregnant bellies in the shadows, “My stomach was the same as always, except it contained more mocha cake than usual, since that type of cake was usually around when I filmed in Brooklyn Heights.”

A number of George and Mike’s films are also easily findable on YouTube, including George’s first “weather diary” Wild Night in El Reno (1977) and Mike’s The Craven Sluck, starring George and Floraine Connors wearing makeup that looks like the prototype for Divine in Pink Flamingos.