George Kuchar

Early life and career

Kuchar 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 graduated in 1960 and drew weather maps for a local news show. During this period, he and his twin brother Mike Kuchar were making 8mm movies, which were showcased in the then-burgeoning underground film scene alongside films by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. Ken Jacobs brought attention of their work to Jonas Mekas, who championed their work in the Village Voice and elsewhere.

After being laid off from a commercial art job in New York City, Kuchar was offered a teaching job in the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1971 until early 2011.

In San Francisco, Kuchar became involved with underground comics via his neighbors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith. They both wound up in his movies and George wound up in their publications.

Films

George Kuchar directed over 200 films and videos (including over 15 with his twin brother Mike), many of them short films by students in his courses at the San Francisco Art Institute. In the Critics' Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in The Village Voice (4 January 2000), Hold Me While I'm Naked was ranked 52nd.

I, An Actress, a 1977 film featuring a screen test of student actress Barbera Lapsley, was selected by the National Film Registry in 2011.

Video diaries

After leaving New York City for San Francisco, 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 Kuchar's oeuvre such as 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 that chronicle Kuchar's annual pilgrimages to El Reno, Oklahoma, to observe tornadoes. In response to changes in media technology, Kuchar's video diaries have increasingly applied the tactics of camp appropriation to the stuff of the digital age. Kuchar's most recent video diaries make 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 has a selection of titles.

Kuchar's video work has clearly influenced the contemporary queer performance/video artists Ryan Trecartin and Felix Bernstein.

Painting

Kuchar's paintings often reflect the same themes as his film and video works while also sharing their fauvist-like color scheme. According to Eileen Myles, Kuchar is used to working in boxes so finds that painting and video don't feel all that different. Kuchar's paintings have been exhibited intermittently throughout his career, most recently at the Casey Kaplan Gallery in Manhattan and in 2012 at MoMA PS1 as a part of Kuchar's posthumous retrospective: Pagan Rhapsodies.

Films featuring George Kuchar

Planet Kuchar, a biopic of the life of George Kuchar, is being developed by Los Angeles production company Automat Pictures and producer Jeffrey Schwarz.

Portrait George and Mike Kuchar (1977) by Rosa von Praunheim.

It Came From Kuchar, a documentary film of the life of George and Mike Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, premiered at the South by Southwest film festival on 14 March 2009.

In 1997, the Kuchar brothers collaborated on a book Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, a memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking with an introduction by director John Waters.

Death

George Kuchar died on 6 September 2011 in San Francisco, just past his 69th birthday on August 31, of complications related to prostate cancer.

Filmography

(The Kuchar brothers, in British punctuation tradition, capitalize articles, prepositional phrases, and contractions in their movie titles, when working together or independently)

Produced at the San Francisco Art Institute: