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George Kuchar
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George Kuchar has been a professor in the Filmmaking Department at San Francisco Art Institute since 1971. Kuchar worked as a commercial artist while making 8mm and 16mm films which were embraced by the underground movie scene of the 1960s. During the 1970s, he began making sync-sound movies, and in the 1980s, he began experimenting with video. Kuchar has won the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Worldwide Video Festival First Prize Award and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. He had four-program tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a recent screening at a Video Drive-In event in Portugal. Two full-length programs of his films are in the collection of (and distributed in Europe by) the British Film Institute.
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Blurb from www.sfai.edu about George Kuchar; "George Kuchar is associate professor in the Film department. His film and video work has been screened internationally, and he has been a major influence for many filmmakers, including John Waters and Todd Solondz. Kuchar has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Worldwide Video Festival First-Prize Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award, the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and others. He ... contributed to the underground comic book, Arcade, for which he created a biography of H.P. Lovecraft. Kuchar's recent major work, Secrets of the Shadow World, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, is a 140-minute digital video epic."
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Although mainly into making movies, George Kuchar has ... done some notable underground comix work. Born in Manhattan, Kuchar was trained as a commercial artist and upon graduation drew weather maps for a local news show. He teamed up with his twin brother Mike and created several 8mm movies, that were showed in the underground scene alongside films by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. After leaving his commercial art job, George Kuchar went into teaching in the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute. He became involved in underground comix through his neighbor, Art Spiegelman. He drew for the comics revue Arcade in the 1970s, for which he created among others his comics biography of HP Lovecraft.
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Underground legend George Kuchar began making no-budget 8mm trash epics at the tender age of 12 with his twin brother and co-conspirator Mike. While growing up in the Bronx, the Kuchars crafted a deliriously smutty world of cinema with little more than wild imaginations and some borrowed lipstick. George’s first 16mm film, "Corruption of the Damned," came at age 23 and he went on to feverishly produce a slew of classic tales of repressed lust, questionable behavior, and Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama – including "Hold Me While I’m Naked," "Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin," "Unstrap Me," and many more. Celebrated alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Kenneth Anger, Kuchar became a hero for movie-makers and movie-lovers living on the fringes. In the early 70s, he began teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he continues to delight (and sometimes frighten) students with his infamous "AC/DC Psychotronic Teleplays" course.
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Self-styled goofy filmmaker George Kuchar tours festivals with some of his 60s work and pays mocking tribute both to himself and these events, with frequent allusions to the surrounding picturesque settings (2002). Fun but slight. 12 min.
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Though Mike Kuchar provides the post-production voice, Red's sad sack slouch and alienated stare are what sell this story. In essence this is a road film, with both inner and outer pathways paved and explored. The Kuchars are concerned with identity and individuality here, but there is an additional social element that is sinister and kind of sick. Together they do a better job than any other self-indulgent bit of mental motion picture masturbation that you're likely to see polluting the festival circuit in this post-millennial malaise. For director Mike Kuchar, film is a visual medium, and pictures tell more about someone or something than a million mindless words.
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George Kuchar