Mon, Dec 4 at 7:00 PM - Sat, Dec 9 at 9:00 PM PST
The Clinton Street Theater
2522 Southeast Clinton Street
Portland, OR 97202
Maestros of the avant-garde and born in the same Bronx hospital as fellow queer hunk Tab Hunter, twin brothers George & Mike Kuchar created entire worlds in Super 8 and 16mm. Exploring themes of sexuality, identity, and everyday life; they had a distinct style that combined elements of kitsch and surrealism while casting friends and fellow misanthropes as actors.
Their films are often characterized by low budgets, camp aesthetics, and a unique blend of Sirkian melodrama and bizarre comedy. Their work is considered a significant part of the history of underground and experimental cinema, serving as an inspiration to the likes of John Waters, Todd Solondz, Greg Araki, and David Lynch.
Read MoreFriday, September 22, 2023
7:30pm PT
Special guest: Post-screening conversation with filmmaker Mike Kuchar.
“George and Mike Kuchar’s films were my first inspiration… these were the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz. Here were directors I could idolize—complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension, outsiders to even ‘underground’ sensibilities who made exactly the films they wanted to make without any money, starring their friends.” – John Waters
Read MoreFrançois Ghebaly is honored to present Big, Bad Boys, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with legendary artist and filmmaker Mike Kuchar. Big, Bad Boys marks the gallery’s second exhibition at our new West Hollywood space located at 1109 N Poinsettia Place, West Hollywood.
Mike Kuchar has been a majorly influential figure in the underground film and comics scenes since the 1960s, first in his hometown of the Bronx and, from the 1970s on, in the creative hotbed of San Francisco. Together with his twin brother George, the Kuchars gained cult recognition for their over-the-top, no-budget films that sent up Hollywood epics, weepy romances, and sci-fi B movies. In iconic films like Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), The Craven Sluck (1967), and Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults(1976), Mike developed his distinctive style that jettisoned traditional narrative structure and acting professionalism in favor of extravagant, tender sagas that would have a significant impact on emerging theorizations and expressions of camp as an artistic sensibility.
Read MoreIntro by filmmaker Zackary Drucker; Florrie Burke, widow of Barbara Hammer.
Collectively, Outfest, IndieCollect and UCLA are committed to sharing LGBTQ+ moving images in order to bring diverse communities together to discuss differing, often radical explorations of sexual orientation and gender identity. From this shared vision, the Pioneers of Queer Cinema program was conceived. The organizers and supporters of this series hope to introduce and reacquaint audiences with landmark queer works and their makers, while inspiring new conversations and renewed action surrounding the complex obstacles LGBTQ+ communities continue to face.
Program includes Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Mike Kuchar’s Seascape (1984), Zackary Drucker’s At Least You Know You Exist (2011) and Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses (1992).
Read MoreArtist-run spaces are an integral part of a vibrant art community. From microcinemas to warehouse spaces to apartment galleries, no healthy art ecosystem can exist without some forms of independent and DIY organizations. With this thought in mind, we are pleased to present the VDB TV program, This Must Be the Space: A Video Conversation on Artist-Run and Artist-Inhabited Spaces, programmed by Emily Eddy, the director of Chicago’s Nightingale Cinema which recently closed their physical space of 14 years.
Emily has also written a delightful and insightful accompanying essay that chronicles some of the Nightingale’s history and ties it into several ideas explored in the works featured in the program by Videofreex, Nazli Dinçel, Glenn Belverio, George Kuchar, Anne McGuire, and Tom Rubnitz. The works range in dates from 1971-2016, consist of disparate styles, and focus on a variety of scenes, but they all illustrate aspects of why the experimentation of the artist-run space is vital in our communities.
Read MoreOn the occasion of Tom of Finland’s birthday (8th May), Tom of Finland Foundation and The Community have curated a group exhibition, supported by Diesel, presenting Tom of Finland Foundation’s permanent collection.
All Together explores the erotic art collection consisting of thousands of artworks, spanning multiple decades and encompassing all media and techniques. This exhibition is possible because of the Foundation’s efforts in preserving the work of Queer artists, many of whom have faced discrimination and misrepresentation due to the nature of what they create.
For thirty-seven years, Tom of Finland Foundation has been building the world’s most extensive collection of LGBTQ+ art. The diverse curation of this show highlights the stories of over seventy featured artists and comprises more than two hundred works of art from the 1940s to the present day.
The opening in Venice coincides with the first weekend of the Venice Biennale and the opening in Paris celebrates Tom’s birth date.
Read MoreBarbara Hammer’s debut feature Nitrate Kisses (1992) integrates the experiences of a diverse sampling of figures from the LGBTQ+ community—including a mixed-race gay couple, representative of the S/M community, and an older lesbian couple—with footage from Lot in Sodom (1933), one of the first American films to make explicit reference to homosexuality. With Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), a shoot-the-works celebration of outlawed sexuality; Mike Kuchar’s Seascape (1984), a gorgeous landscape film of ancient and echoing meanings paying homage to a lithe young muse caught at intersection of land and sea; and At Least You Know You Exist (2011), trans artist Zachary Drucker’s collaboration with elder and activist Flawless Sabrina, both together onscreen after the latter gives a stirring recitation of an essay on the false promises of capitalism and consumption.
Read MoreGeorge and Mike Kuchar entered the underground as Bronx teenagers who were making visionary 8mm approximations of Hollywood spectaculars, providing, in the process, a kind of roadmap for the camp-punk stylings of later auteurs like John Waters. This program, comprised of three early efforts by the duo, includes: Tootsies in Autumn, wherein a group of past-their-prime stage actors descend into madness as they fight and bicker amongst themselves; A Town Called Tempest, a typically torrid melodrama concerning extreme weather conditions; and the tragicomic Lovers of Eternity, in which a lonesome hipster poet makes friends with a succession of bizarre characters atop a squalid New York rooftop in a latter-day Garden of Eden, complete with a cast featuring Jack Smith, filmmaker Dov Lederberg, and an enormous cockroach. A Town Called Tempest is preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Tootsies in Autumn and Lovers of Eternity are preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Read MoreFor the second in the series, Hall offers up an alternative Valentine's Day special double feature of unorthodox sexuality and desire, which includes Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) and Mary Reid Kelley's Swinburne’s Pasiphae (2014). Set a million years from now, Sins of the Fleshapoids reveals a debased future where humanity has forsaken science for self-indulgence and erotic pleasure. A race of enslaved Androids, undertakes all labour, until a rebellious Robot, tired of pleasuring his masters, decides to join the humans in sin.
Read MoreMetrograph presents “DINGLEBERRY JINGLES: YULETIDE OFFERINGS FROM GEORGE KUCHAR”— a live screening introduced by filmmaker Andrew Lampert.
Read MoreThanksgiving, Winter Solstice, Christmas, New Year — George Kuchar never missed an opportunity for a celebration and a good meal. We invite you to vicariously partake of seasonal sensations, all but absent throughout this most strange of years.
Read MoreThanks to the efforts of the Kuchar Brothers Trust, in collaboration with Anthology and Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Mike Kuchar’s DEATH QUEST OF THE JU-JU CULTS, has been newly restored! Arguably Mike’s solo magnum opus, DEATH QUEST is a mini-epic that gleefully and lovingly combines two of Mike’s favorite – if seemingly irreconcilable – genres. What appears at first to be a straightforward prehistoric tale soon morphs into something else entirely, with the deux ex machina appearance of…sorry, no spoilers. In any case, whatever the genre, DEATH QUEST was made with a nearly non-existent budget, but with admirably game actors, Mike’s uniquely resourceful visual gifts, and his inimitable ability to combine mischievous parody with wide-eyed sincerity.
Read MoreThe films of Marie Losier are now on Criterion—three of which feature the Kuchar Brothers!
Read MoreNew online exhibition presents George Kuchar’s film Going Nowhere, a video diary recording Kuchar’s 50th birthday at his dusty apartment and his melancholic interaction with the world through a screen. The exhibition lasts for a week, 1-7 April, on our website.
Read MoreREDCAT is delighted to welcome legendary artist Mike Kuchar for a program of films and videos made by himself and his late twin brother George. Iconic figures who helped define underground film in the 1960s, George and Mike began making no-budget 8mm films in the Bronx while still in their teens. Working with neighbors and friends, the Kuchars created lurid and hilarious takeoffs of Hollywood weepies that made a huge impact on notions of camp and new possibilities for queer cinema, and influenced a generation that included Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many others. Mike Kuchar, whose visual art is on display at François Ghebaly Gallery, will be on hand to show recent videos and reminisce.
Read MoreMike Kuchar
Broken Gods
January 4 - February 2, 2020
Reception: Saturday January 11, 6-9pm
Read MoreFrançois Ghebaly Gallery presents a group show entitled Bad Peach, which will include the work of Mike Kuchar opening August 10, 2019 and on view until September 7, 2019.
Read MoreThe vibrant, poetic and wild works of Mike Kuchar have inspired generations of filmmakers and artists with their wickedly perverse parodies of pop-culture and abundant creativity. From early 8 mm films made with his twin brother George Kuchar featuring friends from their Bronx neighborhood to the underground sci-fi extravaganza Sins of the Fleshapoids 1965, his films take the language of Hollywood and make it so ‘overblown it’s glorious’. In the 1990s Mike Kuchar embraced video with the same transformative passion that he brought to his early 8 mm films, and created a vast body of work ranging from delirious teleplays to recent digital fantasies, displaying a unique creative sensibility. Relishing the possibilities of the most minuscule budgets his films are radiant and lurid in equal measure, celebrating human creativity with an undiminished passion and humor for over 50 years.
Read MoreGRIT AND GLITTER: BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL at the Museum of the Moving Image (June 21-July 6). The lineup runs the gamut from pre-Stonewall films that were controversial for their portrayals of sexuality (Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures,” a pansexual cornucopia that opens the series on Friday alongside two shorts by George Kuchar, was the subject of a censorship clash) to more recent work like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropical Malady”, in which a flirtation gives way, after a mid-film rupture, to something mythic.
Read MoreThe Mills Folly Microcinema series leaps into 2019 with the accessible eccentricities of the late George Kuchar, whose 1989 visit to the UW-Madison campus inspired the cheeky meta diary-film, 500 Millibars To Ecstasy, now celebrating its 30th anniversary. Every so often over the years, local screening series in Madison have featured Kuchar’s work, including one of his most famous and influential avant-garde shorts, Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), which simultaneously embraces high art and kitsch. Kuchar blurs the line between mocking and celebrating the internal melodrama of amateur filmmaking, instilling it with an enchanting performance art quality that inspired provocateur and "Pope of Trash" John Waters.
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