April 9, 2012
June in San Francisco ushered in an exhibition for the underground filmmaker and visual artist Mike Kuchar. “Mike’s Men: Sex, Guys, and Videotape!” was held at Magnet, a city-funded STD clinic in the heart of the Castro, that supposed gay mecca. In fact, the event proved to be one of the most successful attempts at bringing together queer men during Pride month. Superbly curated by Eric Smith, Mark Garrett and Margaret Tedesco, “Mike’s Men” was a collection of illustrations and four video shorts. The exhibition served both as a tribute to his lifelong career in avant-garde art, and an acknowledgement of Mike’s recent loss.
Read MoreJune 16, 2012
A little while back we profiled The Secret Life of Wendel Sampson, a psychedelic gem from the mind of pioneering queer filmmaker Mike Kuchar, who along with his twin brother, George, inspired generations of indie directors, including John Waters and Guy Maddin.
While George was the more prolific of the two, Mike still cranked out a stream of flicks, including A Tub Named Desire (1956), Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) and The Craven Sluck (1967).
Now Mike has a solo exhibit running at Magnet gallery in San Francisco through the end of the month. “Mike’s Men: Sex, Guys and Videotape!” features the underground legend’s drawings, videos, posters and limited-edition prints from the 1960s to the mid-2000s. “As an illustrator, my aim is to amuse the eye and ‘spark’ imagination,” says Kuchar. “To soothe with sensual lines and excite with color. To create titillating scenes that refresh the soul and put a bit more ‘fun’ to viewing pictures.”
Read MoreJune 7, 2012
June was ushered in with Mike's Men: Sex, Guys and Videotape, a flashy, sassy art exhibit by underground filmmaker/artist Mike Kuchar at Magnet on 18th St. Curators Eric Smith, Mark Garrett and Margaret Tedesco have put together a show of the auteur/illustrator's work that will bring back warm (and sometimes hot) memories of the golden age of gay comic books.
Read MoreJune 7, 2012
"But oh, boy, Statue in the Park sure is porn – the olden-day porn of the sticky-floored grindhouse showing grainy loops while some toothless fart masturbated in the back row and shifty-lookin' dudes with their jeans slung low loitered around the stinky urinal. There isn't full nudity in the movie, yet it reeks of trashy sex for about 10 of its 18 minutes. This is when we watch Mike Diana play janitor in a funky restroom, perhaps the very one where this loop is showing. He's real Times Square candy, of the sort you found in Times Square before it was Disneyfied, a sinuous blond street-kid whose freshness is likely to tarnish mighty quick."
Read MoreJune 1, 2012
MAGNET presents…
MIKE KUCHAR
Mike’s Men: Sex, Guys and Videotape!
Solo Exhibition of Drawings and Video with Limited Edition Prints and Posters
Read MoreMay 31, 2012
Mike Kuchar swears he remembers being born. Not his own birth, exactly, but the arrival of his twin brother, George, minutes later.
"I can't get it out of my mind," he says. "I remember seeing him being slapped. And the weirdest thing about it is, I remember thinking, 'I hope he's going to cry the first time. Otherwise they'll hit him again.' "
The Kuchars are the Bronx-born film mavericks who gave the world such underground gems as "Hold Me While I'm Naked," "Confessions of a Teenage Rumpot" and "Sins of the Fleshapoids." Cheerfully dogged in their pursuit of an artistry that bypassed commerce and trends, the Kuchars are bona fide filmmaking heroes.
Read MoreMay 17, 2012
Tor, Conan, Ka-Zar, Jesus Christ: Loin-clothed men fighting, conquering or simply riding dinosaurs have captivated young minds ever since the two were first anachronistically depicted in scenes together. The quintessentially perfect visual pairing of cavemen and dinosaurs, not unlike peanut butter and chocolate or Texas and capital punishment, ranges from pulp comics of the 1930’s to pro-creationist Christian propaganda of today.
Read MoreFace to Face with Stu Smith. Guests: Mike Kuchar, Eric Smith and Jennifer Kroot.
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar (1942–2011) was one of the most creative, original, and influential filmmakers of our time, straddling two generations of North American iconoclasts, from Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Rudy Burckhardt, Kenneth Anger, and Michael Snow to Warren Sonbert, Ernie Gehr, Abigail Child, and Henry Hills. Often collaborating with his twin brother, Mike, George Kuchar started making films as a Bronx teenager, and the brothers’ early films already show the ingenuity, exuberance, and do-it-yourself charm that would pervade scores of their subsequent films.
Read MoreNovember 20, 2011 - January 15, 2012
George Kuchar (American, 1942-2011) was among the most prolific and influential American filmmakers of the last half century. His more than two hundred low-budget films, many made with his twin brother, Mike, regularly feature his friends and students, pioneering a camp aesthetic that has inspired generations of filmmakers and artists.
Read MoreSomeone who was no stranger to tempestuous weather was George Kuchar, low-fi filmmaker extraordinaire, who passed away on 6 September after a battle with cancer. I recently spoke with him on the phone while he was in hospital receiving treatment. Despite his weakness, he rose to the occasion and we talked about his video series ‘Weather Diaries’ (1977–2011). Used to conversations about the weather – I originally come from Scotland – George pointed out that there are more meteorology books written in the UK than anywhere else. Talking to George was a profound and moving experience.
Read MoreSeptember 13, 2011
In this episode of WNYC's Arts Forum from January 2, 1976, film scholar and guest host P. Adams Sitney interviews George Kuchar about his latest script for the film Thundercrack! (1975). Kuchar describes his process, the pornographic nature of the film, and his upcoming projects. Special thanks to Anthology Film Archives for providing the audio for this post.
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar, a filmmaker whose campy yet ardent low-budget movies inspired underground directors like John Waters and David Lynch in the 1960s, and helped kindle the do-it-yourself moviemaking aesthetic now ubiquitous on YouTube, died on Tuesday in San Francisco. He was 69.
Read MoreNovember 30, 2010 - January 8, 2011
Tropical Vulture features the work of legendary independent filmmaker and educator George Kuchar. Since the 1950s, Kuchar has gained attention for displaying his morbid interests, insecurities, and razor-sharp wit in low-budget films with over-the-top plots and performances. This exhibition presents a unique combination of Kuchar's films, videos, paintings and drawings, and is organized by San Francisco-based artist Julio Cesar Morales and Mexico City-based artist Miguel Calderon, two of Kuchar's former students.
Read MoreOctober, 2010
Mike Kuchar made his first films as a teenager, in collaboration with his twin brother George, in the mid 1950s. He achieved legendary underground status for the fabulously original and trashy send-ups of Hollywood B movies which he made in the mid 1960s, such as “Sins of the Fleshapoids.” John Waters and many other filmmakers cite Mike Kuchar as a seminal influence.
Not many filmmakers who began over fifty years ago are still making new work now, and very few indeed could be said to be making their most radical, visionary, and most successful work, but Kuchar is doing just that. In his late 60s, he is producing a string of experimental video works at a dizzying rate that are not only unlike his previous work, they are unlike anyone’s previous work. These videos, typically featuring the performance of a collaborating actor, writer, or dancer, are brimming with visual inventiveness, musical sophistication, humor, and they show the stamp of the Kuchar’s mastery of the art of film in every frame.
Read MoreJuly 15, 2010
The Kuchar Brothers' docu-biographer, Jennifer M. Kroot, explains the films in his Artscape showcase
I asked Jennifer M. Kroot to assess the Mike Kuchar films at Artscape. Here's what she said:
"Medusa's Gaze" (2010)
"It's about Mike's favorite subject: a person dealing with the aftermath of a relationship. A performance artist actually reads poetry in it, but the movie itself is poetical. Mike creates a pretty magical vision, even if the guy is just sitting in his living room, whether with very theatrical, crazy costumes or the fabric of the set. The love affair gone wrong comes out in all these mythological guises, including Medusa's gaze. Mike has this thing about love affairs gone wrong. I always imagine him as a 12- or 13-year-old kid, watching all those Hollywood movies that made the perils of adulthood glamorous, and fantasizing about them. In some way, he's still that 12-year-old boy and he's still fantasizing about adulthood."
Read MoreDocumentary filmmaker Jennifer Kroot talks about the inspiration behind her homage to the Kuchar Brothers, It Came From Kuchar. The film highlights the prolific directors' love for camp, for fun, and most of all, for filmmaking.
Read MoreApril 16, 2010
It Came from Kuchar is the definitive, feature documentary about the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, the Kuchar brothers, George and Mike. In telling the story of George and Mike Kuchar, underground filmmakers who have been churning out low-budget genre films since the early 1960s, Kroot demonstrates a reporter's thoroughness and an artist's intuition. She gets everybody to talk to her - fans and scholars, both foreign and domestic, colleagues, filmmakers such as John Waters and Buck Henry, and of course, the Kuchar brothers themselves. George Kuchar takes Kroot into his classroom at the San Francisco Art Institute and into his filmmaking process. She catches the moment of introspection in which he talks about the struggle to complete a film - and then, in the next second, mentions that he already feels uneasy, not having something new to work on.
Read MoreApril 16, 2010
Long before the days of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog or the underground films of Bruce LaBruce, there were Brothers Kuchar. The twin brothers were in fact fathers of independent cinema decades ago. But their work lives on and has been captured in a new film that explores their influence. For WBEZ, film critic Jonathan Miller has this review of It Came From Kuchar.
Read MoreApril 16, 2010
"There are no second acts in American life," some nobody by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald said. Hogwash. George and Mike Kuchar have had productive, ongoing careers long after their initial burst of notoriety as forerunners of the New York underground film scene in the late ’50s and ’60s. If there is any justice in this world, next year’s release of Jennifer Kroot’s documentary It Came from Kuchar will launch the twin brothers on an equally improbable third act.
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