It had long been the dream of Melinda McDowell-Milks, Curt McDowell’s sister, to stage an event where the newly-restored Directors Cut of Thundercrack! (1975) could be seen in San Francisco on the Castro Theater’s giant screen. Synapse Films—responsible for the restoration work in preparation for the film’s forty-year anniversary—gave her permission.”Go ahead. Do it.” But having never done anything of the sort, she had no awareness of the mechanics involved, and didn’t know what she even needed to know.
Read MoreHARVARD FILM ARCHIVE | Christmas with Anne Robertson and George Kuchar
December 18, 2015 @ 7pm
Unique, prolific, emotional and funny, the filmmakers George Kuchar (1942 - 2011) and Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949 - 2012) both left behind many hours of moving image diaries, much of which is housed at the Harvard Film Archive. While the tones of their respective diaries are quite different, both Kuchar and Robertson cover similar leitmotifs, including food, the body, cats, family and the natural world. They also share the tradition of cinematically confronting the holiday season—a time that can be melancholy or festive, lonely or celebratory, and usually a bit of everything. Tonight we present a selection of their complementary, alternative visions of sugar plums.
Read MoreGEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR @ ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE
Thursday, August 27 @ 7:30pm
Read MoreMOUSSE MAGAZINE | George and Mike Kuchar in Issue 48
April 15, 2015
Read MoreWALKER ART CENTER | International Pop features George Kuchar's HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED
April 11, 2015
This collection of films—which includes works rarely considered alongside one another—lends another perspective to the exhibition International Pop by examining cinema as an extension of Pop practice around the world.
Read MoreAN AFTERNOON WITH MIKE KUCHAR | NOWNESS.COM
January 29, 2015
“Movies should have sex appeal,” says Mike Kuchar. “It’s a basic fundamental quality and helps in making it bearable to watch.” It’s the same bravado that seared through the filmmaker’s lascivious, sugar-coated home videos made with his brother George and screened alongside friends Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekasand Andy Warhol in the New York underground film scene of the 1960s and 70s. Experimenting with 8mm film, the twin brothers from the Bronx conjured up their own camp, sexually charged pop fantasies in fleshly shades of violet, turquoise, and sunflower.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in ArtForum
January 29, 2015
Burnished bubble butts beam with unholy light. Cut and uncut, huge, veiny cocks blossom from every angle. Angels and gods, gladiators and cavemen, street hustlers and bodybuilders, S-M beltings and four-way pirate fuckfests are all drawn with the bright hues and hard lines of comic-book superheroes.
Read MoreMike Kuchar @ Francois Ghebaly Gallery
MIKE KUCHAR: Saints and Sinners, January 17 - February 14, 2015
François Ghebaly is pleased to host a New Year's banquet of beefcake celebrating Satyrs, Stone Age He-Men, Sugar Daddies, and Bawdy Buccaneers, drawn, painted, digitized, and hosted by underground cartoonist and movie maker, Mike Kuchar.
Read MoreThe George Kuchar Reader — Release date: November 30, 2014
George Kuchar (1942-2011) is best known as a pioneering underground film and video maker with a disarming do-it-yourself aesthetic and a hilariously eccentric sensibility. Quirky and ingenious, heartfelt and campy, Kuchar's movies know no boundaries and are an entirely unique development in the history of cinema. The artist's characteristic instinct for kitsch, his humor and conceptual brilliance, were not confined to the screen alone; they can be glimpsed in all the activities he carried out throughout his life.
Read MoreMike Kuchar @ Kimmerich
MIKE KUCHAR: Brave, Bold and Bare, November 8, 2014 - January 10, 2015
“What are these acts of creation we do in paint or on film? Are they linked or related to Creation itself—the very force that gives motion, light, and form to the universe... or am I just a guy warding off boredom with a hobby that substitutes for his loneliness?”
—Mike Kuchar
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar @ Yerba Buena Center For The Arts
San Francisco Cinematheque Presents: A Criminal Account of Pleasure: The George Kuchar Reader
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Yerba Buena Center For The Arts
Andrew Lampert , the editor of The George Kuchar Reader (and Anthology Film Archives’ Curator of Collections) appears in person to read excerpts from the book and to discuss this legend. The program includes George Kuchar’s 16mm Corruption of the Damned and the video The Exiled Files of Eddie Gray.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR @ ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE
Friday, October 17 & Saturday, October 18, 2016
UP TO DATE & OUT OF THIS WORLD WITH MIKE KUCHAR!
He’s back! Yes, one-time NYC denizen Mike Kuchar makes an all-too-rare hometown appearance and return visit to Anthology. Beloved for the films he made in tandem with twin brother, George, as well as for his own over-the-top underground masterpieces, Mike is a prolific creator of moving images the likes of which you cannot imagine or even dream of. Kuchar’s work demonstrates a campy romantic eye and rapturous ear that is as indebted to lyrical poetry as it is to ecstatic imagery. Rather than rest on his voluminous back catalog, the videos that Mike has been making the last few years are undoubtedly amongst the strongest works in a career that began nearly 60 years ago.
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar @ Twooga Booga
THE GEORGE KUCHAR READER
Rare 16mm screening and book launch
The Sunshine Sisters (1972, 36 min, 16mm)
Aqueerius (1980, 8 min, 16mm)
Monday, October 13, 2014 / 7 PM
Read MoreIt Came from Kuchar | KQED Truly CA
By the 1960s, twins George and Mike Kuchar were shaping the underground film scene alongside Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. It Came from Kuchar interweaves the brother's lives, their admirers and a 'greatest hits' of Kuchar clips into a hilarious and moving tale. A film by Jennifer Kroot.
Read MoreGEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR @ ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE
Wednesday, August 25, 2014
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar @ MoMA
Monday, May 26, 2014
1966. USA. Directed by George Kuchar. With Donna Kerness, George Kuchar, Stella Kuchar, Andrea Lunin. The loosely autobiographical Hold Me While I’m Naked is both the story of a frustrated filmmaker trying to prove his artistic integrity through his next production, and Kuchar’s homage to Douglas Sirk’s lush Hollywood melodramas. 15 min.
Read MoreMike Kuchar @ Tate Modern
Mike Kuchar: film follies and digital daydreams
November 29 – December 1, 2013
The vibrant, poetic and wild works of American underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar have inspired generations of filmmakers and artists with their wickedly perverse parodies of pop-culture and abundant creativity. Relishing the possibilities of the most minuscule budgets, his films and videos are radiant and lurid in equal measure, celebrating human creativity with an undiminished passion and humour for over 50 years.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in The Guardian
June 19, 2013
For real illustrative oomph and pizzazz, Mike Kuchar's he-man naked hunks – cavorting with dinosaurs and each other – are much more fun. He and his twin brother, George, also made ultra-camp underground movies in the 1950s and 60s, which were a major influence on director John Waters. It's a surprise any of Kuchar's gladiators and Thor-type beefcakes can even walk, let alone slay brontosauruses, given the bulging impedimenta they drag about between their legs.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Dazed
April 2013 Issue
Gatherings happened in lofts, apartments or unused shops. But the particular loft apartment of experimental filmmaker and New York tastemaker Ken Jacobs was the place to be. “Yeah, he enjoyed our pictures and said, ‘Come back next month,’ and invited Jonas Mekas, who had a column in The Village Voice. (Mekas) also liked our pictures and wrote a big raving review. It was a great time to be making pictures; we knew Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, they’d all come to our shows and say ‘hi’. It was a very exciting time. It was a real exchange. Everyone worked separately, everyone had their own vision, but we’d all meet up at the premieres.”
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Artforum
THE ATOMIC WAR of October 1962 had been averted. There was a heady moment-presaged by the New York World's Fair that opened in the spring of 1964 and heralded by the appearance of Roy Lichtenstein's drawing Great Rings of Saturn!! on the cover of Art in America that April: Pop Art merged with Science Fiction, and the Future was Now.
Read More