George Kuchar Day *

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘George 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.

‘Every year Kuchar made a large-scale scripted film with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught for nearly 40 years. His students were deliriously incorporated into his queerly epic visions, shaped by his uncanny approach to lighting and color filtering, scripts, costumes, overlaying of images and effects, and soundtrack, which are comparable to the greatest Hollywood films, but all done on shoe-string budgets. Rather than being constraining, Kuchar’s production budget enriched the aesthetic power of his films. It helped that he was a genius when it came to lighting, editing, make-up, cinematography, directing, musical soundtrack, and script writing; but his commitment to film as something that can be done idiosyncratically and without huge expense has been an inspiration to generations of independent filmmakers after him. Indeed, Kuchar’s films anticipate the work of younger video artists for whom cheap digital cameras and the Web are the tools at hand.

‘In his films, Kuchar is always poking fun and always having a good time, in an apparently sweet and charmingly self-deprecating way. Yet this court jester of avant-garde cinema had a sardonic edge that was as sharp as an editor’s blade. His vision bubbled out of the cauldron of his gay, Catholic, working-class childhood. This led to his lifelong tango with the high, and often dry, seriousness of the art world.

‘Kuchar stayed true to his American vernacular instincts throughout his life. The body of work he produced, now archived at Harvard, is a testimony to the power, and importance, of film done without the hindrance of large-scale production.

‘As a writer, Kuchar combined his genre-obsessed irony and self-reflective bathos into scripts of scintillating wit. The opening monologue in Thundercrack! (he wrote the screenplay for Curt McDowell) rivals and extends the best of Tennessee Williams’s plays.  Kuchar’s soundtracks, collages from his extensive LP collection, are exemplary for using already existing music in new contexts so seamlessly that you would have thought the music was composed especially for each scene. Kuchar’s films offer object lessons in how a splash of sound totally colors a scene; his quick sound segues contribute to the dynamism of his work and give it that wonderful, much sought-after, B-movie aura. But make no mistake: his editing is as diacritically perspicacious as any sound/image juxtaposition in Godard (even if his ingratiating style would not usually give rise to such terminology).

‘Kuchar made the switch from film to digital relatively early, fully embracing the dominant technology, and as he had done with film, making it completely his own. Much of his later work consists of an ongoing diary—a sprawling, picaresque series in which he documents, in addition to the weather, his meals, his friends, his trips. These funny, endearing works, in which he is the principal character and which he shot entirely by himself, are films that revel in the sublimity of the ordinary.

‘Kuchar created a small but notable body of work outside of his films: drawings and paintings in oil, watercolor, and tempera. George Kuchar: Pagan Rhapsodies, organized by Peter Eleey, including films, videos, and works on paper, is currently on display at MoMA PS1 (through January 15, 2012). He was trained as a commercial artist and after graduating from the School of Industrial Art he drew weather maps for a local news show. Speaking of his paintings, he told Eileen Myles, “I make ’em cause I like painting and I don’t like to paint my apartment. These cover the walls, they cover a lot.” Kuchar researched his paintings, looking for stories that he wanted to paint. Indeed, his paintings look a lot like his movies. “I pick characters, and I’m used to working in a box.” They are studies in light and color and are chock-full of Kuchar’s personality. He became involved in comix through his neighbor in San Francisco in the 1980s, Art Spiegelman; he went on to do many comix storyboards as well as underground comix.

‘Weirdos, kooks, outcasts: these are not the people in Kuchar’s films but the ones on national TV, paraded as normal. In Thundercrack!, Kuchar plays a circus truck driver who has fallen in love with the female gorilla in his charge. In the final, touching scene, we see the driver in bed with someone in a very campy gorilla costume.

‘From Baudelaire’s “À une Mendiante rousse” onward, artists have tried to find a way to portray society’s “others” without voyeurism, pity, condescension, or romanticizing. Kuchar in bed with an actor in gorilla suit is the perfect realization of the possibility of the pataque(e)rical as a quest for “otherworldly humanity” (to borrow a term Kuchar uses in one of his last class films, Lingo of the Lost).

‘A man with a movie camera: nobody’s done it better.’ — Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, The Brooklyn Rail

 

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Stills

 

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Further

George Kuchar @ IMDb
George Kuchar @ Video Data Bank
Book: ‘The George Kuchar Reader’
The George Kuchar Collection @ Harvard Film Archive
George Kuchar obituary @ The Guardian
‘George Kuchar, Filmmaker and Provocateur Who Inspired John Waters, Dead’
Ed Halter on George Kuchar
‘Storm Squatting at El Reno’
‘George Kuchar’s Voice’
George and Mike Kuchar Appreciation Page
‘George Kuchar 1942–2011’ @ Frieze
George Kuchar @ Underground Film Journal
‘The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar’
‘Hold Me While I’m Naked: Notes on a Camp Classic’
‘Reflections on George Kuchar’
‘Color Him Lurid: Deceased Artiste George Kuchar’

 

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It Came from Kuchar
‘It Came from Kuchar is the definitive, feature documentary about the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, the Kuchar brothers. George and Mike Kuchar have inspired two generations of filmmakers, actors, musicians, and artists with their zany, “no budget” films and with their uniquely enchanting spirits. George and Mike Kuchar grew up in the Bronx in the 1950’s making “no-budget” films, compulsively copying Hollywood melodramas with their aunt’s 8mm, home-movie camera. In the 1960’s the New York underground film scene embraced them as the “8mm Mozarts”. Their early films deeply inspired many filmmakers, including John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes, Cory McAbee and Wayne Wang. IT CAME FROM KUCHAR includes numerous clips from the Kuchar brother’s early films including HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED, SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS, and many others. IT CAME FROM KUCHAR features interviews of many of the filmmakers, artists and writers who’ve been inspired by the Kuchars.’ –– Jennifer Smoot

 

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Underground comix
‘Although mainly into making movies, George Kuchar has also done some notable underground comix work. Kuchar was trained as a commercial artist and upon graduation drew weather maps for a local news show. 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.’ — Lambiek

 

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Stuff

George Kuchar Interview 2010

Portraits of George Kuchar at Work

George Kuchar & Guy Maddin in Conversation

George Kuchar on The Counter Culture Hour

George Kuchar’s Parting Message to the People of the Future

 

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Interview
by Steve Lafreniere @ VICE

 

Were there a lot of big movie palaces in the Bronx when you were teenagers in the 50s?
George Kuchar: There were a lot of theaters, and a lot of people in the Bronx went to the movies. The big one was the Paradise. It was on the Grand Concourse near Fordham Road, and that was quite a spectacular theater. It looked Roman. They had stars twinkling on the ceiling and clouds moving by. There was another theater around Southern Boulevard that played foreign pictures, Antonioni movies. I remember going there and the place was packed to see L’Avventura. And they always had a sign that said “Air-Conditioned.” You’d walk by in the summer and, man, the blast of cold air that came out of that place.

How often did you go?
Three times a week. Sometimes we’d see the same movie three times.

Do you remember the ones that made you want to make movies?
I went to see a lot of Douglas Sirk. That was like going to see work by adults. You felt like it was grown-ups making those pictures, and they really looked good. But then there were the Roger Corman pictures. They were done cheap and we thought, “Gee, it could be fun making those.” They would be double bills. Sometimes there would be pictures about Indians with Marla English, and then one of the low-budget horror movies. I used to love seeing those.

Marla English is criminally forgotten. Did you follow certain stars?
Yeah. And it didn’t have to be the big ones, sometimes it was the stars of the B movies. Or a lot of times I went to a movie because they had listed who did the music. If Bernard Herrmann’s name was on the ad, I went to the movie. I loved the sound of the score in the movie theater.

You and Mike started making movies when you got a camera for your 12th birthday. Was it expensive to process the film?
The film was $2.65, and the developing couldn’t have been more than that. You’d bring it into a drugstore, and they would process it at a place locally. But it wasn’t very good. After a few years it would crack, the emulsion would come out, and it would look like a fresco. So we would send it to Kodak. They did a much better job. A projector didn’t cost that much money in those days. They were kind of tin-looking things, with little plastic reels. If you got a better projector it could take bigger reels, so you could make longer movies.

How did two teenagers from the Bronx connect with the underground-film crowd in Manhattan?
We had friends, like bohemians or whatever they were called. A friend of mine, Donna Kerness, she was very pretty. We went to high school together, and then I started putting her in pictures. She made friends with this man, Bob Cowan, who was about ten years older, an artist. He came down from Canada with two other Canadian artists, Mike Snow and Joyce Wieland, to get into the culture scene. He was infatuated with Donna, and she introduced me to them, and they introduced my brother and me to that whole art world in New York that was going on.

Ken Jacobs helped you guys out, right?
We went to Ken Jacobs’s loft because Bob Cowan, I think, was acting in his 8-mm movies. At that time it was like a little theater there, and every Friday or Saturday night he would play underground movies. So my brother and I came with our pictures, people liked them, and we were asked to come back. Ken Jacobs told Jonas Mekas about us, and that’s how the whole ball started rolling.

Even though you were teenagers and didn’t have an art background like those other people, you were accepted?
Yeah! That place used to be full of painters and other artists making movies. We sort of became part of that crowd and began showing at the same venues, and an audience developed. But we had never known anyone like this. These were crazy people. They didn’t behave like the people we were working with at our jobs. A lot of them had never grown up. They were sort of fun, wild, and free.

Where was Warhol in all of this?
I would see him on the street with his entourage, and then he would come to our shows. I remember him coming once with a whole group of people five minutes into the screening. At that time I was also friends with Red Grooms, who was making some 8-mm movies. He asked me if wanted to go to a luncheon that Harry Abrams was holding for pop artists. Since I’d just finished Hold Me While I’m Naked in 16 mm, he asked me if I’d like to bring a projector. Warhol was there, and Rauschenberg, and Oldenburg. We showed the movie, and afterward Warhol said, “It’s good, George. It’s too good. Go back to your old style with the 8 mm.”

He got a lot of his ideas from you and Jack Smith.
Actually, at that time there was a big crosscurrent of people looking at Jack’s work. But he was an odd character, Jack Smith. He was way off in left field or something. He was very talented and all, but he had no stability. The rug was pulled. I put him into a movie because he was living next door to the guy that I was using as the star. Jack was going to the Factory one afternoon and he took me along. Warhol was doing a silk screen when we got there. Jack Smith had acted in a Warhol picture and he was mad because he had been off-camera during his biggest scenes and Warhol never told him, “You’re out of the frame.” Warhol didn’t seem to get too disturbed. He just kept silk-screening.

It’s funny that right after the macho Beat era, here come all these queeny guys like Smith and Warhol.
It was just what was happening. Around the Beat time they all wore ties and shirts and jackets. They’re kind of dressed up, you know what I mean? But then this other thing, this strange exotica, came in. It just happened.

Do you prefer editing to shooting?
I like it all. I like shooting because it’s like one big party. You get a chance to do compositions, lighting, and your wardrobe and makeup. It’s excitement. But it can be hell too, especially if you’re doing a scene and the question arises, “What do we do?” I don’t know what the hell to do.

You improvise that much?
Yeah. So you have to say, “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom,” and then you can get your thoughts together. When the cameras were bigger and I didn’t know what to do to progress a scene, I’d just hide behind the camera. It was big enough to hide your face and you’d make believe you were adjusting the framing.

Maybe it’s because the plots are so much about your own, uh…
Probably obsessions. They always peek out. Sometimes there’s a seam of something that’s on your mind or bothering you. Or else you find somebody interesting and you wind up putting them in a plot, and somehow the plot unravels in the picture. But it’s other people playing them, so it’s all sort of dressed up. And 15 years later you realize what this picture was about, or that it was a pre-shadow of something. Pictures are kind of spooky. Especially when you handle the film yourself, and you got yourself in there. I compare them to little voodoo dolls.

Kenneth Anger believes that film collects more than just light and shadow. He said it made it hard to tell when they were finished.
Sometimes I finish a picture I’m working on and I think, “What a monstrosity.” Then I play it for a group of people and they sit there like, what just happened? And I think, “Uh-oh, what have I unleashed?” But if there’s something wrong with the picture, I fix it. The thing never gets finished unless it gets my complete seal of approval. Otherwise I’m haunted by it.

 

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19 of George Kuchar’s 217 films & videos

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Corruption of the Damned (1965)
‘The film is a cross between The Silence, L’Aventura, and Terrytoons… In it there can be found beauty, glamour, sophistication and smut. An enormous amount of people were rounded up to participate in cameo-roles. For some it was the first time in front of a movie camera but that did not stop them from behaving just as wantonly as they would under normal circumstances. One thing of interest is that Donna Kerness meets Gina Zuckerman at the climax of the film. The motion picture screen’s greatest sexpots are together for the first time in the same scene! If you don’t know what the word sexpot means, wait until you see Donna Kerness’s frying pans! And, if you think they’re great, stay awake and you’ll get a peek at Gina Zuckerman’s noodle-strainer!’ — George Kuchar

the entire film

 

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Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965)
‘An amateur effort starring the filmmaker’s friends and shot, without a script, mainly on weekday nights in various Bronx and Brooklyn apartments. Like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), Fleshapoids has the look of a home movie, having been shot on the amateur reversal stock Kodachrome II and all the more richly saturated for having been printed on Kodachrome as well; no less than Antonioni’s in Red Desert, Kuchar’s “specific aim,” the filmmaker maintained, was “to bombard and engulf the screen with vivid and voluptuous colors.”

‘Set “a million years in the future” and chronicling the conflict between indolent humans and their robot “fleshapoid” slaves, Kuchar’s epic is in essence a silent movie with a tremulous voice-over narration (supplied by Bob Cowan) and a more or less continuous montage of movie music (also compiled by Cowan and including, among many other things, snippets from Bernard Herrmann’s score for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad [1958]). The action is punctuated with strategic sound effects and occasional superimposed speech balloons, the movie directed as a silent movie would have been. “Intensive rehearsing was not necessary,” Kuchar recalled in an early interview. “In fact, sometimes what I did was to yell out directions of what the actors should do while the camera was on and the film was rolling.” Decor is all. Fleshapoids’ true ancestor is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.’ — J. Hoberman

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966)
‘In a time long before YouTube, the Kuchar Brothers borrowed their aunt’s Super-8mm camera at the age of 12 and began making their films: poorly-acted, cheapo productions as much parodies as homages to the Technicolor movies they grew up watching in the 1950’s. The sweetly oddball Kuchar sensibility was also informed by the SF underground comix scene (via friends Art Spiegelman and Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith) when George ended up teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. George, the more prolific of the twins, has made over 200 films, mostly with the help of his SFAI students, with memorable titles such as I Was A Teenage Rumpot, Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof, Corruption Of The Damned, Hold Me While I’m Naked, Color Me Shameless and House Of The White People. His best known film is probably the short, Hold Me While I’m Naked.’ — Dangerous Minds

the entire film

 

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Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967)
‘Eclipse of the Sun Virgin is a 1967, 16mm, 17minute film; directed by George Kuchar. The film is based on dealing with a poignant self-identity and the feeling of void between pornography. The short film was filmed in the late 1960’s, in this era a lot was going on with politics, social surroundings and economics. The short film is set in a small apartment. There is little speaking between the characters and a variety of music and sound in the background of the film. There are a lot of visual aspects of the characters mainly focusing on George Kuchar. Observing the way the film was shot there are a lot of shots and cuts in all the scenes. I think this film is based around maturity physically and emotionally in some ways, for example in the beginning of the film the camera is focused on a slightly attractive guy and then the camera cuts to George who is not so much attractive looking.’ — gwenn k johnson

the entire film

 

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Color Me Shameless (1967)
‘A tale of impotence. The hero is an artist who suffers from a creative block and who cannot bring himself to sexually perform. He has a variety of encounters with women and at times steals articles of clothing from them as sexual fetishes. His frustrations culminate at an art party where he observes others behaving freely, while he can only get drunk. After visiting someone and seeing a “sculpture” in their apartment, he becomes inspired and rushes home to paint. He writes letters to his women friends, telling them to come at once for he has painted a masterpiece. Upon receiving his letter, the women prepare to leave to visit him, but are distracted by their lovers. The man waits in vain; in frustration he destroys the canvas. The fetishes he had been collecting jump out from the drawer where he had been hiding them as if to haunt or taunt him, showing him what he is.’ — George Kuchar

Excerpt

 

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Pagan Rhapsody (1970)
‘Since this was Jane and Lloyd’s first big acting roles, I made the music very loud so it would sweep them to stardom. She once hurt Bob Cowan’s back by sitting on it so this time I had her laying on his stomach. Donna Kerness was pregnant during her scenes but her stomach was kept pretty much in shadow and it’s not noticeable. My stomach was the same as always except it contained more mocha cake than usual since that type of cake was usually around when I filmed in Brooklyn Heights. Being that the picture was made in the winter, there are no outdoor scenes because it’s too cold and when the characters have to suddenly flee a tense situation, it’s too time consuming to have them put on a coat and gloves. Originally not scheduled as a tragedy, things swiftly changed as the months made me more and more sour as I plummet down that incinerator shaft I call my life.’ — George Kuchar

Excerpt

 

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The Devil’s Cleavage (1975)
‘Restless nurses! Lovesick sheriffs! Sexed-up Girl Scout leaders! Lonely motel managers! And other degenerates populate George Kuchar‘s early ’70s mock-Hollywood soap opera, The Devil’s Cleavage. Ainslie Pryor stars as Nurse Ginger, who is stuck married to a total slob, so she takes to cheating on her hubby with anybody she cans. Eventually, she leaves home and becomes the object of obsession of a seedy Oklahoma motel manager played by Kuchar compatriot Curt McDowell. The Devil’s Cleavage is one of Kuchar’s rare feature-length outings. The film is credited by its distributor, Canyon Cinema, as having been completed in 1973. While the film may have had screenings in that year and in 1974, it gained a wider release in 1975, perhaps to capitalize on the success of Thundercrack! the semi-pornographic cult comedy directed by McDowell and written and starring Kuchar.’ — Underground Film Journal

Excerpt

 

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I, An Actress (1977)
‘One of the most enduring factors of Kuchar’s films is just how endearing his passion and peculiar personality was, especially when he was yelling things like “I’m on my knees, Harold, haven’t you seen women on their knees before or is it only on their backs?” He said that one while on his back during the screen test, kicking up at a dummy wearing a coat and a curly wig. The whole ordeal was supposed to be Barbara’s gateway into Hollywood, but George made it his own, tagging a title on the film when it was done. He called it I, an Actress, a George Kuchar picture © 1977. The clip blends his styles together great, maintaining both the exaggerated script reads and camp, while documenting an event in real time and showing the artifice from behind the camera. Watching I, an Actress makes me realize I had boring fucking teachers.’ — Vice

the entire film

 

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Wild Night in El Reno (1977)
‘While the 1977 film Wild Night in El Reno is not the first of Kuchar’s films to have been shot in Oklahoma (A Reason to Live [1976] prefigures it with scenes filmed there as well as in California), it is the earliest in which weather is the principal character. The only human beings seen in the six-minute piece are a woman briefly shown trying to use a payphone during a downpour, and the filmmaker himself, posed enigmatically beside graffiti proclaiming that “Jimmy Rush is a Pussy”. The majority of the film’s frames draw the viewer’s attention to the wind, clouds, rain and lightning strikes that accompany an El Reno storm. Many of the initial shots especially recall an Eric Sloane painting in composition and subject; his renderings of cloud formations in pastoral settings were an influence on the young Kuchar and it’s no surprise that a film bringing out the nature observer in the director would resemble one of Sloane’s landscapes put into motion by the camera shutter and the churning winds.’ — Senses of Cinema

the entire film

 

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The Mongreloid (1978)
‘The Mongreloid runs for about nine minutes. It opens with images of a city. Then, with Kuchar having a heartwarmingly one sided conversation with his dog, Bocko. He recants stories of their travels and all the people they’ve met together. He asks Bocko if he remembers salami and pooping all over San Francisco, “America’s favorite city”. He remembers their trip to lakes and to see a horse, one who didn’t take kindly to Bocko. He relates between them what his dog likes, like curling up with Kuchar as he has dinner, and how his dog’s aged since taking some of those trips.’ — smfafilm

the entire film

 

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The Asphalt Ribbon (1978)
‘Adapted from a pamphlet of “sentimental essays”. This film uses original text from the book, cuts it with sex, violence, rock n’ roll, an actor driving a fake truck, and footage of actual trucks. The story is an ode to American truck drivers.’ — KB

Watch an excerpt here

 

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The Nocturnal Immaculation (1980)
‘Two men, two women, one God and many devils. Add a pinch of vengeance and a dash of mental illness, let simmer with high ideals, then take a mouthful and hang over the railing.’ — zen xiu

Watch the film here

 

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Ascension of the Demonoids (1985)
‘One of the most insanely confusing longer creations by George Kuchar during the 80s, just before he switched to video. This was made after a collection of movies on UFOs and George was looking to “make a spectacle” and “wanted to get off the subject”. So the film wanders between scenes of cheap effects, insanely colorful and pyschedelic montages, discussions between UFO nuts and a woman who shares her recipes, angelic visitors from outer space, religious hallucinations, bigfoot and a couple playing a flute, an Arab massaging a woman, a woman beating up a walking blonde doll in her bathroom, and scenery of Hawaii. I’m lost.’ — The Last Exit

the entire film

 

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Andy’s House of Gary (1993)
‘A youth and a geezer or two chew the fat about cosmic mysteries beyond the realm of scientific digestion.’ — George Kuchar


the entire film

 

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Society Slut (1995)
‘The story of a matron and a midget in the heat of an unbridled passion. The colors run thick and heavy for paint and prurient pleasures as the electronic canvas unscrolls to reveal a bevy of beasties and beauties of nature and the unnatural. A non-stop melodrama of a patron of the arts shot by real art students in a real art school! A collaborative project I worked on with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute.’ — George Kuchar

the entire film

 

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Secrets of the Shadow World (1989 – 1999)
‘With a new millennium almost upon us, images of space aliens invading the marketplace and sleeping habits of consumers worldwide, this miniseries abducts the viewers into the universe of John A. Keel (via a video time-warp supplied by me with Rockefeller Foundation funding). It’s a leisurely expedition through a maze of kitchens and cerebral convolutions in search of the mysteries behind the mundane (or vice versa!). Mr. Keel, an author and stage magician, has made a profound impact on the pop-culture we swim in. His research and books on the UFO enigma have ignited an explosive wild-fire of imaginative invocations such as the X-FILES TV show and the Men in Black blockbuster movie. Yet you never hear about him and he never hears from the movie and television companies. In this video you see and hear him. You also see and hear a whole lot of other people and some animals. The whole show runs almost 2 hours and 20 minutes, but be sure to stay for part 3 as the UFO/Horror author, Whitley Streiber, teams up with my old star, Donna Kerness to reveal exclusive revelations on the ‘visitor’ experience. See this video… then read their books — and pray it’s not true!”‘ — George Kuchar

George Kuchar talks about Secrets of the Shadow World

 

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Butter Balls (2003)
‘To counteract the talkie I had done with graduate student the day before, this undergrad project has no dialogue but just a steady stream of images we dreamed up on the spot. A psychodrama that’s heavy on the beefcake, our picture deals with the sexual dementia of a sex addict undergoing hypnotherapy. It’s a mixture of fantasy and desire with some animals thrown in and lots of strange angles of the leading actor’s attributes.’ — George Kuchar

the entire film

 

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Dynasty of Depravity (2005)
‘This European flavored melodrama depicts a fictional country of refined manners and debased desires that explode into chaos, sending its prodigal son into the pit of 20th Century technology. That technology externalizes his hidden beauty just as he tries to hide the heritage of horror which was the curse of his lineage. That curse now threatens the already damned.’ — George Kuchar

the entire film

 

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Water Sports (2007)
‘A trip to the Marin headlands at the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay headlines this video diary. The viewer gets to eves and eye drop on various verbal and real time activities that are of a wet nature now and then. There’re boats and bodies and some spoken unspeakables amid the splendor of natural and unnatural expressions befitting the rim of a pacific paradise at low tide.’ — andyrod0077

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. I guess if nature or whoever built those spiders specifically to eat hummingbirds, they’re not evil. But, by the same logic, mosquitos wouldn’t be evil, but they are! Oh, right, I did like ‘Dogtooth’. I forgot he did that. I’ve only kind of read the headlines of the violently negative reviews of ‘Kindness’, but they seem to be saying it’s overly cynical and too deliberately provocative in the sense of giving away the game in a condescending way or something? So I guess they’re heady, I guess, sort of. It’s on my favorite illegal streaming site so I’m going to kick back with it with my mental cache emptied. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I know, it’s like the plot of one of those 60s’ American TV series. Thank you googling that. I honestly was very curious. It seems the head jerk would blur the vision, but I’m not a pigeon. I’m not even a stool pigeon. I’ll use love’s superpower, thanks. I’m actually really into writing the new film script right now, and that superpower won’t have any problem finding a receptive vehicle in me. Love remixing a song’s remix until it sounds like the original, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, The mural is kind of nice. Oh, gosh, did France win? Really, everyone’s so consumed with the election tomorrow that it’s like normal things are hardly even happening. ** Jack Skelley, We are born! And so are our covers! And … I got my copy of ‘Myth Lab’ yesterday. It’s so wee. It’s an adorable thing. I can’t stop cuddling it. Wow, cool about the instagram Flunkermania. I don’t know if I’m glad I’m not witnessing that or not. Sad not to see you tonight, but what’s a week in the world shaking lives of us? Does it mean something different when you put the ‘o’ before the ‘x’? I’m going to find out. ox, Dennis (Oh, it spells ox!) ** Lucas, Hi, Lucas. And that is precisely what I will do. I always seem to wait too long to buy concert tickets, so I should probably grab the Xiu Xius now. I hope this weekend fully kills off your flu. Seems likely, no? It’s good to think/know you’re getting better, for sure, but sometimes there’s something ineffable in the primitivism of things you made when you were less skilled that’s beautiful and that you can’t really see because your concentration is on getting better, all of which is to say at least keep the older stuff in a file and don’t delete it because you might come around to seeing its charms one day. ‘Blue of Noon’ is my second favorite Bataille fiction. There’s that beautiful green again. It really almost makes me want to eat it. The weather remains bizarrely nice. It’s strange. Okay, I’m going to move ‘Barbarian’ down my future watch list then, but not eliminate it entirely. That’s better. Have a productive and heavily bouncing back-oriented weekend! xoxo, me. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. It wasn’t a tough choice for me. Just the ceiling of Hell alone was a clincher. Oh, gosh, I like everything about ‘Lancelot du Lac’. It was the first Bresson film I saw, and it changed my life permanently, or my writing permanently at the very least. If I started saying what I love about it, I wouldn’t know how to stop. Okay, I do think the jousting scene, along with the Mr.-Amberson-assesses-his-life scene in ‘Magnificent Ambersons’, are my picks for the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. I’m very happy it pulled you in. And you have a splendid weekend too! ** Sypha, Well, of course I think you should slot it into your novel. Just describing those clubs’ interiors alone seem up your talent’s alley. ** Daniel, Aw, thank you so, so much for saying that, Daniel. That means really a lot. You know I hold your mind and being in the highest regard. xo, Dennis. ** nat, Most things are better imagined, it seems to me. Pretty tempting and open category. Nice verbiage too. My copies of ‘Flunker’ are now somewhere in France itself, according to tracking, so I might just beat you to it. You know Kier’s stuff. Kier did the cover of my novel ‘I Wished’. The photographs of Norway we took did not nail its particular magnificence. I think scale is a big part of it? I hope you make it to Monday happily. ** Steve, my deep condolences on the heat/humidity, need I even say. Disney would fuck/cute-sify l’Enfer, but a rogue Disney Imagineer … that’s a whole other thing. That could totally work. Where to install it though. In the original location, duh. The supermarket interloper on the property would be no loss. I’m into the new film script, so I’ll probably work on that a lot this weekend. Re: the election, the Far right is going to win the most Parliamentary seats pretty much for certain. The giant hope is that the temporary alliance between the Left and the Center Right, and the consequent strategising, will be enough to keep them from gaining a majority big enough that a Far Right person would have to be installed as Prime Minister, because that would be a huge disaster. At the moment, it looks like the alliance strategy will work, and that outcome is the best everyone’s hoping for, and that would be a happy result. ** Harper, Oh, yeah, for sure, writers, and, well, artists in general, go in and out of fashion unpredictably, and if Apollinaire is on the rise, that’s good and a good sign. Hope so. I mean, when Kathy Acker died, there were some years there when she was quite forgotten. I co-edited her Selected Works book soonish after her death, and there was no interest in it at all. But then she gradually became the big deal she is now. It’s interesting, those currents. ‘Superliminal’ sounds great, and it’s on my list for my imminent reengagement with my Switch. Thank you! All seemingly very true: your thoughts on l’Enfer and nostalgia and movements. Online revolutions are certainly easier, but they’re a little dry, but dry can work. ** Justin D, Hi. Thank you so much, Justin. I’m super touched. Really, thank you, that means a lot. I hope you have/had a really fruitful weekend. Anything out of the ordinary cross your path or even anything pleasingly ordinary? xo. ** Oscar 🌀, I’ve never played Worldle, so you’re one up on me. I like seeing the little mysteriously organised colored boxes in my social media feed. Ha ha. As for you, …. Hi! I don’t know what the later ‘Animal Crossings’ are like, but, in the first one, when you stop playing for a few days and return, the townsfolk are all freaked out and kind of pissed off that you left, and they guilt trip you and tell you everything is horrible because of you and stuff. I think I’m too sensitive to objectify that appropriately. I’ve not played either ‘Dark Souls’ or ‘Firewatch’. Heavily noted. Did you ever play the Gamecube game ‘Eternal Darkness’? That was incredible. The player kept going insane and hallucinating, like walking through walls and getting trapped in the game’s behind-the-scenes internal structure, and the game would fuck with you and suddenly say your controller was unplugged and you had 10 seconds to plug it back in or lose your game, and lots of things like that. Amazing. I remain shocked that they never made sequels. No, we’re still good, weatherise. Not as good as you. 16-19 degrees … my mind is doing the cerebral equivalent of drooling. Max that out for me. ** Right. Two separate people have recently asked me to restore the blog’s old George Kuchar Day because the original had become totally decimated by dead imbeds and other internet time-based tomfoolery, so I have done that and even expanded it a little. I hope I have made the right decision. See you on Monday.