The incredible George Kuchar mixed with the cream of the American avant-garde while taking his inspiration from melodramas and B-movies. His camp, cheap films create feelings of joy, inclusivity, and melancholia, as this collection of shorts reveals.
George Kuchar on his early films (1988)
I’ve developed a language in my movies almost like shorthand. Some people don’t know what the hell is going on. In fact, what is going on does interest me to an extent, but it doesn’t interest me to show where people are or how they got there. I want the big scenes, the essence of what’s happening. When you’ve been in movies for many years you begin to discard those details. Also the expense is too high, you want to get right to the point. Finance isn’t always on my mind, but I did develop shortcuts. With video, I can enjoy the mundane, but add meaning to it. I can do bathroom shots, faucet close-ups, what you ate, stuff like that.
Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966) was my second 16mm movie; the first was Corruption of the Damned, which I worked on with my brother. Donna Kerness was very sick during Hold Me While I’m Naked – her face blew up after she had taken cortisone. It became more of a movie about me not being able to make a movie, instead of the original premise which was about a star becoming sick – too close to what happened. I made it seem that she didn’t want to take her clothes off and so she rebelled. I used some previous footage I’d shot of Donna and her husband in the shower and incorporated that with more footage of me than I had originally planned.
We painted the walls of the apartment we used specially. An actress I met once, who was in Three Coins in a Fountain, said to me, ‘The colours are so nice; in Hollywood they colour-correct too much’. She’s right. There’s no colour-correction in Naked; the colours just bounce off the walls.
Pagan Rhapsody (1970) is from the end of my New York period. I only made one more movie there after that: Portrait of Ramona, which has the same cast but is louder, sort of a personal scream. I sang in that. I tried to get a grant for Pagan Rhapsody, but didn’t do it the proper way: I wrote on loose-leaved paper with a ball-point pen. While the application was being processed, I went and made the movie anyway. Instead of an hour-and-a-half, I condensed it to 23 minutes.
It’s all about boomeranging emotions and their chain reactions. It stars Bob Cowan – a painter and filmmaker from Canada who’s working in video now – and Jane Elford, who later became his wife, and who was starring in my pictures at that time as a neurotic heroine. The main actress didn’t turn up for some of the shooting because, at the same time, she was making an oil painting of me and my brother. She got tired of the painting and so didn’t want to see me anymore, but I had to finish the movie. I finally trapped her in the house and wouldn’t let her go. I had to work quick, though, which is why the film ends abruptly and why she receives a tragic ending. I knew she was not going to come back after this. But she did finish the painting.
I go to Oklahoma once a year – I can recommend it. There’s a lot of weather research there; they have more thunderstorms, hailstorms and other sorts of severe weather than anywhere else in the country. When I was younger, I read a lot about the weather as a hobby. So I decided to go and see the place. I made two videos there recently – each 70 minutes long (Weather Diary 1 and 2). I also made a five-minute film there on one of my first trips: Wild Night in El Reno (1977). I was in an Oklahoma motel for about a month; I finished a painting, then made the movie. It was originally going to be longer, and what you see would only have been inserts, but I said no, I don’t want to continue this anymore.
I, an Actress (1977) is a ten-minute black-and-white film which was shot in the classroom. One of my students really wanted to be an actress, and she asked if she could do a small performance. I said fine, and got other students to work on the lighting and other things, and said I’d give her a script. She came to class and I didn’t have the script ready – in fact, I hadn’t even written it. She was all dressed up, she looked nice, and she got so upset that I wrote it stream-of-consciousness. I work best under pressure. She waited, and finally we filmed it in the last ten minutes of class.
… Forever and Always … (1978) often gets buried, but I like this a lot. It’s a series of portraits of a crumbling marriage, with people posed against fixed backgrounds to get that postcard tone and to accentuate what they’re feeling. There’s no dialogue, just music. But the movie didn’t start out like this. Two women gave me $50 because the city was having a ‘Hooray for Kids’ festival, down near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. It was supposed to be a celebration of children on this huge pier. There was all sorts of stuff for them to play in, but they were mainly ripping it off. I went to make a documentary record, but I thought, how about planting an actress and inventing a sequence of events?
So I asked this woman friend who had two children to come in and act like she was having a breakdown amidst this mob of people. Then I filmed some surrounding material explaining why she was cracking up, showing her husband going off to some tropical paradise with a glamour queen; then I also incorporated some footage I shot at Corpus Christi, Texas, of boats and stuff. So it’s like postcards from different places. I was really pleased with it. I think that mothers really understand this picture … The funders saw me taking pictures of seagulls and got a bit worried. At times it was a little embarrassing. Finally they demanded to see the movie. One of the women caught me at the bank as I was standing in line to cash a cheque. I think she liked it. But anyway, what the hell is $50?
George Kuchar interviewed by Mark Finch, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1988
Mosholu Holiday
USA 1966. 10min. 16mm
Hold Me While I’m Naked
USA 1966. 15min. 16mm
Knocturne
USA 1968. 10min. 16mm
Wild Night in El Reno
USA 1971. 6min. 16mm
I, An Actress
USA 1977. 9min. 16mm
Orphans of the Cosmos
USA 2008. 40min. Digital
The screening on Mon 13 Apr will include an extended intro by Professor Juan A. Suárez, author of Experimental Film and Queer Materiality
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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