The King of Kitsch: George Kuchar

"The head, heart, and hairy area below the stomach is what should be stimulated at the cinema.” George Kuchar’s simple aphorism aptly sums up his filmmaking style. Lo-fi, perverse, bitterly humorous, his 200 plus movies have a unique everyday-camp sensibility.

Kuchar started making films as a teenager with his twin brother Mike in the late 1950s, mini-melodramas in which they cast their friends and Bronx neighbours. These early efforts were an attempt to replicate the heroes, explosions, and marauding monsters of Hollywood genre and exploitation flicks. Later, the Kuchars became part of America’s thriving underground scene and were welcomed into the fold by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage. The brothers went their separate ways in 1965 and George made his most famous title, Hold Me While I’m Naked, starring himself as a film director seeking sexual satisfaction. Its mock serious tone is encapsulated by a scene in which George shoots a couple behind a window. At the end, he tells one of them to take her bra off, saying, “the mysticism of the stain glass window, and the profanity of that brassiere do not go well together.” Inspired by the weighty camp of Douglas Sirk and Howard Hawks, among others, Kuchar’s legacy is his skill in undermining ‘serious’ art through self-parody whilst managing to retain a sort of compassionate intellectual dignity.

In the 80s, the prolific artist switched to video, claiming to be attracted to the medium because it was despised as inferior by everyone else. The technical alteration evolved his aesthetic. Kuchar began making video diaries. Still investing in corny special effects and ostentatious commentaries, this next phase in his career led to an even more personal, quotidian approach. GFF is screening Kuchar’s Weather Diaries, a series created over two decades during the loner’s trips to the El Reno motel in Oklahoma to record thunderstorms. Along the way, he meets other oddballs and films them going about their daily business, eating, using the toilet, and other intimate essentials.

Kuchar died a couple of years ago, sparking a fresh burst of interest in his work. Hopefully, his name won’t become ossified through overeager cinephilic reverence. Aspiring filmmakers could do worse than copy his casual path to low-budget greatness. Shortly before he passed, an interviewer asked Kuchar why he makes movies. “I make them for me so I can remember the friends, the places the times I had. Good times.”