Forever And Always
(1978, 16mm, Color, Sound, 20min.)
A marriage on the rocks that hurts the heart almost as much as the colors hurt the eye.
"... a full color portrait of a break-up that comes closer than any other to being an operetta." – B. Ruby Rich
"... Forever and Always often gets buried, but I like it a lot. It's a series of portraits of a crumbling marriage, with people posed against fixed backgrounds to get the 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 embarassing. 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