Friday, September 22, 2023
7:30pm PT
Special guest: Post-screening conversation with filmmaker Mike Kuchar.
“George and Mike Kuchar’s films were my first inspiration… these were the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz. Here were directors I could idolize—complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension, outsiders to even ‘underground’ sensibilities who made exactly the films they wanted to make without any money, starring their friends.” – John Waters
“The Kuchar brothers gave me the self-confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision.” – John Waters
Twins George and Mike Kuchar were born in 1942, growing up in a working-class Bronx neighborhood where their frequent moviegoing represented a cathartic escape into a world of hyperbolic fantasy that felt totally alien in contrast to their daily surroundings. They began to make their own 8mm films as teenagers (first collaboratively, and soon after individually), producing numerous ambitious and elaborately designed mini-epics in eye-popping Kodachrome before Jonas Mekas and other New York experimental film denizens finally caught up with them in the mid-1960s.
These films (and the hundreds more that followed) ooze with massive inspiration and creativity—not to mention infectious, often uproarious humor—and manage miraculously to be utterly earnest without naïveté and brilliantly satirical without a whiff of irony.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.
Total program runtime: 94 min.
Born of the Wind
DIRECTED BY: Mike Kuchar. 1962. 23 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
A Town Called Tempest
DIRECTED BY: George Kuchar. 1963. 33 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
The Craven Sluck
DIRECTED BY: Mike Kuchar. 1967. 23 min. USA. B&W. English. 16mm. Print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
Hold Me While I’m Naked
DIRECTED BY: George Kuchar. 1966. 15 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.