The World of George Kuchar
George Kuchar
09:31:22
Collection: Box Sets , Single Artist Compilations , Kuchar Archive
Tags: Animals, Autobiography, Body, Camp, Diary, Environment, Expedition/Travel, Family, Food, Holiday, Home DVD, Humor
Beloved by filmmakers such as John Waters and Todd Solondz, George Kuchar worked with the moving image for over half a century. In the 1950s, Kuchar and his twin brother Mike began producing ultra-low-budget underground versions of Hollywood genre films, with names like I Was a Teenage Rumpot and The Devil’s Cleavage. These 8mm kitchen-sink masterpieces bore the distinctive marks of what Susan Sontag called “camp,” and positioned the Kuchar brothers as the Bronx’s answer to the downtown underground filmmaking scene, which quickly adopted the Kuchars as their own — and in the work of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and others, showed their influence.
From the 1980s until his death in 2011, Kuchar created brilliantly edited, hilarious, and often diaristic tapes made with dime-store props and not-so-special effects, using friends as actors and the “pageant that is life” for his studio. In an essay that accompanies The World of George Kuchar, Gene Youngblood references his 1968 article on the (then) filmmaker, writing that, ‘“in these apparently lighthearted works I have always detected something more serious, something similar to the corrosive personal vision of Luis Buñuel, though I would not for an instant compare Kuchar to the Spanish master. Today,” Youngblood continues, “I would. There is no doubt in my mind that George Kuchar is one of the great artists in the history of the moving image.”
Curated by Steve Reinke and including essays by Reinke and Gene Youngblood, The World of George Kuchar collects twenty-seven works on five discs, and serves as an entry-point into Kuchar’s extensive oeuvre of video work.
The collection features the following essays:
- Excrements of Time: A Brief Introduction to The World of George Kuchar — Steve Reinke
- Underground Man — Gene Youngblood
Pricing Information:
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The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Health, Humor, LGBTQ
On a back-to-nature trip to Boulder, Colorado, George goes to the mountains, but goes on the rocks emotionally.This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, Diary, Expedition/Travel, Mental Landscape
In this classic example of the Kuchar style, George travels to the Bronx to visit his mother and to see old classmates from art school. “We see what they have become or are becoming or already became…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, Humor
George visits his mother in the hospital on Halloween and contemplates the autumn colors.This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, Humor
Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, Diary
George goes to Oklahoma, but there's a lull in storm activity. It's spring, and though there's romance in the air, the lightning just doesn’t strike; so George makes his own rain—of sorts. Despite…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, Diary, Expedition/Travel, Humor, LGBTQ
An island. A mountain. A City of Angels who scoop up the pellets dropped by other winged creatures.This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Humor
Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Diary, Environment, Expedition/Travel, Humor
A trip to a barren landscape of jagged peaks and deep crevasses becomes a playground for an over-dressed hiker and his beefcake buddy as they secrete and imbibe fluids from various containers.This…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Expedition/Travel, Humor, LGBTQ
The strings of fate manipulate the living and the dead against a landscape of water vapor and watercolors which make more palatable the unacceptable and the undigestable.This title is also available…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Humor
The young and the innocent at the mercy of a palpable presence oozing menace and scarlet-stained goodness as a strawberry sundae melts under the glare of future hell-firestorms in search of kindling.…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags:
Ice falls from the sky as tears plip-plop onto wall-to-wall carpeting. No degree of renovation can enliven the dead that we mourn in our hearts as the storm of the centuries assails our heads with…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Diary
The splendor of a mountain lake is clouded by the musings of a brain in memory mode. The head relives the heartbreak of suburbia and the vacancies that fill every motel on the edge of nowhere. The…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Expedition/Travel, Humor
The New York City summer is fueled by the sultry emanations of hot air that tumble off the tongues of potential thespians as they attempt to decipher the gastric guesswork embedded in the prose of…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Autobiography, City, Diary, Humor
Alone in my room at the El Reno Inn, way out west from Oklahoma City, I face a big picture window that overlooks the refuse of Route 66 to ponder the fate of trailer trash in Twisterville. The skies…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Humor
The spirit of poets permeates the space/time occupied by an assortment of dinner engagements that occasionally erupt into physical or verbal assaults on the taste buds. Flowers of evil are absent…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags:
A metropolis awash in electrical overdrive crashes in the heat of summer and sends a Bronxite into the clutches of a waterworld further north. It is there that we witness the cooling fogs and diving…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: City, Expedition/Travel, Family
A California Christmas season ushers in an array of holiday visuals designed to feed the hunger of soiled souls in search of truffle filled delights. A glittering seaport of electric lights helps the…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags:
Beloved by filmmakers such as John Waters and Todd Solondz, George Kuchar has been working with the moving image for nearly half a century. In the 1950s, Kuchar and his twin brother Mike began…
Collections: Interviews, On Art and Artists, Single TitlesTags: Interview, VDB Interviews
A deliberately tasteless drama about televangelist scandals.This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Humor
A series of abrupt vignettes and transitional montages paint a torrid portrait of a tropical isle in the grip of terror. Linda Martinez stars in this latest atrocity from studio 8 in the San…
Collections: Kuchar Archive, Single TitlesTags: Humor