A lonely, bohemian poet befriends the good, the bad and the ugly in this rooftop drama set in New York's lower East side of Eden.
1963, R8mm, color/sound on cassette tape, 30m (18fps), $100
"Kuchar's films are overtly insane. Anyone who lived in such a world would be mad inside an hour. Perhaps the Marx Brothers might survive, but I doubt it. Godzilla, King of the Monsters, might have a better chance. But the utter insanity, the insanity of perverted cliche, is the genuine unwholesome appeal of Kuchar's outlook. CORRUPTION might seethe with violence and sex, the two most attractive things you can put on the screen, but beneath them a twisted outlook pervades. Something is very much wrong with the Kuchar world." - Leonard Lipton, Berkeley Barb
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 55m, $135
"A very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, HOLD ME surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality." - Ken Kelman
"This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back." - James Stoller, The Village Voice
1966, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
VHS Sale: $35 Home; $45 Other
A dramatized social commentary with the horrifying impact of a three-hundred ton chunk of margarine.
"... a delicate and funny footnote." - James Stoller, The Village Voice
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
A special guest appearance by Canadian TV star Bill Ronald along with the massive presence of "Mrs. Bronx" herself, Frances Leibowitz, and her girlfriend Iris, make this film a must-see for travel enthusiasts and horror fans.
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
Starring Bob Cowan, Gina Zuckerman, Donna Kerness.
This movie was made when I was a bit depressed which is nothing new, but also the main actor, Bob Cowan, happened to be depressed also and so we had a wonderful time working together. One of the actresses was also separated from her husband at this time and the movie solidifies into concrete the repressed desires of everyone who works with me, or more realistically, instead of concrete, the production becomes a frozen, brittle enema bag that slowly thaws and can only be appreciated along channels previously blocked by organic reality.
1967, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
Starring Deborah-Ann and Edith Fischer.
I dedicate this film poem to the behemoths of yesteryear that perished in Siberia along with the horned pachyderms of the pre-glacial epoch. This chilling montage of crimson repression must be seen. Painstakingly filmed and edited, it will be painful to watch, too.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE BLESSED culminates my involvement with artist Red Grooms and Mimi Gross. It is a diary of our work as we head for the Pacific Ocean in a suicidal plunge for theatrical infamy. The film traces the construction of two craven images made in the likeness of myself by Grooms and Gross. Then it switches to the sandhills of Nebraska where fat cattle walk around. There the film explores Grooms' biggest construction, "The Chicago Installation." The film rolls relentlessly onward to the West Coast showing, for the first time on any screen, a theatrical production we three put in the University of California. It marks my directorial debut on the stage and Red Grooms' comeback after ten years of exile from live theatre.
1968, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 42m, $125
Cast: Donna Kerness, artist George Segal and his wife Helen, Walter Gutman. Having nothing to do with racial tensions, HOUSE OF THE WHITE PEOPLE is actually a chunk of film removed from a bigger chunk called UNSTRAP ME. It is a documentation of George Segal creating the basic elements for one of his statues preceded by rare glimpses into his own private museum. Donna Kerness serves as his live model. Walter Gutman sits on a chair and walks around a bit, being that he produced the film. Helen Segal, personifying the ageless saying, "behind every man there stands a woman," stands behind her man and also stands in front of him occasionally. The film is a unique invitation to view the hidden rituals of a famous artist and his infamous model, half naked, snowbound together on a lonely farm, with a silent wife and a notorious guest.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 16.5m, $60
With Joyce Wieland, Frank Meyer and Bocko.
The rising moon is the main theme in this short movie of three people and an animal going about their nocturnal rituals. This movie is evidently part three of my trilogy that started with HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED and ECLIPSE OF THE SUN VIRGIN. It evidently is, since part three never really came out. This seems to look like it could be part three.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $60
Produced by Walter Gutman.
Starring Walter Gutman and a lot of women with a few elephants.
This film is my longest movie in color because someone else produced it. It has a lot of scenery and the soundtrack has a lot of sound. I went to Cape Cod, New Jersey and Florida and got drunk in most of those places because Walter drinks a lot and I had nothing else to do between shooting. The drunkenness did not affect my shooting but many people think that it did.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 77m, $135
Starring Frank Meyer, Zelda Keiser, Donna Kerness, Hopeton Morris and many more. The movie takes a rather negative look at things despite the fact that it was shot in reversal film. It depicts the turbulent relationships of disturbed individuals existing on various levels of an apartment house. Donna Kerness and her husband Hopeton Morris are lurid together and they are also pretty lurid when they're alone.
1969, 16mm, b&w/so, 31m, $90
Starring Jane Elford, Lloyd Williams, Bob Cowan. With Donna Kerness, Brad Bell, John Collyer, Dave Somerset, Janine Soderhjelm, Phillip Weiner.
Since this was Jane and Lloyd's first big acting roles, I made the music very loud so it would sweep them to stardom. She once hurt Bob Cowan's back by sitting on it so this time I had her laying on his stomach.
Donna Kerness was pregnant during her scenes but her stomach was kept pretty much in shadow and it's not noticeable.
My stomach was the same as always except it contained more mocha cake than usual since that type of cake was usually around when I filmed in Brooklyn Heights.
Being that the picture was made in the winter, there are no outdoor scenes because it's too cold and when the characters have to suddenly flee a tense situation, it's too time consuming to have them put on a coat and gloves.
Originally not scheduled as a tragedy, things swiftly changed as the months made me more and more sour as I plummet down that incinerator shaft I call my life.
1970, 16mm, color/so, 23.5m, $75
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
This movie was made mostly in Brooklyn during some very hot and empty evenings. Since the evenings were so empty, Jane Elford, the star, urged me to get started making another movie (we had completed PAGAN RHAPSODY the year before). I said "okay," and launched her in a photographed series of telephone calls, not really knowing who was going to be on the other end. I was interested at the time in irrational, neurotic responses and so the heroine was put into unstable situations that I dreamt up because I was making a movie with a plot and there should be some action .... Many of the stars appear nude and all I can say is that because of the heat and the general, overall feeling of the film which is one of the usual desperation and explosive emotions, I couldn't see any other way of them playing it. The general tone of everything was ... "Why even bother to get dressed?"
The end result is (to me) a rather happy blend of cramped, dark apartments, pumpkin orange people and a lot of music. I sing the vocal to the PORTRAIT OF RAMONA theme at the end and it's rather frightening but I only meant to sing it with some gusto ... not in the way it turned out: like the final screams of a species doomed to extinction.
1971, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
"THE SUNSHINE SISTERS looks like a 1944 postcard that was shot in black and white, but colored with garish grease pencil reds, yellows and greens. Likewise, the film sounds like the scores of at least two-dozen grade B melodramas mixed together with an egg beater. The results are hilarious, ludicrous and incongruous - a love comic book of doomed women and handsome, nefarious young men caught in a web of dramatic cliches, pushed ad absurdum. Elvira Cartwright, dying of movie star disease, is seen alternatingly clutching her waning heart and being taken unfair advantage of in some of the most bizarre places imaginable. Sarah Cartwright wears a phony leopard skin jacket, pointy plastic sunglasses, and gold-toned sandals .... The sisters are played by Jan Lash and Ainslie Pryor. Musical compilation is by Bob Cowan." - program notes, Film Forum, New York
1972, 16mm, color/so, 36m, $100
"... George Kuchar's lovingly farcical re-creation of those (Forties and Fifties) melodramas, THE DEVIL'S CLEAVAGE, is a camp parody that sometimes directly steals from the genre, sometimes burlesques it, and often travesties it. As you might expect, it soon begins to mock all kinds of cinematic references, from Hitchcock to Preminger. But leave the exact details to pedants, laughter's the thing here .� Kuchar manages terribly well in terms of imagination and inventiveness, and just plain terribly in terms of such humdrum details of filming as using a light meter and tape recorder. Technical ineptness aside, we end up with a marvelous hybrid, as if Sam Fuller and Sternberg had collaborated in shooting a script by Tennessee Williams and Russ Meyer. Which is to say that excess is the most basic element of Kuchar's method, even when (almost paradoxically) it's an excess of cliche ('Such language! Bite your tongue!' 'Bite it for me ...').
"... Douglas Sirk tells us, 'Cinema is blood, tears, violence, hate, death, and love.' Kuchar reminds us that cinema, like life, is also bedpans, earwax, sleazy fantasy, ineptness, compromise, and laughter." - Chuck Kleinhans, Film Center program
1973, 16mm, b&w/so, 122m, $150
Scenes for this film were shot in Death Valley and Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park. It's a love story of betrayal, a search for happiness, fulfillment and misery among nature's grandeur.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
This film is about depression, although it's not that depressing. I suppose it has a message of faith and hope in it ... it does for me .... But then again my interest may not match yours. It was shot in San Francisco and in Central Oklahoma with a cast of one man and four women. Crushing emotions are indulged in against a massive meteorological background that brings inspiration and terror to the characters involved.
1976, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
This film was shot in ten minutes with four or five students of mine at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was to be a screen-test for a girl in the class. She wanted something to show producers of theatrical productions, as the girl was interested in an acting career. By the time all the heavy equipment was set up the class was just about over; all we had was ten minutes. Since 400 feet of film takes ten minutes to run through the camera ... that was the answer: Just start it and don't stop till it runs out. I had to get into the act to speed things up so, in a way, this film gives an insight into my directing techniques while under pressure.
1977, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
VHS Sale: $25 Home; $35 Other
KY stands for Kentucky ... where this film was shot. As a visiting artist at the University in Lexington, I involved a group of students in this improvised project. We shot it in five morning sessions from 9 AM to 12:30 PM. I did the photography, directing and story line. The story isn't really in a line as it loops, bends and stops throughout the 20-minute running time.
1977, 16mm, b&w/so, 20m, $60
This film documents a thunderstorm as it rages in full fury above a motel in May on the southern plains. There's sun, wind, clouds, rain and electrical pyrotechnics ... with perhaps a glimpse of a fleeting human figure. But only a glimpse.
1977, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
VHS Sale: $20 Home; $30 Other
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
1978, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
A man, his dog, and the regions they inhabited, each leaving his own distinctive mark on the landscape. Not even time can wash the residue of what they left behind.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
VHS Sale: $25 Home; $35 Other
An enigmatic movie that's like an enigmatic enema.
1979, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
1979, 16mm coor/sound 56 minutes $135 Rental
Young men and women awash with the vital forces that gush forth from flaccid hoses or dribble relentlessly from turned-on nozzles.
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
Two men, two women, one God and many devils. Add a pinch of vengeance and a dash of mental illness, let simmer with high ideals, then take a mouthful and hang over the railing.
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 27m, $60
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
Starring Michelle Joyce in her first color film with me.
A film about a housewife obsessed with the idea of a large hairy creature, 12 feet tall, with big feet. Chronicles her eventual breakdown in no uncertain terms.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $65
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
Against the background of a grisly mystery, four people face a growing sense of panic and uncleanliness. Part documentary, part "cartoon," part B movie, the film asks questions to which there don't seem to be any clear-cut answers.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $50 Other
Something for me to play and remember my mother by when she is not here to visit me: smiling, eating, walking around nice places that are filmed with a cheap lens so that you can't see the cracks and the dirt.
1983, S8mm, color/si, 15m (18fps), $45
Note: The following films were all made at the San Francisco Art Institute and utilize production facilities and student input at that school:
A husband and wife travel by ship to Egypt with their son and encounter the sinister as nature assaults their vessel with tempest and marital tensions. The extreme low budget of this film proved to be an asset.
1975, VHS, b&w/so, 21m, $40 Home; $50 Other
A female sex therapist throws herself into her work with wicked abandon and confronts the masochism of her 9-to-5 job ... with plenty of overtime.
1978, VHS, b&w/so, 20m, $40 Home; $50 Other
The script is from a 1940s drama about teenage rebellion in the world of fashion and parental intervention. The conflict in the plot is mirrored in the clash of colors chosen to decorate this tale.
1980, VHS, color/so, 14m, $30 Home; $40 Other
Hollywood, where legends are born and souls die in the hell fire of licking tongues that aim to please where it hurts most.
1986, VHS, color/so, 18m, $40 Home; $50 Other
The beast within and without makes an attempt to fuse with culture and the denizens of a Frankensteinian legacy.
1987, VHS, color/so, 28m, $40 Home; $50 Other
Can we ever retrace the steps it takes to progress downward to the meat-beaten path of our youth when not even Jehovah can jive to what we juke?
1988, VHS, color/so, 30m, $40 Home; $50 Other
This 45-minute production in black and white and also color was made with my film students and features an international and attractive cast of characters aboard an ocean liner of large dimensions. The ship eventually is torn apart with romantic intrigue and labor revolts and the few tattered, yet still attractive, survivors confront the dawn of a new and natural dominion.
1989, VHS, b&w/color/so, 45m, $50 Home; $60 Other