September 17 – October 30, 2016

Curated by Jordan Stein

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 6 – 9 PM

George Kuchar (1942–2011) documented his gastronomic, meteorological, and libidinal desires in hundreds of film and video productions across four decades. An appetite for intimacy drove many of his first-person adventures, perhaps most tenderly in THE MONGRELOID (1978), a 16mm love-letter to his treasured mutt, Bocko. In nine absurd minutes, Kuchar walks the indifferent animal down memory lane, reflecting mostly on posterior matters: "How's your operation on your behind? You had that 400 dollar operation on your tushy, remember that?"

December 18, 2015 @ 7pm

Unique, prolific, emotional and funny, the filmmakers George Kuchar (1942 - 2011) and Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949 - 2012) both left behind many hours of moving image diaries, much of which is housed at the Harvard Film Archive. While the tones of their respective diaries are quite different, both Kuchar and Robertson cover similar leitmotifs, including food, the body, cats, family and the natural world. They also share the tradition of cinematically confronting the holiday season—a time that can be melancholy or festive, lonely or celebratory, and usually a bit of everything. Tonight we present a selection of their complementary, alternative visions of sugar plums.

April 11, 2015

This collection of films—which includes works rarely considered alongside one another—lends another perspective to the exhibition International Pop by examining cinema as an extension of Pop practice around the world.

San Francisco Cinematheque Presents: A Criminal Account of Pleasure: The George Kuchar Reader
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Yerba Buena Center For The Arts

Andrew Lampert , the editor of The George Kuchar Reader (and Anthology Film Archives’ Curator of Collections) appears in person to read excerpts from the book and to discuss this legend. The program includes George Kuchar’s 16mm Corruption of the Damned and the video The Exiled Files of Eddie Gray. 

Monday, May 26, 2014

1966. USA. Directed by George Kuchar. With Donna Kerness, George Kuchar, Stella Kuchar, Andrea Lunin. The loosely autobiographical Hold Me While I’m Naked is both the story of a frustrated filmmaker trying to prove his artistic integrity through his next production, and Kuchar’s homage to Douglas Sirk’s lush Hollywood melodramas. 15 min.

November 20, 2011 - January 15, 2012

George Kuchar (American, 1942-2011) was among the most prolific and influential American filmmakers of the last half century. His more than two hundred low-budget films, many made with his twin brother, Mike, regularly feature his friends and students, pioneering a camp aesthetic that has inspired generations of filmmakers and artists.

November 30, 2010 - January 8, 2011

Tropical Vulture features the work of legendary independent filmmaker and educator George Kuchar. Since the 1950s, Kuchar has gained attention for displaying his morbid interests, insecurities, and razor-sharp wit in low-budget films with over-the-top plots and performances. This exhibition presents a unique combination of Kuchar's films, videos, paintings and drawings, and is organized by San Francisco-based artist Julio Cesar Morales and Mexico City-based artist Miguel Calderon, two of Kuchar's former students.

The Mills Folly Microcinema series leaps into 2019 with the accessible eccentricities of the late George Kuchar, whose 1989 visit to the UW-Madison campus inspired the cheeky meta diary-film, 500 Millibars To Ecstasy, now celebrating its 30th anniversary. Every so often over the years, local screening series in Madison have featured Kuchar’s work, including one of his most famous and influential avant-garde shorts, Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), which simultaneously embraces high art and kitsch. Kuchar blurs the line between mocking and celebrating the internal melodrama of amateur filmmaking, instilling it with an enchanting performance art quality that inspired provocateur and "Pope of Trash" John Waters.

Mills Folly Microcinema, Madison’s newest experimental film showcase, is taking a trip down the personal rabbit hole of a very naughty rabbit with Melodrama/Melodiary: Three Videos by George Kuchar.

Kuchar was active in the experimental film scene for more than five decades until his death in 2011. A compulsive artist, he made roughly 250 films, many of them “diaries” of his day-to-day life. Campy, raunchy and arguably vile, he was a hero to none other than the Pope of Trash himself, director John Waters. In an introduction to a memoir written by Kuchar and his twin brother, Mike, Waters describes the brothers as his “first inspiration … a bigger inspiration than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz.”