The World of George Kuchar

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