When it comes to It Came From Kuchar, Jennifer M. Kroot’s deceptively breezy documentary about experimental filmmaker brothers George and Mike, I am without a doubt a member of the choir. George Kuchar was my independent study advisor when I was an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute, and much of Kroot’s film documents his life and times at that alma mater of mine. George is seen clomping through the bayside, architectural masterpiece of a campus, slightly hunched, with appreciative students trailing off him like some kind of handycam-weilding, Bronx-accented, beautiful schlock-peddling pied piper. George isn’t the right professor for everyone — as John Waters puts it in the film, “I think some of his students are probably horrified and leave” — but for me, as a very, very serious studier of cinema who took my own attempts at filmmaking very, very seriously, George gave me a much-needed license to have fun with film, to play and pursue the weird. As Brook Hinton, another SFAI stallwart, says of George’s work in the film, it’s “profound, has great beauty, and yet doesn’t take itself too seriously.” George Kuchar is a walking whoopie cushion n a world of art school pretensions … except, you know, funny.
So I can’t proclaim distance, but I can express my appreciation for Kroot’s film as a creative exemplar of how to make a talking head documentary becomes , and salute it as a much-needed work of historiography. As Anthology Film Archives’ Andrew Lampert notes on screen, there is no complete Kuchar filmography — George in particular works so fast, and with an attitude that renders distinctions between video diary, collaborations with students, and his “Real” movies so meaningless, that even the completists can’t completely keep up. Kroot’s film is clearly the result of intimate access to not only the brothers and their films (thus rendering the doc something like a Greatest Hits reel with commentary), but even to some of their unused archival footage.
After a brief set up in the present day, It Came From Kuchar goes back to the 60s and more or less works forward from there, demonstrating how the Kuchars established themselves as the “fun” filmmakers in an art underground primarily concerned with making formal statements against mainstream culture. As one talking head puts it, in art films “nothing happened,” but Kuchar films, “reflected Hollywood, where everything happened.” In terms of film history, the doc is most valuable in revealing the ways in which the Kuchar brothers’ small guage, handmade Hollywood-inspired epics both pillaged the mainstream film industry and the world of celebrity, and were later a reference for directors both Hollywood-dependent and underground. And so Butterfield 8 inspires George’s The Devil’s Cleavage, which latter inspires Guy Maddin. As the footage shows, (a typical exchange –– Woman: “I stink, I stink so bad It scares me!” Man: “Then let me fumigate that beautiful body!”), the Kuchars’ best work brings the liminal subtext of late-Classical Hollywood cinema up to the primary level, but in the process those themes get twisted into a weirdly charming grotesque. The translation back from Kucharland wasn’t so successful; the B-movie novelty of robot sex in Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids lost its charm once replicated virtually exactly in Barbarella.
The film loses steam a bit when talking about George’s foray into non-cinematic pursuits like comics, but regains momentum when talking about George’s sublimation of his desire (of the gay variety, and thus extremely problematic for a Catholic mama’s boy) through the casting of hunks like Mike Diane. The film then drifts into George’s relationship with Curt McDowell, an SFAI student who made gay art porn, who George collaborated with on a film called Thunder chrack (Buck Henry calls it “wonderfully degrading”), and who ultimately died of AIDS. As kroot shows, George captured Kurt on his deathbed in one of his lat 80s video diaries.
If Kuchar completists will find a weakness in Kroot’s picture, it’ll probably be a short-shrifting of Mike’s later life. Mike and George started out working together, then parted ways to pursue slightly different interests, although George would star in most of Mike’s films. As the years went on, George moved to San Francisco and Mike stayed behind in New York; George became increasingly prolific after switching to video in the 80s, and Mike’s output dropped off. It would have been nice to learn more about what he’s been up to, and how the dynamic between the two brothers has aged as they’ve gone separate ways. But Kroot does tap into Mike and George’s twin telepathy: though the brothers aren’t seen interviewed together until the very end of the film, much earlier there’s a rapid fire sequence in which, from two different cities, they collaborate on telling the story about their old parakeet lulu, who they forced to “exercise” by putting it on the family turntable, who then flew away. Fifty years later, 3,000 miles apart, Mike and George are finishing each other’s sentences.
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth