The Cinema of George Kuchar

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George Kuchar materialized camp sensibility like no other filmmaker, with equal measures of precision and excess. Made on the fringes of both independent and avant-garde cinema, his hundreds of films and videos, of which this session features a selection, represent an essential chapter in the history of gay cinema and the beginnings of queer cinema.

From the age of 12, George Kuchar, along with his twin brother Mike, made films by transplanting melodramatic Hollywood passions and improbable Z-movie adventures to grimy Bronx apartments that smelt of cabbage. Cross-dressing due to the difficulty of finding actresses, and forming an extravagant troupe in their adolescence, in their films the Kuchar twins explored the most torrid, lascivious pathologies: animal furies, self-pitying voyeuristic dismays, histrionic fits of frustration in the face of hetero-normative codes. Filmed with a teeming inventiveness without conceit, these films contributed to the “depraved” moral climates in which the bodies of Kuchar productions moved. Oblivious to norms, they sought to embody the most exacerbated erotic drives in satires that are devoid of irony.

The films in this program display Kuchar’s lurid, delirious glamor, drawn from cinema and pop culture. The melodramatic association of the climate with a tormented inner reality in Wild Night in El Reno serves as a prelude to the repression, scopic fantasy and libidinal explosions of Eclipse of the Sun Virgin and Hold Me While I’m Naked, and the visceral larger-than-life catharses of Back to Nature. In Portrait of Ramona, Kuchar captures the dis-inhibition of summer in Brooklyn with a procession of characters, while The Sunshine Sisters explores the relation between desire and danger through the comic-book adventures of two elderly sisters.

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