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.
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This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.
(That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. Years later the other factors that led to the move–petty relationship problems, an intolerance for Midwest winters, a foolish youthful faith in the power of geographical change to correct deep-seated emotional issues–seem far less significant.)
I was already skipping classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to watch George Kuchar’s movies at the Video Data Bank. Shot first on Super 8mm, then 16mm, then prosumer video, sometimes aided by his brother Mike, the Kuchar films were cheap and intentionally schlocky, but the best of them were somehow funny, poignant, and even beautiful. They were exactly the kind of movies I wanted to make! The idea of finishing my final three semesters of art school in a sunny clime, where I would take classes with Kuchar and surely in no time convince him to take me under his wing–it was like an actionable fantasy.
Of course, the reality of it was nothing like I fantasized. …Read more
