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A Few George Kuchar Shorts
Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966)
The Mongreloid (1978)
The Smutty Professor (2003)
Storm Surge (2004)
Swoon Lake (2004)
George Kuchar often wears shorts. He was wearing them the night he showed a few of his short movies at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in October 2004. He has old man legs; they’re scarred and wrinkled. Those legs are the subjects of one of the films he showed that night, Swoon Lake. The diary style video follows Kuchar around San Francisco as he speaks with a few friends and artists about the scars on his legs and oriental toothpaste. He’s certainly not bashful about his physical flaws and, in fact, finds an artist that takes close-up photos of skin defects and makes buttons and origami paper out of them. The exploration of human flaws isn’t a new topic for Kuchar; 1966’s Hold Me While I’m Naked, includes many close up shots of his own heavily acned face. That film is a courageous display of vulnerability, an exploration of sexual loneliness ten times more heartbreaking than anything Todd Solondz could envision.
For simplicity sake we can categorize Kuchar’s massive filmic output into three genres: Early psycho-drama made mostly on film, his film and video “diaries” and his class films made during his 30+ year teaching career. All three genres were finely represented at the Egyptian. Hold Me While I'm Naked is an example of his early film work. Swoon Lake and Storm Surge are indicative of his video diary work. Kuchar’s presence and idiosyncrasies are intoxicating; it’s a joy to join him on the adventure through even his most mundane daily activities. The Smutty Professor is one of his class films. Kuchar teaches film and video production at the San Francisco Art Institute, which enables him to make two class films a year (one a semester). He considers it his, “own little studio system,” in which he writes and directs the movies with a cast and crew made up of his students. The Smutty Professor is actually a documentary of the making of a class film, and therefore an interesting peak at how these movies come together. George makes up scenes as he goes along, at one point a student asks him when he decided on the direction of the scene they were shooting (it was sending the plot in an entirely new direction) and George replies, “uhhh, just before lunch!” It seems he’s open to any new idea that floats into his head and therefore his films are very unpredictable and his remarkable skill makes everything work in the most entertaining fashion.
I’ve kind of lost steam in this review… ummmmm, I’ve sure been getting zits at an alarming rate. I get them more now than when I was an adolescent. George Kuchar makes just as many movies today, if not more, than when he was an adolescent. He’s made nearly 60 films and over 100 videos; it’s about all he seems to do. He’s pure moviemaker. Seek him out.
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