“On Bizarro World, a planet in Superman's universe, people do everything backward and ineptly. If this anti-Earth had a filmmaker, that person would probably be a lot like George Kuchar.” – Ken Johnson, New York Times

“Attempting to launch a formal analysis on [Kuchar's] work is like trying to dissect a rubber chicken — entirely irrelevant.” – Leah Churner, Reverse Shot

George Kuchar (Aug. 31, 1942–Sept. 6, 2011) is a beloved legend of underground cinema. In 2011, Kuchar's film I, An Actress (1977) was inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Other formal honors include the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists, a Los Angeles Film Critics Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and a Worldwide Video Festival First Prize Award. He was also awarded production grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Many of his films and videos have been preserved by the Harvard Film Archive and Anthology Film Archives with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, and select titles are in the collections of the British Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Along with his twin brother and frequent collaborator, Mike, Kuchar practically invented the wild, campy, no-budget, anti-professional, tasteless, gender-bending underground style later embraced by John Waters and others. First making 8mm films in high school, Kuchar at once embraced and parodied a sweeping mish-mash of cinema genres, merging an exploitation ethos with a deep (if irreverent) love of Hollywood movies. “The titles of the 8mm movies they made in their teens,” wrote Roger Ebert, “make Invasion of the Body Snatchers sound like something Laurence Olivier might have starred in.” In 1964, at age 22, the Kuchar brothers had their first retrospective screening — reportedly the first time 8mm films were shown in an art house context. But they were just getting started, and George in particular was incredibly prolific, making hundreds of films, videos, and diary videos. At the San Francisco Art Institute between 1971 - 2010, George taught the classes “AC/DC Psychotronic Teleplays” and “Electro-graphic Sinema,” making two films a year with his students.

“Douglas Sirk tells us, 'Cinema is blood, tears, violence, hate, death and love.' George Kuchar reminds us that cinema, like life, is also bedpans, earwax, sleazy fantasy, ineptness, compromise and laughter.” – Chuck Kleinhans

The Devil's Cleavage (1973) is one of Kuchar's few feature films, and this is a particularly rare print — running 122 min. versus the 108 min. version recently preserved by the Harvard Film Archive. It has been described as “paralytically funny,” and Guy Maddin cites it as among his earliest and most formative screen memories. A ribald, sometimes scatalogical, pastiche of post-war Hollywood melodramas (particularly Butterfield 8), the story centers on a pent-up nurse named Ginger (played by Ainslie Pryor in drag), whose marriage is on the rocks. Leaving San Francisco behind, she heads for new misadventures in the rollicking town of Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him. “We end up with a marvelous hybrid,” writes Chuck Kleinhans, “as if Sam Fuller and Sternberg had collaborated in shooting a script by Tennessee Williams and Russ Meyer.” Co-starring Curt (Thundercrack) McDowell, the film includes cameos by Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, and other notables of the 1970s San Francisco scene.

Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) is one of Kuchar's most famous films, his first in 16mm color, and a near-perfect encapsulation and self-parody of his aesthetic. Loosely autobiographical, it is about a independent director (Kuchar) trying to make a movie that pretends to have artistic merit, but is really just softcore porn. When his lead actress quits — exclaiming “I am sick and tired of being naked in almost every scene!” — everything spirals into a “very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness” (Ken Kelman). Voted one of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century by a Village Voice critics poll, James Stoller has rightly observed that “This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla.”