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George Kuchar was one
of the heroic figures
of American underground film
who sadly passed away this past fall.
He began making films
with his twin brother Mike in the Bronx
when they were just teenagers.
They made these wildly inventive
burlesques of Hollywood cinema,
being in the late 1950s, on 8 mm.
The early Kuchar films
were dime-store approximations
of big budget Hollywood films,
particularly melodramas, and their titles,
"The Naked and The Nude,"
"A Tub Named Desire," are a window
into the sensibility of the films.
By the 1980s, however,
George Kuchar shifted away from film
and toward video,
a fact that distinguished him
from many of his peers,
because consumer-grade Hi8 video
was completely disreputable,
and I think that was what
really attracted Kuchar to it,
the fact that it was so disreputable.
I think what distinguishes Kuchar
from a lot of his contemporaries is that,
let's say, for example, Brakhage,
who actually appears in some
of Kuchar's video diaries,
was interested in creating
a vision of another world,
a vision of inner life, a kind of...
these works that played with abstraction,
and these things that you
could never see otherwise.
What Kuchar was interested in is,
in effect, almost the opposite.
He's interested in representing
back to us everyday life
in all of its kind of quotidian detail.
So his video diaries are full of, like,
mouths munching food in close-up
and, like, an unflushed toilet,
you know, all these things
that are really undignified.
In a sense, if someone like Brakhage
was all about, like, leaving this world
and thinking of something beyond it,
Kuchar was all about bringing it
right back down to Earth, you know.
In some ways, you could call him
this kind of fleshy conscience
of the avant-garde, this...
through comedy, he's kind of
reminding us that we're all mortal.
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