Public Enemy Palin
George Kuchar: An Appreciation
Note: This piece was written for Fanzine in September, shortly following the Kuchar’s untimely death. This is the original text; the edited version (with interview) can be found here.
GEORGE KUCHAR
An Appreciation
I don’t recall the first time I saw one of George Kuchar’s movies, but I’m certain it must have been in the early 1970s at the Fox Venice Theatre, the legendary L.A. area grindhouse that introduced vast numbers of underground, cult and outlaw movies to an entire generation of young filmgoers. I want to think it was Portrait of Romona (1971), but it could have easily been any of several dozen 16mm shorts that George produced (either singly or with his twin brother Mike) starting in 1954 when the boys were a mere 12-years-old.
What is easily remembered and vividly about that first Kuchar movie is just how funny, outrageous and way over-the-top it seemed, a sensation that would persist and grow over the years and through dozens of other films with unforgettable titles like Pagan Rhapsody (1974), The Devil’s Cleavage (1975), A Wild Night in El Reno (1977), The Nocturnal Immaculation (1980), Ascension of the Demonoids (1985) or, deliciously, The Deafening Goo (1989).
The hilarious and overwrought names of Kuchar’s films tellingly reflect the satiric sensibility and playful irony that inform or, rather, run riot in each and every one of his movies. All of them are in equal part homage to and parody of that greater, glittering artificiality that is the product of the Hollywood dream factory and, in their crude and garish surfaces, it is Hollywood’s most sacred cows that are viciously skewered and served piping hot off Kuchar’s cinemagraphic grill.
His films are not in the strict sense films about film, but instead are movies about the cinematic imagination, specifically about pushing the limits of that imagination to their very farthest and ultimately most (il)logical conclusion. In this effort to transcend (or, if you prefer, transgress) the stifling pieties of conventional Hollywood filmmaking, Kuchar produces something that is instantly recognizable and comfortingly familiar and yet still manages to be wholly subversive.
In Kuchar’s films, all of Hollywood’s favored tropes and techniques are made grist for his low or no budget mill — lush orchestral soundtracks, elaborate costumes and make-up, loving close-ups and epic panoramas – all are systematically subverted in a wild and uproarious romp that is astonishingly good-natured and fun. Distorted, trashed and turned on their heads, conventional cinema’s verities are stripped of their sanctimony and seriousness, leaving us laughing at the hapless emperor in all his glorious and grainy nudity.
Like all great comedic directors, Kuchar tackles the big themes – love, sex, war and, of course, aliens from outer space – and he does it with a touch so light and so uniquely his own that he might easily be dubbed the Lubitsch of the underground. His work resembles the great Viennese director in its heartfelt celebration of the commonality of human frailty and the humor that ensues from our vainglorious attempts to depict it. The difference (and it’s an important one, separating as it does mainstream from underground) is Kuchar’s embrace of the absurd, his innate sarcasm and his almost obsessive adoration of pop culture.
His films are a hoot all right, but they’re a hoot that cannot help but make us think and wonder and walk away with a little more than what we started with. The death of someone like George Kuchar diminishes more than an artistic community tragically short of revolutionary perspectives, it leaves us yearning for an artist who can articulate the absurd, the ludicrous, the crazy part of ourselves that was created by the movies we watched and the TV shows in whose flickering shadow we were formed.
In 1977 I moved to San Francisco and found myself involved in the burgeoning punk scene. A few years later, mutatis mutandis, I started a small underground zine called Damage and, for the premier issue, I resolved to do an interview with George Kuchar who, conveniently enough, was teaching and making films at the nearby San Francisco Art Institute. We arranged to meet at a café in North Beach and I spent the days before the interview carefully crafting the questions I wanted to ask. When at last we sat down to do the interview, I pulled out my tape-recorder and watched in astonishment as George’s face drained of color. In a lifetime of doing interviews, I’ve never seen anyone so freaked. I dutifully asked my questions and he haltingly, hesitatingly answered almost monosyllabically. It was like pulling teeth and I was feeling increasingly desperate. To make matters worse, when I looked down at the tape recorder, I suddenly realized the cassette wasn’t turning. The batteries had died. “Oh man,” I moaned, “this is a total disaster.” George’s reaction was to instantly perk up, like he’d been born anew. “No problem,” he said, smiling widely, “no problem at all. I’ll tell you what, I’ll interview myself. I’ll do the whole thing. It’ll be great.” Well, I didn’t have much of a choice and, to tell the truth, the idea sounded way better than anything I could’ve come up with. George had only one stipulation, his autobiographic authorship was to remain strictly entre nous. “It’ll be our secret,” he said, chuckling, “just between you and me, you know?”
And I did know and now so do you. May he rest in peace forever and always and may the pagan angels sing him rhapsodically to sleep.
Comes now JAMES BALDWIN:
“What I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least one can demand.”