40]UStlOUt
JULY 18, 2008
film
Seeing Double
Twin experimental film legends come to Portland
by Gary Morris
Sunday
August 31, 2008
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Mike, “and we stuck the camera in a fast
running stream and ran it in slow motion,
and it was like a flood. We had some
friends dressed up in costumes which
were really bedsheets.”
A cheap camera, a fast-running
stream, a few friends and some bed
sheets—such were the ingredients of Le
Cinema Kuchar then and now. A satiri
cal edge was also evident from early on in
Hollywcxxl sendups with titles like A Tub
The Kuchar brothers' films are equal parts
Called Desire (1956).
flamboyance, terror and raging id.
George’s vivid 1998 essay “Schooling”
gives a good indication of the brothers’
complex, witty sensibility and a feeling for what
in Night of the Bomb (1962). Looking and acting
their films are like—equal parts flamboyance, ter
like cute nerds, the boys were fearless in their de
ror and raging id: “After school my twin brother
votion to their artistry, insisting on making mov
and I would escape to the cinema, fleeing from
ies with nudity and sex and sacrilege, and topics
our classmates, urban urchins who belched up egg
ranging from the timely (the Cuban missile crisis)
creams and clouds of nicotine. In the safety of the
to the taboo (thalidomide babies). They were in
theater we’d sit through hour upon hour of Indian
novative exhibitors as well, setting up informal
squaws being eaten alive by fire ants, debauched
cinema clubs to show their work, which scandal
pagans coughing up blood as the temples of G<xl
ized some of the attendees with its sexual frank
crashed down on their intestines, and naked mon ness, anarchistic air, laughable plots and charm
strosities made from rubber lumbering out of radi
ingly low-rent special effects.
ation-poisoned waters to claw the flesh off women
In the 1960s the brothers began to work inde
who had just lost their virginity.”
pendently, with George refining the steamy camp
Wet Destruction was followed by hundreds of melodrama and, later, working in a diary format
films (literally) in the comic chaos mode, torrid
that allowed him to drolly record the nuances of
two-dollar mekxJramas based on Kuchar favorites
his daily life and his self-proclaimed favorite top
such as Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. The
ic, Midwestern tornadoes. Mike, too, continued
titles are as notorious as the films themselves:
to perfect his own brand of unfettered filmmaking,
Corruption of the Damned (1967), Pussy on a
and both focused on painting, cartoons and writing
Hot Tin Roof (1961), Hold Me While I’m Naked
as well. In the early 1970s George began teach
(1966). Like John Waters’ work, they featured a
ing at San Francisco Art Institute, where students
st(Kk company of eccentric
acted as cast and crew to create new and dazzling
amateurs dying to strut their
digital Kuchar prixluctions: comically surreal
stuff in film after film. Sins
shorts and featurettes with titles like Tempest in
of the Fleshapoids (1965) fea a Tea Room ( 1990) and Queen Konga (2006), the
tures “robot sex.” In Color Me
latter utilizing black-and-white digital video for
Shameless (1967) a woman
some extraordinarily beautiful effects.
ends her obsession with a
Clinton Street Theater is devoting two week
“life-sized doll” by hurling it
ends to the Kuchars spotlighting this later mate
out a window.
rial, each weekend showcasing the work of one of
Thundercrack! (1975) is
the brothers, who will attend. These shorts prom
pure Kuchar, written by and
ise to be among the highlights of Portland’s sum
starring George, but directed
mer cinema season. George is represented by such
by George’s sometime lover
provocative titles as Dangling Digitalia, Cinemaville
Mike (left) and George Kuchar influenced talents as disparate
as John Waters, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and David Lynch.
Curt McDowell. In one
and Orphans of Mars, in which “three attractive
famous scene a sweating
teens on the planet Mars seek funding for an ex
and fantasies into cinema. Alas, one of their first
George gets masturbated in close-up by an amo
pedition into adulthood.” Mike’s program includes
efforts—an untitled “transvestite movie,” accord
rous “escaped gorilla.”
the likes of Cupid’s Infirmary, The Fornicators and
ing to George—resulted not in audience acclaim
Many of the films continued to feature their
Grip of the Gorgon, tantalizingly described thusly:
but a whipping from their outraged mother, whose
trademark shoestring special effects, which in “Those snake-haired sisters of legend are alive and
nightgown they’d “soiled” during shooting.
cluded flcxxls, earthquakes and tornadoes ren well, living in New York City and still turning
men hard as stone!” Not to be missed. ©
“That unfortunate incident,” recalls George,
dered with stock footage, backyard assemblages
hen John Waters’ Pink Flamingos
was released in 1972, audiences
and critics alike were shocked
and enthralled by the “insanity”
onscreen, proclaiming the film
unlike anything they’d seen. And it’s true that
Waters, in his eternal quest to rub viewers’ noses
in bad taste, went over the top in scenes like Di
vine and that hapless toy pixxlle.
But Pink Flamingos was not quite the break
through it seemed. Waters himself credits two
lesser-known but highly influential filmmakers
as the inspiration for Flamingos and all his work:
George and Mike Kuchar. The Kuchar brothers,
separately and together, pioneered a highly per
sonal, queer-inflected, campy, banxjue, hilarious,
strange, low- or no-budget style of experimental
filmmaking in the early 1950s that became the
template for many an underground moviemaker
with more ideas than cash. Talents as disparate as
Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, along with quirky
mainstream artists like David Lynch, have rightly
paid homage to the cinematic teachings of the ir
repressible Kuchars.
George and Mike—you have to call them that;
they’d laugh at the formality of “Mr. Kuchar”—
defied the ixlds from the beginning, as the only
known pair of twin gay filmmakers. Born in Man
hattan in 1942 to working-class parents of Ukrai
nian and Hungarian extraction, the boys moved
to a Bronx tenement at a young age. Both evinced
artistic talent early on. Obsessed with Hollywood
and their truckdriver dad’s trashy novel collection,
they received an 8mm camera for their 12th birth
days and immediately began turning their fears
“did not end our big costume epics. One month
later Mike and I filmed an Egyptian spectacle on
the same roof with all the television antennas re
sembling a cast of skinny thousands. Our career in
films had begun."
Their first “official” film, The Wet Destruction
of the Atlantic Empire, appeared the same year,
1954- “We did matte paintings of the city,” says
and matte paintings by the talented duo. Musi
cal scores were both reassuring and creepy, often
lounge music backgrounding the zany doings on
screen.
In true DIY style, the Kuchars dealt briskly
with any cinematic emergency. If a star didn’t
show, George would pinch-hit, even if the part
called for an actress and a nude buttocks shot, as
Clinton Street Theater presents the K uchar
B rothers 8:30 p.m. July 25 and 26 and Aug. 1
and 2 at 2522 S.E. Clinton St. Admission is $8.
G ary M orris edits and publishes Bright
Lights Film Journal, located online
at www.brightlightsfilm.com.