2012 Winter Programming

Film Screening: A Tribute to George Kuchar
Fri, Feb 24, 8-9:30pm

Film curator Andy Ditzler’s Film Love series continues its ongoing exploration of cinema with a selection by the renowned director George Kuchar (1942-2011).

Film Love pays tribute to our beloved friend George Kuchar, who died in September 2011. Kuchar was one of cinema’s most spectacularly inventive figures, making wildly funny and intense films full of eye‐popping imagery and a revolutionary DIY attitude. On Feb 24 at ACAC, Film Love will pay tribute to Kuchar with a program of films and videos spanning the poles of his career.

Program
I, An Actress (1977), 16mm, black & white, 9 min
Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), 16mm, color, 15 min
Precious Products (1989), video, 15 min
500 Millibars to Ecstasy (1989), video, 16 min

I, An Actress is one of the funniest films ever made about filmmaking. While directing a screen test for a young woman, George can’t resist getting in on the act and starts delivering the hilariously melodramatic dialogue himself. His impromptu performance has since become a classic among devotees.

Hold Me While I’m Naked is often considered Kuchar’s masterpiece. Made at age twenty‐three, it depicts George as a young filmmaker who tries to overcome his sexual frustration and social awkwardness by making movies. Eccentric, virtuosic, funny, and vulnerable, Hold Me While I’m Naked was voted one of the top 100 films of the twentieth century by the Village Voice – sitting on the list just behind Chaplin and Hitchcock.

Entering middle age in the 1980s, Kuchar began a remarkable series of diary videos that continued to the end of his life. In Precious Products and 500 Millibars to Ecstasy, George deals with his turbulent love life, anxieties about human interaction, and fascination with food as social ritual – accompanied by his witty asides to the audience, delivered in his distinctive Bronx accent. Like his melodrama films, the video diaries are brilliant, funny, and deeply moving reflections on the relation of filmmaking to real life, with George impressively negotiating the double role of director behind the camera and protagonist in front of it.

The Film Love series provides access to rare but important films, and seeks to increase awareness of the rich history of experimental and avant garde film. Film Love is curated and hosted by Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals.

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