George Kuchar is one of the legends of independent filmmaking. Beginning as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, Kuchar directed movies which upended Hollywood melodramas into small-scale epics, noted for their creative low-budget effects, over-the-top plots, eye-popping performances by their cast of friends, and titles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, Color Me Shameless and Lust for Ecstasy. Kuchar’s classic film Hold Me While I’m Naked is beloved by several generations of fans and filmmakers, and was voted one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the critics of the Village Voice. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar turned to video making, and created what is possibly the largest single collection (160) of video diaries. This ongoing chronicle of the artist’s life is called "unique in film history" by the scholar Gene Youngblood. In Kuchar's video universe, nothing is safe from the camera expanding his oeuvre to exploiting his morbid interests and notorious insecurities with his token razor-sharp sense of humor in classics like The Mongreloid and The Weather Diaries.—Kuchar’s friendships, lusts, anxieties, fears, and bodily functions are all addressed onscreen, often accompanied by his outrageously funny commentary. And yet below the witty surface lie profound and moving meditations on human existence. Kuchar’s films influenced generations of filmmakers, starting with Andy Warhol and John Waters. Often referred to as Kuchar's 1965 masterpiece, Hold Me While I'm Naked is one of the all-time classics of DIY cinema. With 50 years Kuchar’s ever-expanding (200+ and growing) oeuvre of video work behind him, Kuchar has become a seminal figure in underground cinema.

 

George Kuchar is associate professor in the Film department at San Francisco Art Institute. His film and video work has been screened internationally, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Worldwide Video Festival First-Prize Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award, and the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and others. He also contributed to the underground comic book, Arcade, for which he created a biography of H.P. Lovecraft. Kuchar's recent major work, Secrets of the Shadow World, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.