An Evening with George Kuchar
Tuesday February 2nd, 2010, 19h
NW Film Center
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97205

San Francisco film and video maker George Kuchar is one of the most interesting and prolific (over 200 works) media makers working today. With his homemade Super-8 and 16mm potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, he became legendary as one of the most distinctive and outrageous American underground filmmakers. In the 1980s he transitioned to video, making dozens of subversive, witty, often diaristic works employing friends, students (at the San Francisco Art Institute), and whatever might be creatively (“no-budget”) at hand. Tonight’s sampling of recent works includes, along with other surprises, The Hairy Horror (2009), a short meditation on a tall terror in the trees that shade shadowy giants from the glare of sanity; Burrito Bay (2009), a video diary about the making of another of his films, Tropical Vulture, which “blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real-life approach”; Portrait Of Genie (2008)—"An ex-student of mine opens up in the privacy of her home and shows me her etchings (watercolors) as we talk of art and things that slip under the fabric of daily attire"; and X Mass (2008)—“A California winter turns the left coast into a brew of foaming festivities while landlubbers leap for joy in the spray of salty slurping.” "[Kuchar’s films] were my first inspiration…the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even THE WIZARD OF OZ."—John Waters.

Co-presented by QDoc: Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival. Kuchar also visits the School of Film for conversations with filmmakers.