JEANNE LIOTTA
Will present and discuss her work in person at the Free Form Film Series in Denver (in the Mass Com building at DU) on April 30th!
Liotta’s work is shown and rewarded internationally. just a few honors include: Inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, awards from the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Jerome Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Cinema. Her film Observando El Cielo was named one of the 2007s top films by Artforum and the Village Voice.
4:25 pm • 18 March 2013
SHIRTS!
—-Want a FFFF T Shirt? After a LONG LONG time, we finally have more. The new FFFF site will be up in April and you’ll be able to order shirts from it!
2:12 am • 21 January 2013
9:30pm Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Come and see THE authoritative documentary by Jennifer Kroot about experimental film legends George and Mike Kuchar! …screening to be followed by SURPRISE Kuchar shorts!
677 South 200 West, Salt Lake City, Utah
THIS EVENT IS SPONSORED BY THE CENTRAL UTAH ART CENTER AND HOSTED BY ISMN at BREWVIES (thanks to all who made this possible).
THIS FILM HAS NEVER SHOWN IN UTAH!
…this quote might give you some sense of what you’re in for:
“(The) Kuchar’s films are overtly insane. Anyone who lived in such a world would be mad inside an hour. Perhaps the Marx Brothers might survive, but I doubt it. Godzilla, King of the Monsters, might have a better chance. But the utter insanity, the insanity of perverted cliche, is the genuine unwholesome appeal of Kuchar’s outlook.”
- Leonard Lipton
more info?… for those who want to read it:
About George and Mike Kuchar:
GEORGE:
Kuchar trained as a commercial artist at the School of Industrial Art, now known as the High School of Art and Design, a vocational school in New York City. He graduated in 1960 and drew weather maps for a local news show. During this period, he and his twin brother Mike Kuchar were making 8mm movies, which were showcased in the then-burgeoning underground film scene alongside films by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. Ken Jacobs has brought attention of their work to Jonas Mekas who championed their work in the Village Voice and elsewhere.
After being laid off from a commercial art job in New York City, Kuchar was offered a teaching job in the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1971 until early 2011. [2]
In San Francisco, Kuchar became involved with underground comics via his neighbors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith. They both wound up in his movies and George wound up in their publications.
MIKE:
Raised in The Bronx, he made his first films as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother George Kuchar and participated in New York’s underground film scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Mike divided his time between New York City and his brother’s San Francisco apartment until 2007, when he moved to San Francisco permanently. George died on 6 September 2011 in San Francisco.[2]
It Came From Kuchar, a documentary film of the life of George and Mike Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, premiered at the South by Southwest film festival on 14 March 2009.[3]
In the past 10 years, Kuchar has focused on more intimate one person expressionistic films. At the Vienna International Film Festival in 2009, he unveiled two short films, Swan Song and Dumped. Swan Song features the pain of a young man tormented by his sensuality who is painted as an animal writhing in pain, and Dumped stars veteran stage actress Deirdre McGill in a portrait of a woman engaged in a deadly love triangle. Kuchar is currently teaching in the film program at the San Francisco Art Institute.
The Kuchar brothers collaborated on a book, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997), a humorous memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking and including an introduction by director John Waters.[4]
George Kuchar, Underground Filmmaker, Dies at 69
By PAUL VITELLO
New York Times
September 8, 2011
George Kuchar, a filmmaker whose campy yet ardent low-budget movies inspired underground directors like John Waters and David Lynch in the 1960s, and helped kindle the do-it-yourself moviemaking aesthetic now ubiquitous on YouTube, died on Tuesday in San Francisco. He was 69.
The cause was prostate cancer, his twin brother, Mike, said.
Mr. Kuchar and his brother started making films together as boys, using the eight-millimeter camera they received for their 12th birthday, props from their family’s apartment, and actors enlisted among friends and neighbors in the Bronx.
George and Mike Kuchar (pronounced KOO-char) began receiving attention in the underground film world in the early ’60s with sardonic sendups like “I Was a Teenage Rumpot,” “Night of the Bomb” and “Lust for Ecstasy.” The films spoofed the Hollywood schlock the brothers devoured during weekend marathons at the local movie house, where they essentially grew up, while conveying what The New York Times, in a 1983 retrospective, called “a compassionate sense of the human condition, especially of loneliness.”
As the two developed individual styles, George Kuchar directed the 1966 film short “Hold Me While I’m Naked,” a semi-autobiographical rumination on the frustrations of a maker of soft-core pornographic films. Many movie scholars consider it one of camp’s defining texts. Along with his “Weather Diaries,” a series of films he made on annual visits to a trailer park in Oklahoma during tornado season, it is his best-known work.
Mr. Kuchar’s ability to make movies on a shoestring during a prolific career in which he sometimes made two or three films a year for the art-house circuit was a point of pride for him, and an inspiration to several generations of young filmmakers.
“He was a liberator,” said P. Adams Sitney, a founder of Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, a nonprofit organization that collects and preserves experimental films. “He showed you how to make a film for absolutely nothing, using your friends and your ingenuity. His influence is incalculable — the whole world of YouTube is where you see it. He was a guy who just wanted to keep making films. I don’t think he even wanted to be ‘discovered’ by Hollywood.”
Mr. Waters, who crossed over from cult to mainstream with his 1988 movie <“Hairspray,” said in an interview on Wednesday that the Kuchar brothers were “the people who made me want to make movies.”
“They were the first ‘experimental’ filmmakers I ever read about when I was 15,” he added. “They were giants. They inspired four to five generations of militantly eccentric art fans. To me they were the Warner Brothers of the underground.”
George Andrew Kuchar was born in Manhattan on Aug. 31, 1942 (an hour after his brother), and grew up in the Bronx. His father, also George, was a truck driver whose taste for pornographic films triggered an initial interest in what the younger George called “the sordidness of adults” and the power of film to “suddenly make it so alive.”
Their mother, Stella, bought the brothers their camera.
After graduating from the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, Mr. Kuchar worked briefly drawing weather maps for the New York television meteorologist Dr. Frank Field; then tried drawing comics. He settled on being a full-time filmmaker after The Village Voice and The New York Herald Tribune wrote glowing articles about some of his early work. (A reviewer in Newsweek called the brothers “the holy innocents of the underground.”)
In 1971 he was invited to teach filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he remained on the faculty until his illness forced him to stop work this year. Teaching provided him with not only a steady income but also hundreds of amateur actors — his students — willing to be cast in some of his later movies, including “Carnal Bipeds” (1973), “I Married a Heathen” (1974) and “I, an Actress” (1977).
Mr. Kuchar, whose speaking voice never left the Bronx, was always prosaic in describing his work. In the many documentaries and print interviews that quote him, he almost never uses the term avant-garde. He is more likely to brag about how little money he spent making a film, or to compare the costs of using film and videotape, than to articulate his theory of film.
“Normally, I don’t have much of a personal life,” he said in one taped interview, answering a question about why he made movies. “Making a movie is very personal. You get to interact with people. It’s like a party. You make a party and then you’re home alone for a long time. You edit it, and put it together and then you go — and another party happens when you show the rushes. So it helps your social life.”
In an interview videotaped in 2009, however, he probably came as close as he ever would to explaining his motives as a filmmaker: “Makin’ movies, see, sometimes you see a very beautiful person. And the first thing that comes to my mind is, I want to make a movie of that person. ’Cause I like puttin’ gauzes — ah, cheap, black cloth on the lens with a rubber band — and creating these, what look like 1940s movies, or movies of a beautiful Hollywood style, and blowing these people up bigger than life and making them into gods and goddesses. And I think in the movies that’s a wonderful way of pushing them on the public, and infusing the public with great objects of desire, and dreams, and things of great beauty.”
He added, after a long pause, “Living human beings of beauty.”
2:38 am • 18 September 2012
FREE FORM DENVER!
SIX NEW SCREENING EVENTS IN DENVER THIS SPRING! EVENTS INCLUDE IN PERSON PRESENTATIONS FROM MIKE KUCHAR, CRAIG BALDWIN, JENNIFER KROOT AND JAMIE MELTZER. ENLARGE FLYER BELOW FOR FURTHER DETAILS!
2:12 pm • 16 March 2012
OLD SITE BECOMING NEW
Over the next few months, we are completely re-designing our website and adding a host of new features. In the meantime, you can find out what we are doing NOW on this blog and you can still visit freeformfilm.org for a sampling of the projects we have engaged in since 2003.
1:10 pm • 16 March 2012