This strange, lyrical performance video diary is a millennial reflection on the impossibility to "reveal" one’s self in stormy times such as ours. The piece is also about the intricate connections between performance and everyday life; about language, identity, love, nostalgia and activism amidst the California apocalypse.
It stands as a mecca to 16mm film, and weathers the withering breath of a shifting climate. Bundled-up in opulence and optimism, the film festival goes onward and upward while I succumb to a glacial deposit that proves unflushable.
Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends. Laurel is behind the camera as I recount my one-sided flirtation with a guy who worked at CalArts in the equipment “cage” - the cage where I checked out the video Portapak - the Portapak we utilized to record my anecdote. My story about an everyday interaction would become a trademark of my work. “Laurel and Susan” was not edited or presented publicly until 2022.
Another holiday season rolls into the Northern California coast along with the breakers that roil and foam in mimicry of a "white Christmas." Men, women and felines frolic and fret amid the tinkle of holiday revelers as the short days fade into a melancholy medley of digestive sounds and crackling firewood. Music to the ears and candy to the eyes makes this annual holiday tape a tradition to treasure in this world of terror and tarnish. Come splash in the buoyant pleasures of pacific vistas and sample the crummy crust of California fruitcakes. And by the way, HAPPY NEW YEAR too!
A window or two on the outside world is not enough, especially when you have such a lousy view of things as I had in this Oklahoma residential care home. The majesty of the console-model TV gave new dimension to the concept of time and space, and shrank it all down to a 21-inch lump of nature—a 21-incher that didn’t smell and permeate the atmosphere with discomfiture. A meditation on the elsewhere and wanting to be there.
Private photos of an exploitation film matron (Doris Wishman) in action highlight this collection of summer fare that features a wide range of image-makers pursuing their dreams. From the confines of Hell's Kitchen to the wide-open vistas of New Mexico, the video aims its savage eye at civilized civilians in the heat of digital desire. Take this tour of image driven locals in locales that shimmer in the heat of Hollywood halitosis: the whispered sleaze of tabloid tinsel-town.
George is in Tampa, Florida to do a one-day video workshop, so they make a fast-moving trailer for a non-existent UFO abduction movie.
Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal's Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life — with all of its unnameable and enchantingly fragmented specifics — and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera's odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal's deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing and terror.
An ailing, elderly man listens to a private performance in his room. The singing is a halting mix cross-cultural-Inuktitut and Country & Western. Transgressive and mesmerizing, Karaoke distorts the landscapes of sound and body.
In Inukitut.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.
It's the season of joy once again and this video depicts the tasty and the troublesome in big, heaping spoonfuls. Witness a social whirlpool of whipped confections and stripped confessions tastefully prepared in soupy symbolism. See man and domesticated mammals share in the bounty of a cosmopolitan cornucopia. Feast your eyes and ears on the snap-crackle-and-pop culture of a city simmering in smut. Swallow it all in the 4:3 format and good luck in the digestive department.
Ice falls from the sky as tears plip-plop onto wall-to-wall carpeting. No degree of renovation can enliven the dead that we mourn in our hearts as the storm of the centuries assails our heads with memories of the passing parade that got rained on. A weather diary of May-time misery.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
This East Coast travelogue documents my journey from New York City to Boston as several screenings plunge me into a maelstrom of social excess and tummy filling delights. You too can digest this banquet of artists, poets and movie-makers as this foray into fleeting fame runs its course on a highway of film oriented locales. See the Harvard Film Archive in all its spaciousness and visit the citadel of cinema, Anthology Film Archives, before winding up in a Greenwich Village bar full of verbal beauty. A trip for young and old who like to sit in one spot and watch someone els
Nine individuals visit the Santa Monica Mall and share their thoughts and feelings about love with Wendy Clarke and her camera. Love Tapes: Santa Monica Mall is part of Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
The dark and sloppy side of touring college towns with your work. An internal expose of external secretions that unfortunately make it to the boob tube in full color.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
A photographer comes to my home to take pictures and gets a lensful. His mouth and his shutter snap away as I aim my finest attributes at his cold and hard equipment.
Frisco anxiously awaits the pyrotechnic birth of a New Year while the remnants of holiday greenery still burn bright in all the right places. One of those places gives shelter to an Abyssinian animal of lethargic nature, while all about her the rumblings of tummies in turmoil foreshadow the gluttony of her bipedal guardian.
A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.
This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.
The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.
There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!
Summer and smoke (from pork chops) filters into every rip in my tee-shirt as legs and souls are bared for the infra-red-hot digital camera that's ON THE PROWL!
From the fall colors of the Bronx, we travel up the Hudson River to Bard College and chew the fat with some notable faculty in the film department, who live in the shadow of the Catskill Moutains. Then it's down to Sarasota, Florida where we go to prowl the manicured jungles and opulent estates on Tampa Bay. All of the above is punctuated by a symphonic squad of melodic mannequins and cranked-up antiques that spew forth jingles that jangle in jubilation at the bounty deposited in their slots.
In a motel in El Reno, Oklahoma, George observes the weather and copes with leaking air conditioning, food shopping, loneliness, television, and eating, among other things.
Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
The rocks are red, the mood is blue, the sky is big, and the scars on the earth run deep as a man and woman shop incessantly for nature's bounty and the trinkets of a vanishing culture.
A brief visit with a graduate student in the painting department of the art college where Kuchar teaches and the discussion that follows the unveiling of his work. Stroll through a gallery of acryllic-rendered innocence gone awry and the yo-yo generation in heat.
Benning illustrates a lustful encounter with a “bad girl,” through the gender posturing and genre interplay of Hollywood stereotypes: posing for the camera as the rebel, the platinum blonde, the gangster, the '50s crooner, and the heavy-lidded vamp. Cigarette poses, romantic slow dancing, and fast-action heavy metal street shots propel the viewer through the story of the love affair. Benning’s video goes farther than romantic fantasy, describing other facets of physical attraction including fear, violence, lust, guilt and total excitement.
