A voyage through a California Christmas that begins in the turd-smeared streets of San Francisco and ends in a botanical wonder of ethnic endurance and faith. A journey that incorporates pelicans, palaces, and platters of plenty. A season of joy bloated with the ephemeral gasses of religious fermentation and the iconography of a movie-land Madonna.
George goes to Oklahoma, but there's a lull in storm activity. It's spring, and though there's romance in the air, the lightning just doesn’t strike; so George makes his own rain—of sorts. Despite the drought, the videos must go on.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Nine micro-essays on animation and death--with many appearances including Goethe, Pink Floyd and Bambi--leads to a final encounter and introduction.
A party of past students illuminates this diary of boxed dreams, as those enclosed face the real world and nurture into existence the future people of the next millennium.
In the first of George Kuchar’s Alumni Series, he braces the unusually volatile weather, contending with torrential rain and flooding on his way to visit the apartment of alumni Peter Van Langen. Van Langen will be remembered for his role as Captain Toby Steel in Kuchar’s La Verbotene Voyage from 1989. Unlike his character’s brooding hostility toward nature, Van Langen and his roommate are much more at ease as they lounge around their loft in hammocks. After talking with Van Langen about his experience working with B-movie director Roger Corman.
Shot in low-light style, Kuchar documents his experiences with various underground filmmakers such as James Broughton and Ken Jacobs, then moves on to the other side of Hollywood lifestyle to visit Nicholas Cage. Images of crowds and facial close-ups comprise this haunting tape.
There is so much to absorb: the wetness from the sky. The hooded figure in the box. A big plate of pasta, and that chair on wheels. Messages of moral guidance clash with actions that are on a collision course with dilapidation. And through it all the water runs, the fridge is full and hearts yearn for that which mellows the melody of God’s glockenspiel. For the winds of change rattle the bones of the grim reaper as he swings his scythe in rhythm to a cacophony of corruption intrinsic to this orchestra pit of purgatorial preludes and egg laying swan songs.
A young painter, and his somewhat slower roommate, talk of paranormal occurrences in a room of charcoal canvasses and ephemeral renderings. Eavesdrop on the improbable and the impossible (BUT TRUE!).
LYNDALE is a story of shifting family dynamics, told through the relationship of two brothers. Shot on ten different video formats, this experimental documentary is both the story of a Chicago family, and a record of the digital revolution in the early 2000s. The piece takes place over a six-year period during which filmmakers Oli Rodriguez and Victoria Stob shared a house with Rodriguez’s brother, Jeff.
One of my weather diary series out in Oklahoma. The tone is wistful, the surroundings wispy (with some puffs of pungency). The TV is on and the porcelain is smeared with some residue atrocity from a previous passion. But all is well as emptiness persists beyond the four walls of this prairie mausoleum.
Ireland, October 20th 2007
The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series and looks back at the events of the past six years.
Six Years Later is the eighth episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
A California winter turns the left coast into a brew of foaming festivities while landlubbers leap for joy in the spray of salty slurpings.
The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century.
"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."
— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018
Frozen in time and place, yet celebrating birthdays left and right, I ponder the technology that sends me out into the world via magnetism—a magnetism that not only attracts images and sound but also the particles of nothing that become something when activated by a dust mop. A meditation on white spots and black holes that suck and purr when plugged in or turned on.
George Kuchar has been invited to Francis Ford Coppola’s vineyard for a large family picnic. Walking around the property with a friend, the two look on as a team of workers picks grapes for winemaking. The visual wonder of this setting is not lost on Kuchar, who spends little time filming those in attendance. Instead, Kuchar turns his lens to all things natural, ranging from small goats and swans to the simple beauty of light reflecting off a stream.
A lavish home is visited, shutters click, bottoms are exposed, water splashes and a welcome wetness stains an area unquenched for so long. A jacuzzi bubbles to life in a bedroom community that floats to sleep on aqua-filled rubber.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
"Over the course of one year, I periodically shot footage from the front window of my third floor apartment. This material became the basis of Window, a video about knowing. How do we come to know a place or a person? Through repetition and variations; our knowledge comes from more than one unique experience. It is the sum of many things. 'The sum of all sight and sound. The sum of all motion.' Window attempts to show how a whole can be more than merely the sum of the parts."
—Nelson Henricks
A behind-the-scenes look at the man behind the trophy and the poisons that taint an otherwise jubilant jamboree.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.
“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.
In the second installment of George Kuchar’s Alumni Series, he begins with news coverage of the mudslides the month before that had resulted from the flooding documented in his Alumni Series #1. Kuchar next cleans his house in anticipation of a visit from his friend Leslie, but as he mentions not having toilet paper, the threat of mudslides continues to linger. After simulating his guest sloppily using the restroom with the aid of two balloons and some questionable unknown liquid, the two happily lounge around Kuchar’s apartment while discussing cats.
Two gardens of plenty sprout with the seeds of bitter fruit made sweeter by the touch of summer, which rushes in with the scent of floral flatulence. Made heady by the gorgeous gas, the subjects of this video open both heart and mouth to nature's bounty which is served in microwaveable platters of convenient disposability to protect the environment from caustic suds. A touch of poison does escape the purity of these proceedings, but the general mood is one of gregarious grimness amid the plentitudes of paradise."
The artist Bruce Conner is featured in this videotape which bounces east and west, depicting the fragility of holistic hooligans in a world of hit-and-run encounters, Prozac, and pizzas. A meditation on faulty plumbing and paradise lost... but not forgotten!
A nocturnal COVID-19 memoir.
Piano assemblage and image sequencing by Bob Snyder. Images by Sara Livingston.
Sections 1-30 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.
"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine
