Screenings of the Kuchar films

Introduction by Peter Eleey
Speaker Sommerakademie 2012

Kunstraum Oktogon, August 22, 2012, 21.30h

A visionary who created high drama from low culture and the vulgarities of everyday life, George Kuchar (1942–2011) began his film career as a teenager, making no-budget 8mm flicks with his twin brother, Mike, in their New York apartment before being introduced to the downtown underground scene in the early 1960s. He recalled being fascinated by weather even as a child, watching storms that caused “the window panes in my living room to bulge inward with alarming convexity while outside the metal sheeting on the apartment building was being ripped off and whipped through the rain-soaked streets like giant razor blades.”
Kuchar trained in commercial art, and illustrated weather reports for a New York television station early in his professional career. Dramatic weather features prominently in his later work. Beginning in 1977, Kuchar made a regular spring pilgrimage to Oklahoma, where he hunkered down to wait for tornadoes—what he called “superstars of the meteorological stage”—and made intimate video diaries from his motel room as the clouds swirled overhead. Landmarks of American film, these studies capture in starkly personal terms the “turmoil, tedium, terror and televised terrain” of the Great Plains. Kuchar was also obsessed with UFOs, and the lightning and thunder featured in his “Weather Diaries” appear as combinations of extraterrestrial activity and natural special effects, vehicles for the mystery, banality, and beauty that mark every Kuchar film.