Screening:
Saturday, April 28, 5:00 PM, Charles 3

Twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar grew up in the Bronx, and began making films 8mm together in the '50s, eventually graduating to 16mm in the '60s. This program consists of film works by each, including their signature films: Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike) and Hold Me While I'm Naked (George).

Ascension of the Demonoids
(George Kuchar, 1985, 45 min.) Though a UFO drama, this picture delves more into the inner yearnings and spiritual crises of its characters than the outward mystery of the flying watcha-ma-call-its. Based on true hearsay. "It was supposed to slam the door on the series of flying saucer movies I was grinding out at the time but the portal never really slammed shut and so the nightmare continues in other mediums (like video tape)."-G.K.

Hold Me While I'm Naked
(George Kuchar, 1966, 15 min.) An abstract meditation on the emotional and technical traumas of making a low budget movie, George made this film about his personal feelings of deprivation on and off the set.

Sins of the Fleshapoids
(Mike Kuchar, 1966, 50 min.) Using comic book dialogue balloons because he couldn't afford synch sound, Mike's underground classic is set in the distant future when a humanoid robot (or "fleshapoid") begins to have very human longings. A brand new print will be shown thanks to a grant from the film preservation department of the American Film Institute.

Tidbits:
"The voices are all dubbed by me as I guess I wasn't in the mood for company during the post-production phase… My mom appears at the end under the influence of my make-up palette."-G.K. on Hold Me While I'm Naked

"I have two types of actors that I work with: half of them overact, the other half can't act at all. When given very brief on-the-spot directions, they become hilarious to look at. I believe this technique contributes greatly to making a comical movie."-M.K.

Bios:
George Kuchar has been a professor in the Filmmaking Department at San Francisco Art Institute since 1971. Kuchar worked as a commercial artist while making 8mm and 16mm films which were embraced by the underground movie scene of the 1960s. During the 1970s, he began making sync-sound movies, and in the 1980s, he began experimenting with video. Kuchar has won the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Worldwide Video Festival First Prize Award and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. He had four-program tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a recent screening at a Video Drive-In event in Portugal. Two full-length programs of his films are in the collection of (and distributed in Europe by) the British Film Institute. Other works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York. George has made over 60 films and 70 videos, has had several screenplays made into films, and has acted in two productions.

Mike Kuchar has directed over 50 8mm, 16mm, and video format films. Since 1963, he has had over 300 international public exhibitions including The Museum of Modern Art (1966, '67, '98), the Andy Warhol Museum (1997), the American Museum of the Moving Image (1989), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1968), Yale and Princeton Universities, the Carnegie Institute, London's Filmmaker's Co-Op, and Frankfurt's Deutsches Filmmuseum. In addition, he is represented in the permanent collections of Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive and New York's Anthology Film Archives. Mike has also taught at a variety of institutions including the New School, the Collective for Living Cinema, Millennium Films, and San Francisco Art Institute. He worked as Director of Photography on a number of features including three films by Rosa von Praunheim. Along with is brother, George, he wrote an autobiography, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (Zanja Press).