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Passionate Visions

George Kuchar

2001 00:15:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
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Description

The Rudnick family run amok with unleashed talent in San Francisco and display a wide girth of creative curvature for all to admire over a hot cup of java. The fluidity of artistic endeavors spills over the borders of the Pacific Rim to highlight not only aquatic animals, but also desert-bound creatures etched in the thirst-quenching magnificence of kitchenware crystal. The whirlwind of painted and sculpted objects of art, in combination with eyeball searing displays of expression, dazzle the viewer into a violent reverie of fist-swinging appreciation that adds a kinetic momentum to the unfettered madness.

As if to catch ones breath, we are swooped away to the wave battered coves of Pacifica to sniff the sea-encrusted statuary of Jerry Barrish. Amid the turbulent setting of sea and sand, we meet a man and his mate awash with a tide of discarded junk transformed into museum quality dimensionality. Come join this expedition into the sun-drenched parlors of Northern California and smell what's cooking on the Hibachi.

About George Kuchar

George Kuchar ranks as one of the most exciting and prolific American independent film and videomakers. With his homemade Super 8 and 16mm potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, he became legendary as a distinctive and outrageous underground filmmaker whose work influenced many other artists, including Andy Warhol, John Waters, and David Lynch. After his 1980s transition to video, he remained a master of genre manipulation and subversion, creating hundreds of brilliantly edited, hilarious, observant, often diaristic videos with an 8mm camcorder, dime-store props, not-so-special effects, using friends as actors, and the “pageant that is life” as his studio.

In 1984 Kuchar received the Los Angeles Film Critics Award in the Experimental/Independent category. In 1992, he received the prestigious Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute. In 1996 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for forty years, where he made many videos in collaboration with his students.

"...The best for last, though: the filmmaker George Kuchar... When the day arrives — and it will — to appoint an official United States cultural ambassador to Outer Space, Mr. Kuchar is the obvious choice. I will say no more. See his films. He is beyond enigmatic. He is it. I salute him."

— Holland Cotter, Review of the Good Morning Midnight exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery, The New York Times, July 27th, 2007

All title descriptions by George Kuchar unless otherwise noted.

Also see:

George Kuchar: An Interview

The World of George Kuchar, DVD Box Set available for Institutional and Individual Purchase