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Arizona Byways

George Kuchar

2001 00:23:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video

Description

A cactus-strewn desert becomes the backdrop for this series of filmic stopovers that focuses on the living quarters assigned the assignee of this adventurous arrangement. Great natural beauty clashes with manufactured outdoorsmanship, as a tired body and sluggish mind seek the oblivion of hotel hospitality in an arid region of artistic aspirations. The viewer is introduced to a world of prickly plants and satin-skinned succubi who prowl the alleys of western decay to staple their fig leaflets on the vertical shafts that poke unsheathed at the virgin skies of southern Arizona. The sheaths are administered, and the population prepares for cinematic coupling in a city park earmarked for culture. Enter the masculine caves that spilled forth their glittering guts onto a surface world as desperate for gems as it was for water, and share in the claustrophobic terror intrinsic to the rape of rock and the pillaging of pebbles. Witness this natural spectacle all packaged and delivered in the form of a vacation video, and marvel at the mavens of movie-making as they bombard the public with a cacophony of celluloid under the moonlit, desert sky.

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