Skip to main content

Hefner's Heifers

George Kuchar

1989 00:13:00 United StatesEnglishColor4:3

Description

George Kuchar just received a tape of himself on the Dog and His Friends from the Dog House television show, but he must first track down a VHS player to watch it. After arriving at a friend’s home, Kuchar draws attention to the number of animals present in the kitchen, noting that it reminded him of the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, Illinois. Flashing back to Chicago, Kuchar takes a tour of the abandoned ‘pleasure palace’ by flashlight, exploring the dark recesses of the basement bowling alley and underwater bar. As he rummages around in the darkness, Kuchar recalls that his own Hold Me Wild and his brother Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids had both been included in the ‘History of Sex in Film’ issue of Playboy in years past. Back in his home, Kuchar further explores this relationship between sex, the body and time as he obsesses over a new clock modeled after a three-dimensional nude woman.

Continuing this discussion of sexual/temporal sensation being mediated through objects, Hefner’s Heifers concludes with Kuchar appearing as a guest on Madeleine’s Variety Television: The Show Without a Purpose, where he meets Crystal, the bionic woman. Having been burned in a fire, she now wears a mask and speaks with a digitized robot voice. Even as Crystal surrounds herself with technology meant to facilitate normal interactions, her robot voice is distorted and the subtitles accompanying her are garbled and lead only to miscommunication. --Kyle Riley

 

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