George Kuchar, K Mart Self Portrait (date unknown), courtesy Ada Gallery and George Kuchar
FILM LOVE presents
GEORGE KUCHAR
A tribute
Friday, February 24, 2012
8:00 pm at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
$5 general | $3 student/senior | Free with
ACAC membership
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George Kuchar, K Mart Self Portrait (date unknown), courtesy Ada Gallery and George Kuchar |
Film Love pays tribute to our beloved
friend George Kuchar, who died in September 2011.
George Kuchar was one of cinema’s most spectacularly inventive figures, making
wildly funny and intense films full of eye-popping imagery and a revolutionary
DIY attitude. On February 24 at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Film Love
will pay tribute to Kuchar with a program of films and videos spanning his
career.
Hold Me While I’m Naked is often considered Kuchar’s masterpiece. Made at
age twenty-three, it depicts George as a young filmmaker who tries to overcome
his sexual frustration and social awkwardness by making movies. Eccentric,
virtuosic, funny, and vulnerable, Hold Me While I’m Naked was voted one
of the top 100 films of the twentieth century by the Village Voice – sitting on
the list just behind Chaplin and Hitchcock.
I, An Actress is one of the funniest films ever made about filmmaking.
While directing a screen test for a young woman, George can’t resist getting in
on the act and starts delivering the hilariously melodramatic dialogue himself.
His impromptu performance has since become a classic among devotees.
Entering middle age in the 1980s, Kuchar began a remarkable series of diary
videos that continued to the end of his life. In Precious Products and
500 Millibars to Ecstasy, George deals with his turbulent love life,
anxieties about human interaction, and fascination with food as social ritual –
accompanied by his witty asides to the audience, delivered in his distinctive
Bronx accent. Like his melodrama films, the video diaries are brilliant, funny,
occasionally shocking and deeply moving reflections on the relation of
filmmaking to real life, with George impressively negotiating the double role of
director behind the camera and protagonist in front of it.
SELECTIONS
I, An Actress (1977), 9 min, 16mm
Hold Me While I'm Naked (1965), 15 min, 16mm
Precious Products (1989), 15 min, video
500 Millibars to Ecstasy (1989), 16 min, video
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW
Atlanta, GA, 30318
404.688.1970
http://www.thecontemporary.org/
GEORGE KUCHAR is co-sponsored by the Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center.
GEORGE KUCHAR is a Film Love event, programmed and hosted by
Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals. Film Love promotes awareness of the rich
history of experimental and avant-garde film. Through public screenings and
events, Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for
the discussion of film as art, and explores alternative forms of moving image
projection and viewing. Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the
critics of Creative Loafing in 2006, and was featured in Atlanta Magazine's Best
of Atlanta 2009.