One of Kuchar’s few feature-length works is this ribald pastiche to postwar Hollywood melodrama, that period when the studios were trying very hard to be adult. The intricate, overheated plot involves a nurse trapped in an unhappy marriage who escapes the big city in search of greener pastures in Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him, gleefully intertwining the suggestive and the scatological, while also pointing towards the later postmodern parodies of Cindy Sherman. The Devil’s Cleavage is also a rich time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, replete with cameos from Curt McDowell and Art Spiegelman. —hcl.harvard.edu
George Kuchar (born August 31, 1942, New York City) is an American film director, known for his “low-fi” aesthetic, playful use of no-talent actors, plotless plots, and themeless themes. Trained as a commercial artist in a vocational high school, the School of Industrial Art, he drew weather maps for a local news show. During this period, he and his twin brother Mike Kuchar were making 8mm movies which were showcased in the then-burgeoning underground film scene alongside films by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage.
After being laid off from a commercial art job in New York City, Kuchar was offered a teaching job in the film department of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has taught since 1971. It was in San Francisco that he became involved with underground comics via his neighbors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith. They both wound up in his movies and George wound up in their publications.
Planet Kuchar, a biopic of the life of George Kuchar… read more