Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool

Mike Kuchar has been a major influential figure in the underground film and comics scenes since the 1960s, first in his hometown of the Bronx and, from the 1970s on, in the creative hotbed of San Francisco. Together with his twin brother George, the Kuchars gained cult recognition for their over-the-top, no-budget films that sent up Hollywood epics, weepy romances, and sci-fi B movies, developing a distinctive style that jettisoned traditional narrative structure and acting professionalism in favor of extravagant, tender sagas that would have a significant impact on emerging theorizations and expressions of camp as an artistic sensibility.

George Kuchar was born in New York City in 1942 along with twin brother Mike. At an early age they made 8mm films and later attended the High School of Industrial Art in N.Y.C. (which is now the High School of Art and Design). Employed in the world of commercial art in Manhattan, George Kuchar was later laid off from work and never went back to that snake-pit; instead, he embarked on a fulltime movie career. Having been introduced to the avant-garde film scene in the early 1960s, he acquired an audience for his low-budget dramas and was hired by the San Francisco Art Institute to teach filmmaking. In 1985 he began making 8mm video diaries and has completed about 50 works in that medium. George died in 2011.

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