Blog
Thank You, George
Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Monday, September 13th, 2010
Last night I went to see the documentary It Came From Kuchar at the Rafael Film Center with George Kuchar and the film’s director Jennifer M. Kroot in attendance. George Kuchar, for those who aren’t familiar with him, started as an underground filmmaker, along with his brother Mike, in New York in the 60s with Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and the like, although his style stood markedly apart from his more aloof, intellectual counterparts. Nurtured on 1950s Hollywood melodramas, George’s work features garish colors, lurid subject matter and frequently pushes the limits of commonly agreed-upon decency. What also sets George apart from his peers is that, to this day, despite prodigious and ongoing output, he remains largely under the radar.
Here’s why I went to see the film: George was my very first film teacher. I couldn’t not go. A student must pay homage to the teachers who most influenced her whenever the opportunity arises. George’s influence reaches far and wide, having taught for almost 40 years now at my alma mater, the San Francisco Art Institute. In that small sphere, he is revered and beloved. (And I must commend Ms. Kroot, another former student, for doing such justice to him in her film.)
The reason George is so loved by his students, aside from the fact that he’s a creative genius, is his unbounded can-do-ism. There is no production problem that can’t be solved and all “mistakes” immediately become assets. He is completely empowering and implicitly permission-giving for whatever creative motivation you have brewing in you. I don’t remember him ever showing any negativity or judgment. And his lack of self-consciousness is freeing to be around. Reflecting back, I think one of the biggest messages I, personally, came away with is that it’s okay to love melodrama.
When the screening ended, I told Ed I wanted to say hi to George, and then said, “But I doubt he’ll remember me.” It has been, after all, something like 30 years since I was in his class. To my astonishment, though, as I sidled up to him, still surrounded by other admirers, he turned to me and said, “Oh! Hi, Jennine!” Then, surprising me further, he said, “Symphony for a Sinner!”
Among George’s various oeuvres – his underground films, his weather films, his video diaries – is a category known as the “class films.” These are the class projects he made using school equipment and student actors in the school’s sound-studio classroom. I had the honor of appearing in Symphony for a Sinner, which I have always assumed was just one among the many class films he’s made. But I learned from George last night it is considered something of a pinnacle in its genre. This morning I found this about it on the internet:
“Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions. New York critic and coauthor of Midnight Movies J. Hoberman would rank it as one of the ten best films of the year, while Stan Brakhage would call it “the ultimate class picture.” John Waters, who now visited George regularly whenever he passed through San Francisco, envied the lurid color photography and wanted George to shoot his next picture (which would have been Polyester and didn’t happen). Symphony, Waters said, had the look he craved for Desperate Living (1977).” (www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/kuchar1.html)
When I lived in New York I had an upstairs neighbor who starred in an early Brian DePalma film Murder a la Mod. That was the only film she ever appeared in and by the time I knew her she was a receptionist in an art gallery and lived in a tiny Greenwich Village garret with her photographer husband. But she was very proud of her contribution to DePalma’s early career and would often bring out a book to show featuring a publicity still of her in the film.
So that’s going to be me someday. George’s star will rise to the recognition he deserves as a major American filmmaker of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and I will ride his coattails to posterity for having played a back up singer in a nightclub scene doing a disco version of “Can’t Get Started With You” in his seminal film Symphony for a Sinner. I would love it if it were so (even though I’m sure if I were to view my performance today I would find it utterly embarrassing).