Ep. 204: Mike Kuchar (Kuchar Brothers) filmmaker/painter/comic artist/cinematographer

I’ve been a fan of The Kuchar Brothers for almost twenty years and they are among my top 5 directors. They are known as heroes to filmmaker John Waters and were part of the underground film scene in New York City in the late 1950’s and 1960’s as championed by film curator Jonas Mekas.

This was one of my favorite interviews and one of the biggest honors I’ve ever had in doing this podcast. Mike is one of the funniest, kindest, creative, and most thoughtful filmmakers of the past 50 years. The way he speaks about making films is truly magical. The care he puts into the work and the reverence he has for the actors in his films are a true rarity. We talked about a lot of topics, but my favorite thing was when Mike spoke about remembering his birth. That’s the kind of magical and wonderful things he can do with his brain. I’m pretty sure he spoke about that ability as a way of time traveling through his own memories. He is operating at genius level.

If you don’t know his films, Mike directed a film called “Sins of the Fleshapoids” which is one of my favorite of his films. It features his brother George in a lead role.

https://tubitv.com/movies/100027431/sins-of-the-fleshapoids

Many of the Kuchar Brothers films can be found here to watch for free below at Penn Sound. It says it’s George’s films but it has Mike’s films as well.

PennSound: George Kuchar

Mike Kuchar has been a majorly 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. In iconic films like Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), The Craven Sluck (1967), and Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults(1976), Mike developed his 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.

John Waters, Guy Maddin, and Wayne Wang all cite the Kuchars as an important influence. (In It Came From Kuchar Waters calls them “true underground filmmakers,” says they should be knighted, and points to George’s cinematic use of turds as a precursor to his own Pink Flamingos; Maddin, discussing their aesthetic, recalls the actors’ “aggressively stylized voices” and remembers feeling as though “chocolate bars had been applied to the eyebrows,” which are like no other eyebrows in the history of film.)

At a time when Andy Warhol was making movies in which nothing happened, and non-narrative filmmakers like Stan Brakhage were making experimental, formalist films, the Kuchar brothers pumped out one mutant Hollywood melodrama after another—works that, in a climate of hip, affectless filmmaking, were “all affect.” Jonas Mekas, film critic for the Village Voice at the time, speculated that the makers of Barbarella had stolen ideas directly from the Kuchar film Sins of the Fleshapoids.

- Evan James (from an article in Mother Jones) 4-13-2010

https://www.kucharbrothers.org/mike-kuchar

https://www.kucharbrothers.org

https://www.instagram.com/kucharbrothers

Credits

This episode was produced, researched, and (barely) edited by Rich Wexler

https://www.vintageannalsarchive.com/vintage-annals-archive-podcast.html

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