(Side note: A teenage John Waters first learned about the Kuchar brothers by reading Jonas Mekas’s “Movie Journal” column in our very own Village Voice.
Without knowing it at the time, the Kuchars would become two of the most revered figures of the American underground cinema. In The Craven Sluck (1967), Mike directs the lustful adventures of an unhappy housewife, which come to an end when UFOs attack New York. (“Where humans fail to find love,” the movie’s narrator exclaims, “machines have succeeded!”) His The Secret of Wendel Samson, made that same year, stars artist Red Grooms (alongside his then-wife, painter/sculptress Mimi Gross) as a man struggling with his homosexuality, running to and from various lovers’ beds. Mike’s Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) is a dystopian sci-fi vision of a world in which robots have become the vessels for feeling. Sexual desire and its romantic counterpoint, love, were themes both Kuchars returned to over and over again. The Kuchars shot most of their pictures in and around the Bronx, recruiting friends and neighbors to join their stable of stars. After finishing his degree, Mike supported himself retouching fashion photographs for the likes of the New York Times and Vogue, but in the off-hours he and George pursued their shared passion for film, each writing and directing his very own lo-fi genre pieces - seedy, hilarious takes on the cheapest Hollywood epics. In high school, the brothers studied commercial illustration at the School of Art and Design in Manhattan.
As George remembered in their 1997 Reflections From a Cinematic Cesspool, a memoir-cum–manual for aspiring filmmakers: “On the screen there would always be a wonderful tapestry of big people and they seemed so wild and crazy….The women wantonly lifted up their skirts to adjust garter-belts and men in pin-striped suits appeared from behind shadowed décor to suck and chew on Technicolor lips.” For the Kuchars, as for gay male contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, the movie theater was a temple for erotics both expressed and repressed, projected and appropriated, homo and hetero, all whirled together on the silver screen. Sympathy for the devil: Mike Kuchar’s “Rescued!” (2017) Mike Kuchar/Anton Kern GalleryĪs boys growing up in the Bronx, Mike and his twin brother - the late, equally great film and video artist George (1942–2011) - loved to spend their weekends at the movies, watching everything from newsreels to B films to blockbusters, their young minds roused by all the thrills that Hollywood had to offer: romance, drama, action, science fiction, terror, suspense.
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