Film Studies For Free: This and that (Perkins, Rich on Kuchar Bros, Westerns, Fan Videos, Timecode, Kubrick and the Coens)

Tuesday 18 August 2009

This and that (Perkins, Rich on Kuchar Bros, Westerns, Fan Videos, Timecode, Kubrick and the Coens)

Trailer for It Came From Kuchar - As Alexandra Juhasz writes at Media Praxis: '[This] documentary does little more than let the brothers, their films, and fans speak for themselves. And what more do we need? Inventive, life-long bohemians making their work outside dominant structures and to an international fanbase of crazed cineastes. As I implied regarding Fig Trees recently: it becomes an increasingly rare pleasure to see work that resides outside the dumbed down regime of the popular.'

Having been briefly out of action, Film Studies For Free is sorting through its in-tray and to-do lists. Below are some assorted bits of online news and links that it wanted you not to miss:

Film Studies For Free was delighted to hear from VF Perkins who generously offered up some frame stills to help illustrate the first of the two sequence analyses in his online essay "You Only Live Once" which FSFF linked to some weeks back (also see HERE). FSFF has posted the stills in three sections, one HERE, two HERE and three HERE.
Listen to B Ruby Rich on the Kuchar Brothers (also see video above) in a great podcast interview for Outtake:

In this audio interview Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson talks with B Ruby Rich, American Scholar and Film Critic about Director Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary “It Came From Kuchar.” Long before YouTube, there were the outrageous, no-budget movies of underground, filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. George and Mike grew up in the Bronx in the 1950’s. At the age of twelve, they became obsessed with Hollywood melodramas and began making their own homespun melodramas with their aunt’s 8mm camera. They used their friends and family as actors and their Bronx neighborhood as their set. Early Kuchar titles featured in this film include “I Was A Teenage Rumpot” and “Born of the Wind”. In the early 1960’s, alongside Andy Warhol, the Kuchar brothers shaped the New York underground film scene. Known as the “8mm Mozarts”, their films were noticeably different than other underground films of the time. They were wildly funny, but also human and vulnerable. Their films have inspired many filmmakers, including John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Wayne Wang (all are interviewed in this film). Despite having high profile fans, the Kuchars remain largely unknown because they are only ambitious to make movies, not to be famous.