"Nature's Excretions: The Everyday Ecologies of George Kuchar"
Ciudad de México, July 17-19, 2025

Program 1: Cineteca Nacional de México
July 17th, 19h

- Eclipse of the Sun Virgin
George Kuchar, 1967, USA, 15 min, 16mm
16mm print from Anthology Film Archives

- A Reason to Live
George Kuchar, 1976, USA, 25 min, 16mm
16mm print from Anthology Film Archives

- Ascension of the Demonoids
George Kuchar, 1985, USA, 45 min, 16mm
16mm print from Anthology Film Archives

Program 2: Centro de Cultura Digital
July 19th, 18h

- Wild Night in El Reno
George Kuchar, 1977, USA, 6 min, 16mm
16mm print from Anthology Film Archives

- Weather Diary 2
George Kuchar, 1987, USA, 70 min, video
DV copy from Video Data Bank

- Scarlet Droppings
George Kuchar, 1991, USA, 15 min, video
DV copy from Video Data Bank

Curatorial Text:

It would be a mistake to locate in a single crux or symbol the multivalent work of the great U.S. underground filmmaker and video diarist George Kuchar (1942-2011), but it is safe to say that the relationship between inside and outside was one of his obsessions. Or rather: his films and writings were throughout imbued with anxiety about what were personal obsessions (and paranoias) and what were fundamental structuring facts of the world—weather, conspiracies surrounding UFOs, Men in Black. After all, his North Star for paranormal questions became the journalist John A. Keel (the protagonist of the late video series Secrets of the Shadow World, 1999), an author who, while denying the reality of UFOs, saw them as manifestations of real, hidden, conspiratorial phenomena: the immanence of the occult.

Indeed, an almost inescapable psychoanalytic figure in commentary on Kuchar is “sublimation.” In his recent book Experimental Film and Queer Materiality, Juan Antonio Suárez describes Kuchar’s Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) as “a satire of the postwar homoerotic films of [Kenneth] Anger, Willard Maas, and Gregory Markopoulos,” particularly Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice (1953), where the “implication is that Anger’s lyrical squirts, sprays, and aqueous reflections on sculpted stone are, at bottom, thin sublimations of golden showers and scat.” On the occasion of a 1988 retrospective in London, British critic Michael O’Pray described Wild Night in El Reno (1977) and the opening salvoes in Kuchar’s Weather Diary series as “an enchantment of the family romance” where nature is an absent father: “a vengeful and all-powerful Old Testament patriarch, who does not even dare to take human form.” Kuchar’s regular summers as a “storm squatter” in
Oklahoma were always means of returning home—even more specifically, to the bathroom—disappointed whenever those familial conflicts known as tornados did not manifest.

Were these just ineffable personal obsessions? Hardly. In an unpublished 1982 letter praising Kuchar for Wild Night, Stan Brakhage was also sent back to plaintive memories of his father (particularly his passing in Enid, Oklahoma, due north from El Reno). And yet it must be admitted that both Kuchar and Brakhage shared many of the same ambitions, and frustrations, regarding film’s possibilities for liberating the isolation felt in singular aesthetic experiences: except that for Kuchar what occupied the place of Brakhage’s supposedly isolating ways of seeing light were precisely (concretely? familiarly?) UFOs.

I thus think that author Gene Youngblood is exaggerating differences between Kuchar’s video diaries and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden when he says, “Where Thoreau’s disobedience is world-referential, Kuchar’s just otherworldly. He wants to go away with aliens.” Rather, for Kuchar the alien is already here. We are not grammatically or conceptually far from the “Economy” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden if it is expanded to include shit and masturbation (and we are only somewhat far from Thoreau’s Economy once the diets of others are absorbed, specifically Bigfoot’s). Is it too pat to say that Kuchar is Thoreauvian insofar as he’s concerned not with self-escape but rather self-knowledge? In his remarkable posthumously published correspondence with lifelong collaborator Donna Kerness, Kuchar expresses his view of sex as a way of getting to know himself. He presents this as a conclusion arrived at with maturity, though a kernel of that ambition for sex is already present in Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, and its use of music from the musical On the Town: the lyric “My extensive knowledge of anatomy” serves as an ironic confession of youthful latency.

And how knowing are Kuchar’s suspicions of hostility towards him of non-human nature? In Scarlet Droppings (1991) a trip to a zoo in Normal, Illinois, invites George’s whispered commentary: “Look, just take it for what it’s worth, an animal’s an animal… Once in a while they’re going to try to bite your head off.” In Secrets of the Shadow World he mentions to John A. Keel—without disavowing some obvious personal identification—H.P. Lovecraft’s fear of fish. These moments are hints by Kuchar of just enough self-awareness that non-human nature’s hostility might be simply more of himself spread outwards and then looking back in.

In a 1966 article in a Berkeley, California, newspaper Leonard Lipton likened Kuchar’s mastery of classical Hollywood forms to how “Einstein was called the last of the classical physicists, and Newton the last of the great geometers… He has forged ahead by going backwards.” This kind of thought is something of a commonplace regarding modernism in the arts (from T.S. Eliot to Stanley Cavell). But Lipton’s (slightly prophetic, because written so early) formulation might allow for a further twist: Kuchar goes backwards, and then forwards, by going inside—by sustaining a clear idea of the bodily needs that ground our even wanting to have so settled an idea as “weather” or “outer space” (not to mention the limits of the self that could render intelligible such an idea as “excrement”).

What might be the point of having such self-knowledge, or (if it amounts to the same thing) attunement between inside and outside? As stated by a character in A Reason to Live (1976), “The fog is coming. It’ll give you strength.” The film’s implication is that nature alone—but especially tempestuous nature, nature at its most manifest—is a reason to live. And it is a film lit out of that conviction.

We will be lighting screening rooms in Mexico City out of that same conviction—the sense of affirming life by convoking forces of nature—with the most extensive program of Kuchar’s films ever shown in Mexico. We begin at the Cineteca Nacional on July 17 with “Interiores y Exteriores de George Kuchar,” showing three films in 16mm (from Anthology Film Archives): Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967), A Reason to Live (1976), and the UFO film Ascension of the Demonoids (1985). We then continue at the Centro de Cultura Digital on July 19 with a deeper plunge into nature, “Exteriores e Interiores de George Kuchar,” screening a 16mm print of Wild Night in El Reno (1977, also from Anthology) as well as Weather Diary 2 (1987) and Scarlet Droppings (1991), both provided by Video Data Bank.

In this selection of Kuchar’s cinema, sublimated material returns to earth: but doubly enchanted by its passage through the stars.

-Byron Davies