FEEL IT.STREAM
Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Directing

Biography

Mike Kuchar, cinematographer, painter and writer and brother of George Kuchar, was born in New York City. He began making 8mm movies in the 1950's, switching over to 16mm film production in 1960, and continues now, producing short motion pictures in the video and digital formats. Mike and George Kuchar were the co-recipients of the "Vanguard Director Award" at the 11th CineVegas Film Festival, 2009, and the 2009 "Frameline Award" at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. "Film purists," says Mike, "tend to snub the digital medium — but as far as I'm concerned, if it allows the image to move and make noise, I'll gladly use it... and the format fits perfectly into my budgets too!" Mike Kuchar is a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow for his work in film and video.

Known For

Cinématon
4.9

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Cinématon

1978Movie
Underground New York

A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.

Underground New York

1968Movie