When Jamie and I went to his last screening at Harvard, when he joined the audience via Skype, we could tell that George Kuchar's health had taken a serious hit; he was in a hospice, which he gamely joked was a "one-way door," and he was surrounded by his family and friends. None of this suggested that he was going to recover.
Even so, it's somewhat of a shock for us to hear that he passed away last night. It was only about three weeks ago that we saw him, and he was as sharp as ever, his mind squarely in the soup of ideas from which crawled so many films, comics and paintings that nobody knows for sure the full extent of it all, a mystery you learned about if and when you saw It Came From Kuchar (if you didn't, it's a solid documentary, and a fine introduction and tribute to the Kuchar Brothers). And he was still repeating the same refrain he's probably been saying ever since he finished his first movie: "I want to make another one."
i'm very sorry for your loss. he sounds like a genuinely compelling figure, and i will be sure to watch the documentary. it's extremely difficult to believe that someone with whom you've recently spoken and/or seen is simply gone from the world you know. i hope you will keep his memory and energy alive by relaying his work to others (as you have done here). and, at least he did not pass from repressed flatulence. the end...
ReplyDeleteOr repressed anything.
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