Mike Kuchar’s Films Emerge Above Ground

Filmforum inaugurates its fall season tonight at LACE, 1804 Industrial St., with a program of films by Mike Kuchar. With his twin brother, George, the Bronx-born Kuchar began making films in the ‘50s, and by the early ‘60s they had made a number of landmark underground comedies, such as “I Was a Teen-age Rumpot” and “The Naked and the Nude.” San Francisco-based George has continued in this vein, but Mike (who still lives in the Bronx) has often worked in an entirely different mode with his poetic nature films. This 75-minute program spans nearly 20 years of work by Mike. Much of it has never been seen before in Los Angeles.

The program commences on a jaunty, vivid note with “Light Sketches” (1967), a work in the squiggle-and-scratch mode of the “psychedelic” ’60s, featuring streaks of color resembling pick-up sticks in constant flux--and through which can be discerned a human head in profile and later in full face. The other five films are either in the nature category or comedies in the twins’ original vein.

“Tales of the Bronx” (1968) is very much like the twins’ films and is composed of kitschy vignettes involving lust and longing. On the one hand is the voluptuous Donna Kerness, a favorite of the twins, who enjoys a session of lovemaking with a stranger while in another apartment a nerdy young man is inundated with food and gifts by his massive, possessive mother.

“Fable for a New Age” (1985) shows Kuchar has lost none of his sense of humor as he depicts four women in the throes of frustrated sexual desire. He’s not making fun of them but rather is sending up the absurdities of passion and the ways in which it undermines our dignity. One woman, given to heady, long-winded monologues and carrying on like a silent screen vamp, envisions herself as a kind of Eve in the Garden of Eden about to seduce her Adam--but instead of being overcome by the fabled scents of Araby (or such) she is assaulted by the odor of “old socks, gasoline and aftershave.”

In “Cycles” (1968) and “Mindscape” (undated) Kuchar celebrates the changes of the seasons and the beauty of a field of wheat (contrasted abruptly with a Manhattan skyline), and in both instances a handsome young man, clearly a sex object, turns up amid the natural scenery, in a way that’s amusing and that suggests he identifies with his frustrated women. In a sense, Kuchar’s two kinds of films are bridged in “Tone Poem” (1984) when an elegant woman, wandering about a misty grove of trees, is lightly kissed by a faun.

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