"Kuchar 8mm Manifesto"

by George Kuchar

Last Friday at the Eventorium, a symposium took place. It was called 8mm: Avant-Garde of the Future!? Leonard Lipton (from Popular Photography), Al Leslie, Serge Gavronsky, Mike and George Kuchar, and a number of others were on the panel. Here are some of the findings of the evening:

There is no avant-garde. There are no home movies. There is no art. If there is avant-garde, then there is a home movie. If there is no avant-garde, then there is no art and all movies are home movies. Hollywood movies are avant-garde. There hasn't been a decline of Hollywood (not in the past fifty years). Hollywood movies are a beautiful sickness. The dots of grain on 8mm, are the size of ping-pong balls; if you shoot a tree, one grain makes one leaf. That's why the Kuchars are going to 16mm to have bigger leaves in their movies. Eight mm is good for reproduction, for reaching homes, for distribution -- but for the original shooting 16mm is better and 70mm is still better.

Highlight of the evening was a manifesto read by George Kuchar.

Kuchar manifesto:

Yes, 8mm is a tool of defense in this society of mechanized corruption because through 8mm and its puny size we come closer to the dimension of the atom.

We in this modern world of geological dormanticity are now experiencing an evolution evolving around minutenocities. We no longer think big except in the realm of nuclear bombardment, and therefore, it is now unusual to find human beings with little things. Eight mm is one of those little things, but 8mm becomes enormous when light from a projector bulb illuminates to a great dimension the abnormalities of the psychotic.

In the hands of a potential pervert, this medium becomes like a sculpture of clay with a base of yeast. Sprinkle a few smatters of liquid upon the sculpture and it will blow up and expand to startling and gargantuan proportions. But, as you will see, the clay shell that envelopes the overall piece of work will crack and make dirt everywhere .

The inner-beauty of the work will be revealed while a tthe same the film-maker will crack and eventally suicide. Looking upon the face of one's own evil is enough to bring the sting of acid to an esophagus that thas previously experienced only buttermilk.

That 8mm will become avant-garde is a contagious diesease-breeder because we are all avant-garde to the point of annihilation, and only when we face the after-effects of total deformity can we then think more clearly and cry because we couldn't concentrate on moral isolation.

Who are we to ask whether 8 mm will be the avant-garde of the future when only God and the Vatican know for sure? Moral issues of this nature should never be left for the filthy hands of the beatnik to twist into pretzels of degeneracy. Let the beatnik and the frustrated executive twist 8mm film into his own image and thereby give others a chance to sniff the world of narcotics and total spiritual breakdown.

Having worked with 8mm for twelve years, I have seen what it can do to a person. The creative intellect undergoes a great revolt and the bars of restraint are ripped from the casement of sanity until everything is a whirlpool of incandescent pudding. Eight mm, has taught me to think more clearly and to express myself in direct terms. Like my religion, I was born into 8mm because my aunt had loaned me her movie camera and then my mother bought me one for Christmas. Now I'm going to make a 16mm picture called Corruption of the Damned and I'm making it in 16mm because I can't make it in 7mm. Therefore I'm going up instead of down, which has been the usual trend in my life of wanton pleasures. I enjoyed working in 8mm and I'm enjoying 16mm and if both were taken from me, I'd enjoy vegetating because a life of stagnation is one of disease and only through disease can we realize what sickness is.

(from Village Voice, December 17, 1964)