The filmmaker, actor and artist Mike Kuchar is best known for his low-budget avant garde films, though he has always been an artist alongside his cinematic career. Raised in New York’s Bronx, he made his first films as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother George, and participated in New York’s underground film scene in the 1960s and 1970s. He divided his time between New York City and his brother’s San Francisco apartment until 2007, when he moved permanently to San Francisco; George died in 2011.

Kuchar has been an influential figure in the underground film scene since the 1960s. The Kuchar twins gained cult recognition first in the Bronx and then in San Francisco for their over-the-top, no-budget films that sent up Hollywood epics, weepy romances, and sci-fi B movies. In iconic films like Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), The Craven Sluck (1967), and Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults (1976), Mike developed his distinctive style that jettisoned traditional narrative structure and acting professionalism in favour of extravagant, tender sagas that would have a significant impact on emerging representations of camp as an artistic sensibility.

In more recent years, Kuchar has focused on more intimate one-person expressionistic films. At the Vienna International Film Festival in 2009 he unveiled two short films, Swan Song and Dumped. Swan Song features the pain of a young man tormented by his sensuality who is depicted as an animal writhing in pain, while Dumped stars veteran stage actress Deirdre McGill in a portrait of a woman engaged in a deadly love triangle.

While Mike Kuchar is best known for his films, he has always been an illustrator too. He worked as a magazine retoucher in the 1960s, and after moving to California started to work – first anonymously and then as ‘Mike’ – in the then underground comic scene.

Throughout the 1970s Kuchar began to support his filmmaking with erotic drawings that graced the pages of gay magazines and erotic comic books like Gay Heart Throbs, Meatmen, and First Hand Magazine. These evocative works evolved to become an integral part of his oeuvre, with a unique combination of gonzo lewdness and uncompromising joy, garnering underground fandom and critical acclaim.

Kuchar now teaches in the film programme at the San Francisco Art Institute.

We are grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist.