July 4–31, 2025
e-flux Film is pleased to present George Kuchar’s Vermin of the Vortex (1996) as the July 2025 edition of Staff Picks.
George Kuchar was renowned for his irreverent humor, camp aesthetics, and deeply personal approach to filmmaking. His distinctive body of work often merges diaristic realism with imaginative satire, deliberately challenging the expectations of institutional art discourses.
In Vermin of the Vortex, Kuchar humorously responds to a contentious personal encounter with the institutional culture of documentary filmmaking at the 1996 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, where his diaristic work became the center of controversy, criticized for its perceived lack of political seriousness and theoretical rigor. Blending actual footage of the heated Seminar confrontation with surreal scenes of alien abduction, Kuchar playfully reflects on his experience of academic alienation. At the same time, footage from the more welcoming environment of the Chicago Underground Film Festival provides a contrast, emphasizing Kuchar's outsider perspective and the complex dynamics between underground art and institutional expectations.
This program is presented in collaboration with Video Data Bank.
George Kuchar, Vermin of the Vortex (1996, 22 minutes)
Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. The film features George Kuchar at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Vermin of the Vortex will stream on e-flux Film until July 31, 2025. View the film here.
George Kuchar (1942–2011) was an influential figure in American underground cinema, celebrated for his prolific body of low-budget, humorous, and deeply personal films. With his homemade Super 8 and 16mm potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, he became legendary as a distinctive and outrageous underground filmmaker whose work influenced many other artists, including Andy Warhol, John Waters, and David Lynch. After his 1980s transition to video, he remained a master of genre manipulation and subversion, creating hundreds of brilliantly edited, hilarious, observant, often diaristic videos with an 8mm camcorder, dime-store props, not-so-special effects, using friends as actors, and the “pageant that is life” as his studio. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for forty years, where he made many videos in collaboration with his students. Throughout his career, Kuchar consistently challenged cinematic conventions and institutional norms, leaving a legacy of innovative and provocative work.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
