George Kuchar was one of the most creative, original, and influential filmmakers, straddling between two generations of North American iconoclasts, including Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Rudy Burckhardt, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Warren Sonbert, Ernie Gehr, Abigail Child, and Henry Hills. Often collaborating with his twin brother, Mike, the Kuchars started making films as Bronx teenagers and these early films already show the ingenuity, exuberance, and do-it-yourself charm that they would keep over their scores of subsequent films.
I have been grimly awaiting the official announcement of Kathryne Lindberg's death, after she disappeared in December, 2010 , an apparent suicide. Her body was recently found and the family has released this announcement, with information on a memorial service. Kathryne's first book was Reading Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche(Oxford, 1987) but her research in recent years was on African-American literature and Communism, focussing on the 1930s. She spent years researching her book, so it is my hope that her notes or drafts might somehow be rescued. Kathryne was an editorial board member of boundary 2. And married the poet Murray Jackson, whose death stayed with her till her own death. I last saw Kathryne when she came to Chicago, with my cousin Susan Bernstein, to see Emma's show at DOVA. Kathryne, like they say, did not suffer fools lightly, really not at all, and she did not suffer the foolishness in herself either I suspect. She was unrelenting in the harsh light she cast on American racism and its centrality for understanding American literature. She used her formidable wit, charm, and knowledge to undercut any argument that would ameliorate this history, our history as Americans and as American writers.
