The best Curt McDowell’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Curt McDowell’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Curt McDowell.
Audience
6.4/10
Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure of lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.
Confessions
6.1/10
Curt McDowell has a confession for his parents.
The Mongreloid
6.7/10
A man, his dog, and the regions they inhabited, each leaving his own distinctive mark on the landscape. Not even time can wash the residue of what they left behind.
George Kuchar: The Comedy of the Underground
A documentary portrait of filmmaker George Kuchar conducting a tour of his apartment where he displays memorabilia and his toys which were used for props.
Symphony for a Sinner
8/10
Symphony for a Sinner (1979) was a long, lavishly photographed color film generally considered the magnum opus of the class productions.
Video Album 5: The Thursday People
The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary. “An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”
Xmas 1986
"In Xmas 1986, George Kuchar’s mother Stella has come to stay with him for the holidays. After a series of dinners with friends, Stella’s repeated discussions about her shingles and Kuchar’s ominous film-noirish narration, Kuchar rescues the morale of a dinner party gone bad thanks to an undercooked ham by presenting his hosts with a very memorable holiday gift." – Kyle Riley
A Visit to Indiana
5.8/10
Super 8 home movie footage of McDowell's trip home to Indiana, with voice-over by McDowell and Ted Davis.
Peed Into the Wind
“PEED INTO THE WIND smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” –George Kuchar
