George Kuchar

I never knew much about George Kuchar before the other week's Flipside special at the BFI. In fact, I somehow got the idea from a cursory read-through of the programme notes that he would actually be present at the screenings. As it turned out, his death last year made this unlikely, but the documentary shown here - as rough and ready as any of Kuchar's movies - brought him to life quite splendidly. He was a funny guy, like a knowing idiot savant (and yes, I know technically that's a tautology, but what you have to realise is - when I do it, it's clever), and in fact I seem to have got him slightly confused with Harry Hill in my mind. But Kuchar's films could only have been made by him, in as much as they were made by someone and not (as you might possibly imagine from watching them) by accident.

But he is far from precious about his work. In the documentary, he and his brother are looking at old photos of themselves along with the actress playing a 'sasquatch detective' in George's latest film, and she wonders aloud what the future holds for them both. 'I don't know', says George. 'Weight problems?'

As for the films themselves, they're quite demented. There was Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin, which invents (unless I imagined this) gay tracheotomy porn. Wild Night In El Reno, on the other hand, is just a five-minute account of stormy weather over a motel in Oklahoma, originally intended as atmospheric inserts for a longer film, 'but I said no, I don't want to continue this anymore'. And Forever And Always, possibly my favourite here, in which a woman loses her husband to a woman with fruit on her head, then carts her children despairingly around a festival called 'Hooray For Kids' before they are run over by a car driven by a tailor's dummy. By the end of it, I felt like this had happened to me, and in a sense, it had.