George Kuchar | Hold Me While I’m Naked / 1966

a life worth living

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Kuchar (screenwriter and director) Hold Me While I’m Naked / 1966

 

The 15 minute short film by George Kuchar titled Hold Me While I’m Naked, as he himself describes it, “was supposed to be about a mother and a daughter vying for the affections of the same man. Then the star got sick, so I decided to make a picture about a filmmaker who couldn’t make a movie, and that would be me.”

    We might describe this film, accordingly, as the story of a gay man’s fantasy of a Hollywood heterosexual love story that he could neither inhabit nor actually film, given his lack of finances, expertise, and comprehension of the world he desired. And as such, it is so painfully close to an autobiographical tale that it almost hurts to watch it; yet because of that very straight-forward telling, the absurd romance of the storyteller/filmmaker, and his very inability to actually make such a story, the work shifts momentarily into a campy production that finally reveals itself to be deeply profound.

    In some respects, this work parallels a movie such as Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953)—the major difference being that Ed Wood was a complete naïf without any talent while George and his twin brother Mike, both gay men, were incredibly aware of the art they were imitating, and given their total lack of finances for actors, costumes, music, and all the other elements of great filmmaking, were incredibly talented, nonetheless, at creating the illusion of Hollywood glamour, stripping it of nearly all of its outer shell of slickness to reveal, somewhat like Nicolas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the real feelings, societal hypocrisy, and delusions of that lay beneath. As James Stoller, writing in The Village Voice, expressed it in a far more poetic manner: "This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back."

    As critic Ed Halter reminds us, “By the time George Kuchar completed Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966) at the tender age of 23, he was already a celebrated director with more than 17 films under his belt, all made with his fraternal twin, Mike. The siblings had launched their heretofore conjoined career eight years earlier, making their first films by borrowing their aunt’s 8mm home-movie camera and their mother’s nightgown, and later perfected how to shoot and edit through scrutinizing the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, and Roger Corman at local movie theaters. Bearing titles like The Naked and the Nude (1957), Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof (1961), and Lust For Ecstasy (1963), the Kuchars’ luridly colorful micro-melodramas circulated in the amateur film clubs of their day, where the Bronx teens had been enthusiastic participants.”

    By 1965, Mike has just finished filming his first solo, a science-fiction parody titled Sins of the Felshapoids, leaving George to film by himself. Hold Me became as Halter sees it, a kind of “a lament of artistic isolation.”

     The film begins with Philip (played by George), a young man of no great beauty determined to make low-budget skin flicks with little but an overactive imagination. As if he were directing an Italian drama equal to the work of Fellini or Rosselli, he orders his star (Donna Kerness), dressed in an asparagus-green dress that looks somewhat like a prom-gown, to rush in hysterics out of a tenement building and make her way across a large brown-bricked wall. At the end of the street stands a young handsome boy, watching. For what purpose the director has sent her on her frenzied run, we never discern, but it certainly appears dramatic, and her demeanor is that of a traumatized movie star having discovered perhaps that her lover has been unfaithful or that he has just been killed, or…whatever other scenario which we might conjure up. 

    Back inside, the filmmaker attempts a love scene played out on the floor between our actress and a handsome male which Philip attempts to capture through a stained glass window, perhaps combining a bit of sanctity with his depiction of sin. But her bra seems for too prosaic for the scene, and he asks her to remove it, as he makes a second shoot of her naked body being kissed.

     But our temperamental star has now reached her limits. As Philip packs up, telling the couple what to expect for the next day’s shoot, the couple continue to make love, she finally breaking off when Philip has left, complaining to her co-star that she is “sick and tired of being naked in almost every scene.”

     Our nerdy hero now makes his way home, stopping by the way to use his camera as he films himself gently interacting with a small bird who not only hops upon his finger, but lets him kiss it.

    As Halter perceptively argues, what in 1996 critic Jack Stevenson struggled to describe as a “house-of-mirrors close-up,” was actually something close to what today we would describe as a selfie shot, “achieved more than forty years before Instagram.”

     Back at home, Philip receives a phone call telling him that his actor has quit. With no large salary, contracts, or studio commitment hanging over the relationship, there is little he can do but hang up the phone and stand looking out the window in absolute sorrow.

     He sadly beds down, in an almost horror-film like vignette, with both female and male mannequins, after painting the female’s lips bright red.

     Yet even then he cannot stop imagining what he might have filmed. And the next morning, he calls another actress and her boyfriend (who appears to be the young man standing at the end of the block in the first scene), but she is similarly disinterested.

     The love scene he conjures up between the two of them, however, becomes the passionate fantasy that he hoped to play out in his film, the two of them moving to the shower fully dressed, her terre verte colored halter slipping under the male’s grip to reveal one of her breasts.

     Philip strips and takes a long shower of despair; as he imagines the other couple passionately making love in the shower, he spins about in drag, draped in a red dress, finally beating his head against the wall in sorrow for the impossibility of realizing his dreams.

     His mother calls into him to “Get out, for Christ’s sake! You’ve been in there an hour!” She herself wants to finish up and leave the house.

     He moves to the table, a man still living at home with a mother in control of his life, as she serves him up a plate of badly burned toast and beets. Looking straight at the camera he comments, in utter sincerity belying a deep despair: “There’s a lotta things in life worth living for. Isn’t there?”

     There is no one there to hold him while he’s naked.

     As critic Ken Kellman observed of the film, it is: "a very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, Hold Me surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality."

      This oddly poignant film was voted number 52 in the Village Voice’s Critic’s Poll of 100 Best Films of the 20th Century.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Věra Chytilová | Sedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967

let’s do it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Věra Chytilová, Esster Krumbachová, and Pavel Juráček (screenplay, based on a story by Chytilová), Věra Chytilová (director) Sedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967

 

Long before Saturday Night Live’s “two wild and crazy guys,” the Czech emigrant Festrunk brothrs, Czech director Věra Chytilová wrote of two wild and crazy gals in her film Daisies. The “daisies,” in this case, who insist they are sisters, but may, in fact, be only close friends, are both named Marie (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), who observing that the world had become “spoiled” and meaningless, with the logic of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” determine not only to fall in love Thelma and Louise-style (in the 1991 film), but aim at becoming “spoiled” themselves.

     What follows is 70 some minutes of Dada-like events, wherein, in full color, sepia, and other techniques of coloration, the Maries deconstruct themselves and the patriarchal society which has attempted to turn them into objects. Early on, one of the Maries declares that she has become merely a “doll,” that world also meaning “virgin” in Czech.

     Their first act is to frolic across a field with a single tree brimming with applies, which suggests that they have suddenly become Eve-like figures, tempting the men around them so that the entire society might fall. Indeed, throughout this amazing mash-up of cinema techniques, they are seen dining with older, married men who must end up paying for the huge meals they together consume.

    Gluttony seems to be one of the major ways through which they become “spoiled,” behaving almost as if they were attempting not just to trick their victims—leaving them generally in the lurch as the males with whom they dine run to catch their trains back to their wives—but to consume, to literally eat up the society itself.

    At one point, we see the feminist logic to these actions as they slice up various phallic-shaped food stuffs, including bananas, croissants, and sausages (grilled, for a few moments earlier in a fire that nearly burned up their room).

   But “spoiled,” in this case, also includes testing the limits of their own relationship—cutting away each other’s body parts as if they were paper dolls and/or store window mannequins—and of close women friends such as an elderly bathroom attendant who attempts to keep them near her by serving coffee, and from whom they steal a few coins.

    What is clear is that both the characters and director are testing the limits of their own transgressions, and together they inventively imagine ways to challenge the system in which they are trapped. While the woman are observed as constantly seeking new ways to “spoil” themselves, so dose Chytilová endlessly attempt to break down the limitations of filmmaking, shifting not only dozens of different lenses and other cinematic devices, but ambitiously moving images from the realist into the abstract. And several moments of the film look more like an early silent film or even a cartoon reel rather than a feature film of the late 1960s.

    Such willful destruction, obviously, can end only in one way. The two Maries break to a Communist Party banquet, playfully eating up nearly all the food before the presumably mostly male diners have even entered the room while dancing across the long banquet table, all of which ends in a farcical food fight before the two, swinging from a class chandelier, fall to their deaths by, strangely enough, drowning.

    A narrator suggests that, given a chance, the two might have wanted to make amends; but when we observe the Maries attempting to clear up their mess and put the impossibly broken plates and silverware back in place, we know that they would never have been able to “fix it up.”

    Chytilová’s work, in turn, was banned for “depicting the wanton” (the censors claimed that the director had used up too much food in the filming), and the director herself was banned for several years from filmmaking.

    Today we recognize this droll movie not only as a brilliant feminist work, but as one of the most innovated films of the Czech New Wave.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).