Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck invites you to celebrate the weary winter months of the impending holiday season with us as best as we know how, through the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-smelling video camera of George Kuchar. Like an untended litter box, George’s enormous body of video work is strewn with festive nuggets of every kind, but it is wintertime and Christmas that seem to receive the most fervent attention. Themes of family, friends, food, firesides, kitsch, ritual, embarrassment, guilt, and indigestion comprise the perfect ingredients for one of our all-time favorite filmmaker’s magnetic, diaristic gaze, as he approaches the holiday season with love, tenderness, humor, and horror. Lightstruck is thrilled to present a selection of four of our favorite George Kuchar holiday videos, combining like mulled wine to give you a warm tingling sensation followed the next morning by a headache and maybe a little agita. In *Frigid Escapades*, George visits Gene Youngblood in Santa Fe but makes it back to the Bay Area in time for dinner with Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure. In *Migration of the Blubberoids*, a wintery visit to mom in The Bronx is an occasion for tensions to ferment over ring cake from Artuso Pastry Shop. *Xmas 1986* is an emotional epic centered around family and community, with a moving visit to dying friend Curt McDowell forming the centerpiece of one of George’s greatest mixes of the comic, tragic, and eccentric. Our holiday evening will close with the unsurpassably entitled *Fill Thy Crack With Whiteness*, a music-driven montage with plenty of laughs, various Xmas gatherings, and groans of yuletide cheer to send us all stumbling out into the eternally snowless Los Angeles night. PROGRAM: - Frigid Escapades (2007) 10m - Migration of the Blubberoids (1989) 12m - Xmas 1986 (1986) 36.5m - Fill Thy Crack with Whiteness (1989) 14m total = 72.5m Program and notes by Mark Toscano. All videos courtesy of Video Data Bank, with additional thanks to Michelle Silva and a tip of Santa’s hat to Mike Kuchar.