Purgatory Junction

A short film by George Kuchar.

A wide-ranging look at pictures I collect on my walls and in my head. A look at pictures I concoct with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, and objects d’art collected by those whose picture is taken by my picture-taking machine.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

A ripe lad embarks on a raw correspondence with his mirrored image, and thus: the dialogue is "fleshed out" to its full potential.

...What once was for him "real," is now but a "dream," --for the day comes when we find ourselves stranded with memories.

It is believed that Life originated in the Sea, and like the Ocean itself, human existance is thus subject to tides and surging currents of emotions stirred up by memory.

There is a garden in the dark hunger of his psyche where forbidden fruit grows.

The dialogue for this production, featuring Cupid, is taken from the pages of a personal diary found under a chair.

Secret number... secret shape... knower of the secret name... God of the realm of night - I summon you, 'Son of Sin'... arise!

Playwright and performance artist Marc Arthur paves a color-saturated path from 'awake consciousness' to sleeping 'dreamscape'.

A "grand dame's" delirious daydream blooms like a voluptous blossom in spring.

A girl with two male companions in a room is a space where the mind's eye wanders!

He hears the whispers of gargoyles in a hall of heavy stone.

Nymphs and Satyrs are conjured back into activity when poetry is recited and fluffy clouds sail above the contemporary, domestic landscape.

An angry trollop and a self-doubting college kid collide in his cramped apartment for an episode of claustrophobia and self-analysis.

When the body's "primal" urges feel deprived in a "modern" age, a debate about "sex" and "love" ensues to resolve the question — perhaps even find some solution that will suffice!