The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 7-13
Weather Diary 3 (1988)
Directed by George Kuchar
The “diary film” genre has had several sly and brilliant practitioners, each one of them idiosyncratic. Joe Gibbons, Jonas Mekas, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Kidlat Tahimik, and others make playful games out of offering different sides of themselves as they relate to varied environs, with a sweetness attached to each reveal. The late, great Kuchar’s multipart video series studies Oklahoma weather patterns through plucky New York-born George’s obsessive on-site running commentaries. “I’m starved for weather,” he tells the camera in Weather Diary 3, a 25-minute video piece in which our hero endeavors to roam the great outdoors beyond the confines of his room at the El Reno Motel. Storm conditions forbid him from tramping around, though, leading him to pass the time by watching television reports, cooking toast and sausages, dreaming of younger men to keep him company, and befriending a fellow buff named Mike. The video studies inner climates shifting in tandem with outer ones as a person strives to feel free, happy, and un-lonesome. George says at one point, to whomever might hear, “You’ve just gotta keep your mind busy and your body succulent for God and country.” Four more of Kuchar’s weather diaries will also screen in this program. Aaron Cutler (October 10, 8:30pm at BAM’s “Diaries, Notes, and Sketches: Cinematic Autobiography”)