“Hold Me While I’m Naked was a picture I made. 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: I couldn’t make this picture anymore with the way I had planned. Luckily, I think it turned out kind of interesting this way with my dilemma. It also became something about a guy who thought everyone else was having fun–taking hot showers together, and all kinds of hanky-panky–and here I was, with my mother, living at home and stuff.” – George Kuchar

There is something feverishly unpleasant about George Kuchar‘s 1966 short movie Hold Me While I’m Naked. In it’s short running time, it takes you on a parodic journey through the eyes of a repressed filmmaker who struggles to direct his cast in sex scenes. The feeling of intimacy and the aesthetic of high camp gaudiness – combined with a John Waters transgressive approach to physicality makes this film paradoxically both difficult to watch and difficult to turn away from.

It’s also a hard film to justify as a prestigious moment, the director teases purposefully over-the-top performances out of his actors, the dialogue affected and delivered with an alienating dubbed quality. But this cracked and grimy artifice covers a deeply subversive and progressive heart. The short running time works in it’s favour – allowing you just enough time in this world to get the joke and to experience the atmosphere without it becoming oppressive or, even worse, normalised.

Watch in a double bill with Wavelength (1967), another distinctive and difficult short film, directed by Michael Snow, but as detached and clinical as Hold Me While I’m Naked is fleshy and organic.