John Kirch was a lifelong filmmaker, Pittsburgher, and teenage zombie in Night of the Living Dead. As a teenager in the mid and late 60s, he created a steady stream of irreverent 8mm films with his friends, each one a glimpse into his passion for collecting underground and pop culture sights and sounds. In his early 20s, he formalized his training behind the camera by attending California Institute of the Arts. When he returned to Pittsburgh, he became a fixture of the city’s burgeoning punk rock and filmmaking scenes, documenting with his 16mm camera and entertaining audiences with his proto-microcinema evenings of 16mm cartoons and camp.
John turned his skills as a fastidious film handler into a longtime career as a film editor. Professionally, he cut film and video for local news station KDKA for 35 years. He was also one of the most well-regarded negative conformers in the region. In his final years, up until his death in 2021, John enjoyed the leisure of retirement by completing films from his meticulously organized archive of decades of footage he had shot.
Now we look back at his work as a filmmaker with an evening of his Pittsburgh-centric comic experiments:
-Premieres of brand new restorations of “Post Card City” and other selections from his seldom seen 1960s amateur films, funded by 126 Kickstarter backers and the Al Larvick Conservation Fund. Vintage Pittsburgh footage abounds!
-16mm presentations of some of John’s 1970s punk classics, including proto-music video “The Targets,” found footage tease “Things We Used to Do,” frozen-in-time portrait “Nancy’s Hair on Fire” and more.
-Plus, a selection of John’s later videotape and digital video work.
———————
Doors at 7:30, screening starts at 8
At the Glitterbox Theater
———————
ABOUT ESSENTIAL PITTSBURGH
Pittsburgh Sound + Image seeks to redefine our region’s film history with the Essential Pittsburgh series. We acknowledge the depth of creativity which has flourished here by spotlighting vital artists and their films from the 1960s through the 2000s. This landmark series is a continuation of our efforts to celebrate a fuller picture of independent, amateur, industrial, and experimental filmmaking talent, and to better situate Pittsburgh nationally as a place of rich cinematic history.
