« While the 1977 film Wild Night in El Reno is not the first of Kuchar’s films to have been shot in Oklahoma, it is the earliest in which weather is the principal character. The only human beings seen in the six-minute piece are a woman briefly shown trying to use a payphone during a downpour, and the filmmaker himself, posed enigmatically beside graffiti proclaiming that “Jimmy Rush is a Pussy”. The majority of the film’s frames draw the viewer’s attention to the wind, clouds, rain and lightning strikes that accompany an El Reno storm. Many of the initial shots especially recall an Eric Sloane painting in composition and subject; his renderings of cloud formations in pastoral settings were an influence on the young Kuchar and it’s no surprise that a film bringing out the nature observer in the director would resemble one of Sloane’s landscapes put into motion by the camera shutter and the churning winds. » Brian Darr
No print in distribution
