Luther Price 1962 - 2020

How to respond to Luther Price's death? After all, according to his own bio (reproduced on Dennis Cooper's blog post on Price, a typically thorough orgy of links), he died already in 1985 after being shot in Nicaragua. A titan of avant-garde cinema (who also worked in sculpture, slides, performance art, etc), he deserves a most reverent obituary. But is it ignorant to wonder if we should mourn his loss?

The first time I saw Luther Price in person was at a Cinematexas screening in 2006. I no longer recall the titles.* But they were violent, spasmodic things that rattled through the projector. Inevitably, one film broke, a more extreme, more final finish than even, say, a Warhol film that doesn't end but stops. A Price film simply cannot go on and may never be revived again. Like Price himself now.

Towards the end of the Q&A after, someone wistfully said, "Sorry about your film." Price just shrugged. Someone else asked if he would ever make his films available on DVD. He paused for a long time before saying, "No." He wasn't smug or contemptuous. It really did appear as if he was pondering the impossibility of his work having any sense of permanence. Not since my first encounter with Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" did I, an inveterate media hoarder, get such a pungent reminder that wrestling with art means above all to wrestle with your mortality. 

So how to honor Luther Price? Would a catalogue raisonné betray his legacy? A Criterion Blu-ray? Is it possible to preserve his textual disturbances - the chancres, the sores, the noise, the crud after being exhumed from the earth, the do-not-resuscitate endings? How to convey that this was one of the most visceral filmmakers in the history of the medium? Perhaps only Michael Sicinski's deathless praise from 2007 will do:

“In the near future, perhaps 'a Luther Price film' will consist of getting a speck of dust in your eye in some dark alley. Late at night. Far from home. That’s a compliment.”

* Underground Film Journal reports that a "Retrospective" took place on September 21st. Price appeared a few weeks later at Anthology Film Archives where, according to a post on the Frameworks listserv, "[t]his special screening may include a sneak preview of work in progress SILK and SINGING BISCOTTS. Films from the URF series and the Biscotts series will be included along with FANCY and INSIDE THE VELVET K , DEAF FOR CHICKEN LIP and others." So some of those titles might have been shown at the Cinematexas screening. Or not.