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.

Luther Price in person at The Nightingale!

Last Sunday, White Light Cinema and The Nightingale presented Resurrections, Rare Super-8 Films and Handmade Slides by Luther Price including his very first film...well, I'm hesitant to even name it because while Resurrections was a retrospective, an evening of cinema more alive to the present could not be imagined.

Two aspects of the program drove home the here and now. Given the fragility of Price's films,  threatening to break or burn due to the vagaries of having been buried under ground, painted on, spliced to all hell, neglected, etc., programmer Patrick Friel rode the projector like a DJ maintaining a continuous beat. At so many turns, you could feel that a film was one frame away from slipping into oblivion which only deepened its intensity. But every flutter was righted by Friel's constant attention. An A+ performance!

And if the projection rendered a film irreparable, Luther Price wouldn't have indulged in any mourning as he implied in a rambling, charming, utterly disarming talk after the screening. From his trepidation about unearthing these films in the first place to his discussion of an injury resulting from a cat bite, everything he said underscored the impermanent nature of his cinema. He confessed that he didn't view himself as a filmmaker and that process was all to him. He just needs to keep at this and will continue to do so even if his arms fall off. The legs and feet will still be there to work with. And when those fall off, he can use his asscheeks to keep it going.

As someone whose archiving tendencies too often prevent a life lived in the present, I found Luther Price's presence before me Easter Sunday inspirational. So for once, I won't catalog the films I was fortunate enough to witness. But does even writing about a Luther Price film betray its significance? If a Criterion collection could even be conceived, would Patrick Friel have to accompany each copy to highlight and/or speed up digital rot?

Luther Price films at The Nightingale

Never pass up an evening of Luther Price films. Despite (if not because of) their propensity to assault us with crusty reminders of our perpetually decaying existence, they themselves are fragile things that sometimes fail to survive projection, perhaps never to be seen again, like scabs lost forever in shag carpeting. So a Luther Price screening is always a precious event indeed. Last night, White Light Cinema presented SLAM! – A Luther Price Super-8 Sampler at The Nightingale kicking off with Mr. Wonderful (1987, 10 min) which consists entirely of an uncomfortable close-up of Mister Rogers' Let's Be Together Today as selections from the album play on the soundtrack. The image has a bit of schmutz on it - ear wax, maybe, or dandruff. Fred sings "The Clown in Me" about acting the clown as a response to fear and uncertainty. You can hear the song in a different version below.

H.S.C. (1989, 10 min) was shot off a TV screen broadcasting the Home Shopping Club (now Network) selling us a Capodimonte porcelain figurine. I could've sworn that this then cut to home movies of a little girl showing off some ballet moves and being entertained by a clown at a party. But my friend Todd thought this latter footage was another film.

Jellyfish Sandwich (1994, 20 min) features old war footage (Pearl Harbor maybe), Asian women chatting, and upside-down football plays intercut into a maelstrom of angry energy. Todd: "That's exactly what I think of football!"

In the middle of the program, I lost track of which film is which but these were shown:

Porcelyn Ribbon [aka Porcelain Ribbon] (1995, 5 min)

Slam (1996, 5 min)

These & Those (1996, 4 min)

One of these combined hardcore gay porn with a western movie. But I'm certain about the final three.

Ritual 629 (1999, 13 min) - Two main layers of imagery - 1. creepily inert surgical footage (or some sort of meaty material) again shot off a television set (I think) and 2. more extreme porn including a man bringing his asshole down on a thin pole and another pissing or ejaculating into a wine glass. The soundtrack was industrial scrapes and clangs. My favorite.

Dead Ringer (1999, 4 min) - Yet another film shot off of a television screen, this time the climax of the 1964 film of the same name in which Bette Davis plays an identical twin who kills her sister and assumes her identity. You settle into the narrative but all too soon, it cuts off at an utterly random moment at which point it seems to signify or "happen." Why there, we wonder, as we do with so many events and lives cut short.

Yellow Goodbye (1999, 10 min) - This one started out with the feel of a Richard Kern film as it observes and swirls around (and with) two men in bad drag dancing around to, according to Fred Camper, a Cass Elliot song. It cuts to spinning footage of buildings taken from a courtyard and then to shots of a shirtless man imprisoned by yellowish scrapes on the film.

Overall, I'd say this Price screening was much easier to take but less profound than the last one I attended, Kittens, Biscuits, & Blots on March 20, 2011 which remains one of the most exhilarating, if punishing, cinematic experiences I've ever had, especially at the end when the last four films, all hand-painted and/or buried in the ground, flaked off in the projector until the final one, presumably Dusty Rickets (2007, approx. 8 min.), broke a few minutes in.

Added attractions: a fat cat named Simon who greeted us at the door; seats on the comfy couch in the front; and Charles the love hound who sat with us for the entire screening.