Essential/Unessential Warhol at Anthology Film Archives

Greg Pierce, the Director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum, brought several rare (are there any other kind?) Warhol titles to Anthology Film Archives last weekend under the program title Essential/Unessential Warhol. And it wasn't until the final evening, during a Q&A with Pierce conducted by Andrew Lampert, that I not only fully grasped the "Unessential" portion of the title but also came to understand something about Warhol's cinema. Lampert's first question seemed naive at first: "Why are we here?" Well, we're here because these films are comically rare, barely seen by anyone on the planet in almost 60 years. But the question came immediately after Sunday's screening of The Andy Warhol Story (1966). And, as with Saturday's Paranoia [version 1] (1966), which Pierce judged a failure, it was pretty awful. So the question really concerned why we were compelled to sit through an indulgent, speed-fueled bitchfest with typically godawful sound, no matter how anthropologically or conceptually fascinating (an antagonistic Rene Ricard plays/lampoons Warhol while Edie Sedgwick floats around the edges and Paul Morrissey tries to get Ricard to speak into the visible mic). We were there because Warhol was one of the 20th century's greatest artists and/or we'd been transformed by some of his more readily available films (Blow Job has been ensconced at #5 on my top ten favorite films of all time list for decades and my screening of Empire a few years back remains a cinemagoing touchstone). But Essential/Unessential Warhol taught me that it's okay to deem some Warhol films as just plain bad at least until technology can allow us to discern more than ten words of his Superstars' babble over 66 minutes. Pierce even provided evidence that Warhol himself disdained The Andy Warhol Story (and maybe Paranoia too?). So the Unessential aspect is akin to examining Michelangelo's sketches or rifling through Bob Dylan's garbage with the crucial proviso that Warhol threw almost nothing out. 

As for the Essential, Pierce brought two reels from 1967's 25-hour **** (Four Stars) - reel 20 – “Nico Music” and reel 75 – “Sausalito,” both enchanting precisely because the sound was so crystalline. The Andy Warhol Story and (I assume) Paranoia were shot with an Auricon camera which records sound, muddily, directly onto the film. The **** reels were shot using a separate magnetic sound recorder and it's the making of those films. The former features Nico improvising variations on "It Was a Pleasure Then" from her solo debut Chelsea Girl with John Cale and Lou Reed performing off-camera and Warhol's trademark bloops skipping time forward. “Sausalito” (pic below) was even better, a calm travelogue observing dusk at a boat dock with Nico mostly off-camera intoning pseudo-profundities like “One has to limit space somehow. Not to . . . drown.” Warhol creates abstract images by focusing on crepuscular reflections in the water and toys with distinctions between inside and outside - at one point, a telephone rings, suggesting some of the footage was shot from indoors. And even with these reels, there was something of the scholarly about them since **** is technically 50 hours long with the projectionist instructed to show reels on top of another somewhat akin to the improvisatory nature of projecting The Chelsea Girls (1966)

Most essential of all was Drink aka Drunk (1965), two 33-minute reels of renowned documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, reportedly already tipsy before filming, drinking an entire bottle of J&B scotch in about twenty minutes. It's cute and fun for a while as de Antonio rants and babbles. But it quickly becomes distressing, even alarming as he starts to lose consciousness. He barely speaks in the second reel and passes out flat on his back. The camera moves not a hair throughout all 66 minutes and, despite the presence of several people during filming, no one speaks to him or intervenes in any way (although as the Catalogue Raisonné makes clear, there were some shenanigans during the fifteen minutes it took to change reels). Where Paranoia put me to sleep (blessedly so), Drink/Drunk had my mind racing with all sorts of questions about ethics, genre, sadism, masochism, subject, object, authorship, etc. I believe it surpasses even Blow Job as Warhol's greatest film (so far!) and now sorely regret missing it on the chilly evening of November 19, 2016 when it was last shown in NYC at MOMA. 

My remaining qualm is the claims critics and scholars have long been making about other Warhol titles with hideous sound. J. Hoberman, for one, put Beauty #2 (1965) at #1 on his top ten list for the Village Voice in 1988 and ten years later put Outer and Inner Space (1965) at #4. I've seen both on film and couldn't understand a damn word. And given that the former especially lives and dies with its back-and-forth sparing, I'm missing a lot. I saw John and Ivy (1965) at UT-Austin about twenty years ago and the professor who programmed it claimed that the print she'd previously seen had much clearer sound than the scuzzy sonics on the print we heard. Are there indeed prints with more pristine sound out there? Or are my ears rotted from decades of DJing, rock 'n' roll, and tinnitus? More likely the latter. Pierce told us he transcribed the dialogue of Beauty #2, a task I couldn't perform for more than a phrase or two, and the Catalogue Raisonné lays out significant chunks of dialogue from Drunk and John and Ivy (perhaps because the writers had headphones and/or the ability to rewind?). So maybe one day we'll get some Blu-rays or a streaming platform with closed captioning that will reveal a kernel of genius to The Andy Warhol Story. 

I skipped the first night screening of Batman Dracula because I saw a shorter/different iteration of it at MOMA last spring and two nights of Warhol scholarship was plenty. 

For more on Essential/Unessential Warhol, check out my pal Jody's post on Drunk and Paranoia, Elizabeth Purchell on the **** reels, and Melissa Anderson on the series overall.

Opus (Matt Helmet, 1970)

Opus is nine minutes of avant-porn in which a heterosexual couple have sex with Toshi Ichyanagi's "Extended Voices (for Voices with Moog Synthesizer and Buchla Associates Electronic Modular System)" on the soundtrack (although it seems to be spliced in with another piece). A curio at best, it still ends conventionally with a money shot. According to the Erotica Films blog, the performers are Natalie Nell and John Joseph and the festival mentioned in the opening credits is The Second Wet Dream Film Festival (1971). 

Grade: B-minus

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.

100 Great Avant-garde Films!

Adynata (Leslie Thornton 1983)
Aelf-scin (Joseph Bernard 1979)
Aleph (Wallace Berman 1955-66?)
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold 1998)
Amerikanos (Christos Dimas 1999)
Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp 1926)
L'Arrivée (Peter Tscherkassky 1997-1998)
Autumn Fire (Herman Weinberg 1930-33)
Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy 1924)
Berlin Horse (Malcolm Le Grice 1970)
Blow Job (Andy Warhol 1963)
Boston Fire (Peter Hutton 1979)
La Cartomancienne (The Fortune Teller) (Jerome Hill 1932)
Un chant d'amour (Jean Genet 1950)
Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel 1929)
Chronic (Jennifer Reeves 1997)
Chumlum (Ron Rice 1964)
La cicatrice intérieure (Philippe Garrel 1972)
Clouds (Peter Gidal 1969)
Cobra Mist (Emily Richardson 2008)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov 1968)
Colour Flight (Len Lye 1937)
Combat de boxe (Charles Dekeukeleire 1929)
Cul en l'air (Pierre Yves Clouin 1998)
Cybelle (Donald Richie 1968)
Decodings (Michael Wallin 1988)
Dirty (Stephen Dwoskin 1971)
Ecce Homo (Jerry Tartaglia 1989)
11 x 14 (James Benning)
A Family Finds Entertainment (Ryan Trecartin 2005)
Family Tyranny (Modelling and Molding) (Paul McCarthy and Mike
Kelley 1987)
Film Ist (Gustav Deutsch 1998-2004)
Filmpiece for Sunshine (John Luther Schofill, Jr. 1966-1968)
Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith 1963)
The Flicker (Tony Conrad 1966)
Fly Away Homo (Andrew HIller 1998)
La fórmula secreta (Rubén Gámez 1965)
From the Notebook of… (Robert Beavers 1971/1998)
Fuses (Carolee Schneemann 1967)
The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith 1976)
Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah 1986)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers 1969-1970)
Images d'Ostende (Henri Storck 1929)
It Wasn't Love (Sadie Benning 1992)
Jack’s Dream (Joseph Cornell c. 1930-1970)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975)
Klipperty Klopp (Andrew Kotting, 1984, 12m)
Kunst Life (Roger Jacoby 1975)
Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger 1965)
Light Rhythms (Francis Bruguière & Oswell Blakeston 1931)
Lost Book Found (Jem Cohen 1996)
Luke (Bruce Conner 1967)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid 1943)
Mirrors Facing Mirrors (Adam Cooley 2010)
Mosaik im Vertrauen (Peter Kubelka, 1955)
Motion Painting No. 1 (Oskar Fischinger 1947)
My Parents Read Dreams I’ve Had About Them (Neil Goldberg 1998)
Near the Big Chakra (Anne Severson 1971)
Nightcats (Stan Brakhage 1956)
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffatt 1989)
(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton 1971)
Notch (Diane Kitchen 2000)
Notes of an Early Fall (Saul Levine 1976-77)
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 (John C. Hecker 1939)
Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa 1926)
The Passing (Bill Viola 1991)
Pensao Globo (Matthias Müller 1997)
Peyote Queen (Storm De Hirsch 1965)
Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood 1971)
pornfilm (Stephanie Barber 1999)
A Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait 1952)
Pu Pu (Motoharu Jonouchi 1960)
Race d'Ep (Lionel Soukaz 1979)
Reflections of Evil (Damon Packard 2002)
La région centrale (Michael Snow 1967)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas 1972)
Roof (Betsy Kalin 1998)
Schuss! (Nicolas Rey 2005)
She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh 2001)
Side/Walk/Shuttle (Ernie Gehr 1991)
Sissy Boy Slap Party (Guy Maddin 1995)
6/64 Mama Und Papa (Kurt Kren 1964)
Sodom (Luther Price 1989)
Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (Marguerite Duras 1976)
Sorrows (Gregory J. Markopoulos 1969)
Le souriante Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac 1922)
"Sredni Vashtar" by Saki (David Bradley 1940-43)
Standard Gauge (Morgan Fisher 1984)
Stuffing (Animal Charm 1998)
Submit To Me Now (Richard Kern 1987)
Symphony for a Sinner (George Kuchar 1979)
Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein 1947)
Thanatopsis (Ed Emshwiller 1963)
The End (Christopher Maclaine 1953)
This Is It (James Broughton 1971)
Thundercrack! (Curt McDowell 1975)
Tomatos Another Day (James Sibley Watson and Alec Wilder 1930/1933) (pictured below)
Tríptico Elemental de España (José Val del Omar, 1960)
The Vyrotonin Decision (Matt McCormick 1999)
Wet One (Ian MacTilstra 2008)
Whitney: Mama’s Little Baby (Lawrence Elbert 2000)
Wind Vane (Chris Welsby 1972)

The Wind Is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea (David Brooks, 1968)

The Wind Is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea is a quietly lovely film with undertows of entropy due in part to a ever-zooming, ever-twirling camera. I wondered if Terence Malick ever saw this because I could feel some of his bucolic reveries at moments. But it's much more varied than that suggests. There are bits of vérité interviews with people discussing a Vietnam vet named Chandler, an artist whom the war has left directionless at best. There's also a kick the can game near Walden pond starring Stanley Cavell, Sidney Morgenbesser, and Arthur Danto (Brooks was his student). The soundtrack features an early version of Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" which will probably prevent it from ever getting a DVD release. And it's all over in a quizzical 52 minutes. Brooks died at 24 in 1969 in a car accident.

Bonding Occurs Between Enraged Film Lovers At Sold-out Nathaniel Dorsky Anthology Screening

Manhattan, October 17 - In an atmosphere reminiscent of the good vibes outside Studio 54 amongst the folks who couldn't get in, only far more bittersweet, several film lovers in the lobby of Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave.) managed to bond with one another despite their rage over not getting tickets to a sold-out screening of Nathaniel Dorsky's new films. Avant-garde enthusiasts who arrived as early at 7:00 p.m. for the 7:30 p.m. screening were greeted with a "Dorsky Is Now Sold Out" sign, a phrase that soon took on an double meaning for the angry unfortunates.

Raising their hopes but also stoking their flames of rage was another sign reading "Maybe A Few Might Get In?" So a group of about 20 hopefuls waited in the lobby for word from an admittedly sympathetic Anthology employee about potential seating. Around 7:30 p.m. said employee announced that there were five aisle seats available which went to the names at the top of a long waiting list. But an occasion for revelry quickly turned sour since the announcement broke up several groups of friends. Kisses and hugs were exchanged with the unlucky as one loudmouth wondered aloud how they could possibly remain friends after this.

Two aspects of the evening contributed to the tense environment. Nathaniel Dorsky refuses to release his masterful films on DVD/Blu-ray so one must attend a rare screening in more privileged cities around the world in order to see them. Even worse, Anthology was screening (freakin') Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel, 1982) in their much larger theatre upstairs. Attendance figures for that 7:00 p.m. screening were not released by press time. But one could surmise that they could not have exceeded the turnout for Dorsky. Further compounding the offense is that Eating Raoul was a staple of early cable television and has been available not only on VHS but on a Criterion Blu-ray as well. The loudmouth asked the employee why the Dorsky films weren't shown in the larger theatre. "Nick (?) decided that they would work better in the smaller theatre," was the reply.

Once it was official that no one else beyond the lucky five would be getting in, the employee offered Dorsky bookmarks as a pathetic consolation prize. One particularly sad Dorsky fan was gifted the "Sold Out" sign (seen below). The loudmouth asked the employee to convey to Dorsky that we were pissed.

Nevertheless, the unlucky bonded over their misfortune. They wondered if buying a membership would get them in and then got even sadder that they didn't have a membership in the first place. Others discussed the genius of Dorsky while ruing the "necessity" of watching his masterpieces on film in a theatre. Genuine sorrys were exchanged as the supporters of the avant-garde dispersed morosely.

Brandishing a copy of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the loudmouth went on a harangue:

"Today, I hate the avant-garde. I traveled from The Bronx to see these films. Three hours wasted. I've crossed state lines to see avant-garde films. I am not the enemy. But now I will fight to get these films shown to the unprivileged who can't attend screenings in Manhattan or at Harvard. I now want to bootleg every film ever! Long live KG! Long live UbuWeb! Blu-rays for all. Myron Ort sells DVDs of his films online. So does Joseph Bernard whose films are at least as gorgeous as Dorsky's? Why can't Dorsky??? We get it. We know they should be experienced live in motion on film. We get that, say, Luther Price's films are about decay, that even their destruction is part of their aesthetic experience. But let us have that aesthetic experience! We're here in the auratic space that is Manhattan and Anthology and we can't see Dorsky films??? There's something rotten here!!!"

Eventually, the loudmouth found himself talking to no one outside on 2nd Ave. and he walked home alone slowly in the wrong direction.

Ulysses in the Subway (Paul Kaiser, Marc Downie, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, 2017)

The avant-garde trains us to step off the capitalist treadmill and pause on some useful-in-its-uselessness image or sound. I've been mesmerized by a rainbow sliver on a CD tower created by light caught on an overturned DVD. And I always stayed to listen to my garage door close because it evoked the gong-rattling guitars of My Bloody Valentine's "All I Need." So I was receptive to Ulysses in the Subway, a 3-D algorithmic picturing of a sound journey taken by Ken Jacobs of a subway ride up to 42nd Street and then back down to his loft near Chambers Street where his wife Flo (Penelope in this Odyssey) awaits him. But it put me right back on the capitalist treadmill.

The idea here is to awaken our hearing to the sounds around us by providing a graphic representation of their complexity, an effect enhanced by the 3-D which allows us to dive into the sound-images. Often, they resembled the perspective of looking upon miles of city lights from high on a hill. The problem is that the sounds themselves weren't recontextualized and the sound-images didn't do enough to transform that deadening "Stand clear of the closing door please" announcement. For millions of New Yorkers every day, this is capitalism's repetition compulsion at its most pummeling and Ulysses didn't deliver it from us. And soon, everything about the project felt just as oppressive as those eternal announcements, from the fact that the journey never wanders above 42nd Street to the leisure implied in Jacobs' stopping to listen to an endless steel drum performance to the hoary narrative of the male wanderer and the female waiting at home. 

Ok so it wasn't for me. But I'll tell you who it was for. At the Q&A afterward at MOMA, an old man asked where he could hear these sounds. Clearly, the man hadn't been underground in some time, if ever. So come with me and watch the Show Time boys do their thang. Marvel at the purple explosion all over the walls and pillars in the Union Square station of black man named Prince at various points in his history. Keep your eyes open for the light orgy just before you reach the 125th Street station. Oh you've never up this far before?

New York Film Festival Screenings 3

Autumn (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2016)
The Dreamer (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2016)
Bagatelle II (Jerome Hiler, 2016) 

Program 8 of the NYFF's Projections slate ("an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be") featured the latest films from Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler and they were presented in the order above. I note this for two reasons: 1. Each film was (felt? became?) more representational than the previous. 2. Autumn is my favorite film of the year but it could have been any one of these had I seen them in a different order. That might seem damning (of my critical faculties and/or avant-garde cinema) but it speaks to the indigestible nature of these gorgeous films. With multiple superimpositions, out-of-focus shots, and the general information rich tumble of imagery (and no sound to direct our gaze), they resist attempts to consume them, nay, even to conceive of them. Much of the time, we don't even know what we're looking at, what is figure and what is ground. We could be gazing up at a zeppelin or some sort of seed-like formation within a water drop.

They reminded me, of course, of Brakhage, particularly his Arabics and the sense of cinema as eye-confounding abstraction devoid of any referent. But more often, it reminded of the popular music I hold most dear, consumer products that sound unconsumable, that you'll never get to the bottom of, songs where the figure of the vocals engage in an unresolvable struggle with the ground of the music, striving to be heard but never quite succeeding. The sample-dense strafing of Public Enemy and M.I.A. The murk of the Stones' Exile, Sly's Riot and Ariel Pink's Doldrums. The shoegazing yearning of My Bloody Valentine, Glasvegas, and Belong's Colorloss Record.

Curt McDowell at Anthology

In Confessions (1971), Curt McDowell asks a friend what's wrong and what's right about him. What's wrong about him, the friend confesses, is whether or not he's aware of other people's rhythms. I had this assessment knocking about my head while watching some of McDowell's films, preserved by Academy Film Archive, at Anthology this week, particularly longer ones like Taboo (The Single and The LP) (1981, 53 min.) and Peed into the Wind (1972, 54 min.). They're taxing, difficult films. McDowell's sister Melinda, on hand for the screenings, even thanked us for sitting through Taboo. I find McDowell much more effective (or do I mean "palatable"?) in the 15-25 minute range and I confess that the obscure Peed into the Wind has already faded from memory (apart from McDowell as possibly latent heterosexual rock star Mick Terrific singing to us from some sort of soft-focus TV screen within the frame and George Kuchar making faces to an...off-screen mirror?).

But much of the avant-garde cinema experience is a question of orienting oneself to different rhythms. And after all, the friend in Confessions says what's right about McDowell is just about everything else. So once I reoriented myself to his intensity, just about everything else in the program was oh so right including Taboo, a film which deserves that hoary old avant-garde descriptor "surreal" (I heard it applied recently to The Hart of London...nope!).

In several public bathrooms, McDowell had come across some odd graffiti which pointed to a family melodrama ripe for McDowellfication, hence Taboo. The graffiti ("Abner slapped hard like blue magic") repeats like an idée fixe throughout the film, especially recited by a beautiful trick named Fahed Martin. So do shots of the trick, sitting shirtless or, most disturbingly, tied up in a shower. Interspersed between all of this are what one can assume are attempts to dramatize the Abner family conflict and it all unfolds if not like a dream than an itchy self-examination.

Still, best in show was Boggy Depot (1973, 17 min.), easily the best American musical of the 1970s. Seriously. I'm not sure how a set of songs about hypnotizing George Kuchar could be anything less than scintillating. There's even an incredible cross-cut ensemble number that beats West Side Story's "Tonight." I adored every nanosecond.

 

 

 

For more, check out Whit Strub here and Michael Guillen here. 

Here's Melinda McDowell introducing the screenings.

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.

Dominic Angerame terminated

A few days ago, I wrote that Dominic Angerame had retired from Canyon Cinema because that is what Canyon's press release stated here. According to Angerame, however, he was unceremoniously terminated. I won't say more because Angerame will release a statement soon. But I will retain the original post with a link here.

One man lost, another found

Canyon Cinema announced yesterday that they're losing Executive Director Dominic Angerame to retirement. Where this leaves the already beleaguered avant-garde/experimental film rental facility is anyone's guess. But Angerame stuck with Canyon throughout the advent of digital media and dwindling-to-nonexistent film rental budgets. And he's been a hero of mine for decades. The Canyon Cinema catalog (no. 5, published in 1982 along with the thin Supplement) was my early education in  avant-garde cinema. I had the opportunity to thank him personally at SCMS Los Angeles. But I want to honor his career and dedication upon his retirement. You're an inspiration, Dominic. Thank you!
UPDATE HERE

And in the Found category, a photograph from the lost gay porn version of the life of Jesus Christ, Him (Ed D. Louie, 1974), has turned up at the To Obscurity and Beyond blog (scroll down to the bottom). I've never quite believed the existence of this film after first encountering it in The Golden Turkey Awards. But reviews (come out, come out, wherever you are, David Tipmore!) and now a production still bring us ever closer to the unholy grail - an actual print. It's gotta be out there. Check your attics (or your own selfishly guarded archive).