Luther Price at Cinematheque

Posted November 4, 2008 at 1:33am by Carl Martin, edited November 10, 2008 at 2:37am
In the last post, I discussed the film Flaming Striptease, notable for existing only as a spliced-together assemblage, not ever having been duplicated, never losing the status of unique artifact. This is even more essentially so of Luther Price's recent 16mm films, which San Francisco Cinematheque screens this Sunday, November 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Here is the perhaps impermanent description from their site:
The films of Luther Price (Sodom, Clown, Bottle Can...) are among the most intense and visceral in all of cinema, frequently immersing viewers in smothering domestic nightmares and presenting teetering monuments to entropy and decay, locating abject horror in the mundane, beauty in the horrific. His recent work, based largely on repetitive assemblies of scavenged 16mm strips, replete with his trademark techniques of material distress and physical violation, continues Price's obsessional exploration of identity, sexuality and the extremes of bodily experience. This program presents a selection of this recent work, all completed since 2005, including Nice Biscotts, Nice Baskets, Singing Biscotts, Dipping Sause, Silk and more.
I haven't (to my recollection) seen any of Price's films, but descriptions of his work characterize it as intensely material-oriented. If a film uses repeated footage, it is because Price had multiple copies of the source film (up to 13) to harvest it from. While optical printing could have been used to extract an arbitrary number of copies of a shot (while preserving the original, normally a laudable goal), the attendant generational loss would betray the indirectness of this approach. Film is honest that way. So it's fitting that this selfsame, splice-punctuated footage, bearing directly its scars of "material distress", will be running through the YBCA screening room's 16mm projectors Sunday.

I'll have to wait till then to see how Price develops the more content-oriented themes of his work, as mentioned in Cinematheque's description, and indeed whether I've properly understood his working method. It might even warrant further comment at that time.

Edit:
I'm back from the program, and it warrants further comments. Here is the lineup of films shown: Apparently, Singing Biscotts was playing elsewhere and unavailable, but the five films from this series that did screen (can you pick the titles out from the list?) are similar enough that some have already lost their individual identities in my memory. They all consist of footage culled from 13 copies of the same film, apparently about old folk in a rest home. (Nice Baskets seems to center more on young people in a supermarket, with a reminiscing voiceover stripped of its contextualizing power.) Same Day Nice Biscotts is organized into sections of nearly identical shots (of a blind woman being helped into a van, mostly), varied slightly in their start and end points, butted against each other so as to extend and isolate the present moment. In another film of the Biscotts series, a longer montage sequence traversing the rest home is repeated with variations. All these films seem to highlight the disorientation of old age.

In the black and white Dipping Sause, footage of a curious film in which Rube Goldberg contraptions end up interfering in various ways with a boy suspended over a tank of water alternates with negative, sometimes optically layered (not by Price's hand but rather inherent to the found footage itself) scenes from a kitchen, I think. The footage used had no intentional soundtrack, but silent 16mm film can still produce sound as its perforations are scanned, and this "motorboating" noise comprises the soundtrack of the entire film. Others of Price's films are peppered with short stretches of black or clear film that burst similarly onto the soundtrack.

Old film repurposed as sound filler (slugs used when editing magnetic sound) can be a rich source of found material. This is perhaps the purpose for which portions of a 35mm print of a Steven Seagal movie were either optically printed or physically cut down to 16mm. The resulting images of course are about 2½ times too tall for the smaller film gauge, and overlap themselves as the film is projected. In Turbulant Blue, a shootout among mannequins and industrial shelving gives rise to exploding fireballs, all folded back upon itself in a Brakhagian abstraction, the imagery itself being read as soundtrack, dotted with loud pops at the splices. I found this film, with its perfect color and frenetic imagery, to be the most visually compelling. It's part of a series including Turbulant Yellow, not shown. (Why not?--I am curious!)

The Mongrel Sister juxtaposes a woman's psychological breakdown (vaguely presented in asylum-set scenes) with nature footage featuring frogs, snakes, and deep scratches--though still just the everyday wear and tear suffered from handling by a schoolteacher, not one of Price's "trademark techniques of material distress and physical violation", I'd say. But still a somewhat meatier taste of the promised "obsessional exploration of identity, sexuality and the extremes of bodily experience".

With Silk, we take a hearty bite. This film was scheduled to precede Mongrel Sister, but started backwards and upside down and was postponed to a more fitting slot in the progression. It needed to be rewound first, having arrived "tails out"--an apt description in more than one way. The dominant footage is a man-on-man stag film featuring explicit salad-tossing and sodomy. The supporting footage appears to be outtakes of burly 1950's-era cops stalking around nonchalantly yet somehow menacingly. Bruce Conner might have made this film, only he would have added a musical soundtrack.

Up to this point, the program had suffered the defection of only one audience member (after Turbulant Blue). One more bailed during Fancy, and many who stayed squirmed uncomfortably throughout. Fancy is a surgery film. We see faces sliced up and sewn together in several places, and a big toe pretty much destroyed under the knife. The operations are intercut and jumbled temporally, often so as to create disturbing associations. One extended riff on Buñuel outdoes the master in suggesting extreme violence to an eyeball. The film's soundtrack is augmented with swishing noises, presumably a "physical violation" on Price's part. All in all, a strong finish to the show.