families aren’t saints: three early films by luther price
by Douglas Messerli
The filmmaker who was best known as Luther
Price, died on June 13, 2020 at the age of 58. His real name is unknown or at
least unrevealed in the several essays and commentaries I have read about him.
Commentator Ed Halter suggests that he purposely keeps it secret, “like a
fairy-tale character would,” since his work is “rooted profoundly in the story
of family and the traumatic events of his personal history.”
In
an interview with Tara Merenda Nelson in October 16, 2012, Price responded to a
question about his numerous personas:
“Tom Rhoads is a good place to start. There
were nicknames and other names before that, and the names changed because of
situations that might have occurred in my life. I was really only FAG for one
night. But then my friends started yelling across the bar "FAG! FAG!"
and I was like, "this isn't working." Brigk was a persona coming out
of my injuries in Nicaragua, and the end of one part of my life that was very
sculptural, and moving into film. After my accident, I became very introspective,
and I felt I needed to investigate something other than social issues. I needed
to really go back into my own self and investigate my own childhood, my past,
where I grew up, my roots.”
He
received his BFA in Sculpture and Media/Performing arts from the Massachusetts
College of Art and Design, where he studied with Saul Levine. Beginning in the
1980s he took on various different pseudonyms, including Brigk Aethy, Fag, and
Tom Rhoads, before finally killing himself via a performance work by eating too
many candies, taking on the name Luther Price for one of his most controversial
works, Sodom (1989–1994), which he began as Tom Rhoads, but finished as
Price.
His
experimental film work, highly controversial, has been screened widely in the
US and Europe in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, and the San Francisco Cinematheque, but because it exists often
in simply one print—something forced upon him by various technicians’ refusal
to produce what they described as pornographic and disturbing imagery—his work
is difficult to see without traveling. The French distributor Light Cone,
however, has streamed some of his early works on line, including the three
represented in this essay.
Price taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and at the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts,” a course of “Hand-made Films,”
being of particular interest to students.
Although, Price is generally described as a gay filmmaker, works such as
Sodom were highly controversial in the LGBTQ community when they first
appeared because of their seemingly homophobic viewpoint—something with which
you will note below; I strongly disagree. Using found footage, pornography,
surgical footage, and psychodramatic performances, with the director often
himself playing roles in drag and other costumes, particularly that of the
clown, Price’s work often challenges the viewer’s assumptions without providing
easy answers, but generally they hold no particular point of view, merely
reflecting situations which are sometimes generated by those outside the gay
community in their negative judgments of it, particularly in the time of AIDS
or the LGBTQ’s incursion into the public consciousness. What is perhaps most
notable about Price’s works is that they present attitudes toward homosexuality
that do always easily embrace gay behavior. These views, not necessarily those
of the creator, must be reckoned with in order for gays to be fully understood
by the society at large, including aspects of gay behavior that continue to
terrify and frighten the heterosexual world. The visions of the gay boys and
adults in Price’s works, accordingly, are often a result of those forces, and
need to be comprehended within that context. And in that sense his works are
challenging and not always simply endorsements of popular LGBTQ+ sentiments.
His films, moreover, often involve a great deal of irony and humor which might
be missed by the casual viewer—the kind of viewer for which his slowly moving
and repetitive films are not easily endured.
Price has made dozens of short films, some of which have been seen by
only a few viewers, and not all of them are sexual or homosexual in subject
matter, since his works often deal with the idea of experimentation itself.
Indeed, before his death Price had been hand-crafting individual 35mm slides
which he showed through slide projectors, stunning images seemingly without
narrative content.
The films I discuss here are his three of his earliest works, Green (1988),
Warm Broth (1987-1988), and the notorious Sodom, begun in 1988,
but released after several transformations, including the director’s persona,
in 1989. I myself have reworked the last essay, which I first wrote shortly
after Price’s death.
I
should add that since Price is often the creator, director, and performer is
these works, even performing as an actor upon the celluloid itself, scratching
and punching holes in the film, I have simply listed his persona in each case
without assigning any particular role other than suggesting that presence of
the pseudonym behind these works.
Los Angeles, March 13, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March
2023).
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