Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] | Warm Broth / 1987-1988

home sweet home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] Warm Broth / 1987-1988

 

As David Hudson reminds us, artist Carolee Schneemann once described watching Rhoads/Price’s Warm Broth as “an indelible experience. That really is that apposite word when describing Luther’s movies—indelible. They stay with you, like a childhood memory, or a scar.” Indeed, how can such a movie not stay with you when for 35 some minutes a mechanical doll that seems to be losing power but still keeps going repeating over and over four major sentences that represent a nightmare of the heterosexual world in which every mother must constantly endure: “Tell me a secret,” “Hold me tight,” “Give me a kiss,” along with an occasional “We love you mommy.”?

     The poor harried mother of Rhoads’ work, played mostly by the director in drag, spends the largest part of the movie hanging out clothing on a clothes line whose endposts look more like a cross than supports, surely one of the numerous crosses she must daily bear, along with peeling potatoes for dinner, which, as Hudson reminds us, echoes Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Her ordeals are endlessly repetitive just as the doll’s cries. As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis observes, “It is a film without pity.” Certainly, it is a relentless demand for love that is rarely satisfied despite all the symbols of joy and satisfaction the film shows us.

 

    The suburban world of Warm Broth, however, is not only a horror film for the mother at the center of this piece but for young gay boys and lesbian girls growing up in the endless heterosexual environment of room after room of floral wallpaper, bedding, and coverlets, of wrapped candies in yellow cellophane, of pretty decorative table arrangements, and rows and rows of other lifeless and seemingly rotting dolls—as the Light Cone description put it, a bit like a “descent into hell in your grandparents’ house.”

     Only this is the home of two children, a boy and a girl who must both endure the rigid gender roles embraced by the secretive father and mother, who twice during the half-hour enliven the viewer’s vision just for a second with an image of raw sex. Otherwise, it is an endless depiction of sweetness that surely might kill anyone trying to survive this distracted dream just as the overdose of candy killed one of Price’s pseudonyms in an early performance.

    The doll, aged since its original creation, has a voice so irritating and difficult to properly hear that I was certain for the first five or ten minutes of the film that I was hearing the words, despite my incredulousness: “hetero-secrets,” “hetero-songs,” “hetero-flowers,” interspersed with the “We love yous.” Obviously, no doll might be programmed to say such things, I realized, and it was just my brain orally expressing the experience I was witnessing with my eyes. It was, in fact, a variation of what all young children must endure in suburban American homes which celebrate the kitsch of normality.

 

  As a collection of images alone, it almost makes you want to vomit; as Hudson hints: “This is a ruthless film, imbued with a sense of decay and horror” for both the mother and her children, the father—except in a few frames, being notably absent.

Los Angeles, March 11, 2023 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023

 

Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] | Green / 1988

poisoned

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] Green / 1988

 

This 36-minute film was inspired by the suicide of his mother’s sister Sally, which, as I mention above, occurred the day he was born. As he grew up, accordingly, he came to believe that he was the reincarnation of his own aunt. And like many a young adult, he imagined he would die early, at the age of 23, joining her just as he was joined to her spiritually since birth.

     In a highly poetic fragmentary narrative, the director describes the film in a preface on Light Cone’s site:

 

“Filled with poison, all the veins infested … Question of time … The image of the ghost haunts my breath, gnaws my mind. I see her beautiful face and wonder if she was my mother. I loved her and she can see me. I thought she was really in me. I thought I was her. My life would end at twenty-three and we would be together. There would be no sadness. Everyone would know that she was coming for me. But I lived. I was not supposed to die at that time. It was his way of telling me to stop joining my mother. Now they are together and I am the ghost. 37 years old, there is something about this number. I will die then and I will remember this necklace of green emeralds at my mother’s funeral. And that’s when I’ll realize why I lived.

     The images that haunt my memories roam the life next to me, brushing my breathing body, veiling my vision, slowing down my pace, devouring my thoughts. I am never alone. In fusion, I prevent myself from loneliness and all rest, living for two, becoming the other. Am I real?”

     Making the film in 1988, moreover, the director could not have but been thinking of the AIDS

epidemic, and throughout the film he not only focuses on the young male of this film, his face covered with pustules, but flashes from time-to-time to various pathological slides of what appear to be skin lesions similar to Kaposi sarcoma.

     Death, in fact, is clearly the subject of this work and appears in various forms, beginning with the first image of the film, a dead starling laid out on the pavement as we hear a vinyl record playing “Let There Be Love,” sung in a scratchy rendition by Pearl Bailey, followed by various radio performances and local broadcasts from the past. We see what appears to be his mother dressed in green—a highly intuitive scene since after his mother died years later, she asked to be buried in the same color of a dress. Her image is lovely and endearing.

      But other women, versions of her performed by the director in drag are not so charming, one with a huge and not very lovely overbite who seems frozen in time as the ice cream cone melts in her hands without her being able to move. Another woman, with a purple-green wig seems caught in smile of rictus, unable to close her mouth. In short none of these women seem able to provide help or even vocal support to the young man who appears sometimes walking alone, at other times, wearing glasses pondering his fate, and who finally appears to take up the center of the work by swallowing, one by one, a vast number of pills spread out across a table with a flask of gin, a can of beer, and a glass of water to help him get them down.

     When he finally finishes the last pill, even seeking for more hiding among the table’s objects, the images fall out of focus, as we observe him briefly in fading white light, first sitting on and then climbing into a bed. Momentarily images appear in full focus, the mother in a green emerald necklace or holding out a birthday cake before they again blur and disappear as the screen is transformed into a series of moths smashing themselves against the frames of the film itself, signifying the decay of the picture itself as evidence of the young man’s death by suicide, occasioned evidently because he has been affected by the disease, if not AIDS, an infection just as deadly.

      One might describe this film as a horrifying fantasy tied up with the women of his childhood whom he loved but who could not fully help him any longer as he grew into a gay man, separating himself from their world.

      In this work, everyone is indeed “poisoned,” unable to behave in the manner that he remembers his mother in her glorious youth, filled with smiling beauty. The reincarnations of her, performed by himself, are cruel reminders that his mother can no longer serve him as she did when he was a child.

     As critic Gary Morris observes in his Bright Lights Film Journal essay, the images are “at once campy and poignant,” the toothful harridan attempting to represent the past, transfixed by that past itself so fully that she’s unable to even lick at the pleasures of the long-ago ice cream cone as it melts over her fingers. The open smile of the face of the other woman is not of joy but is frozen there in time, becoming something of horror instead of delight.

     Reality for this storyteller can only exist when can rid himself of his overwhelming mother-dominated history.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).

   

Douglas Messerli | Families Aren't Saints: Three Early Films by Luther Price / 2023 [essay]

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.”

    We do know that he was born In Marlborough, Massachusetts on January 26, 1962, the day his aunt Sally committed suicide, and event that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

     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).

Sergei Paradjanov and Dodo Abashidze | Ashug-Karibi (Ashik Kerib) / 1988

1001 days on the road

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gia Badridze (scenario, based on a story by Mikhail Lermontov), Sergei Paradjanov and Dodo Abashidze (directors) Ashug-Karibi (Ashik Kerib) / 1988

 

Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov’s last film, Ashik Kerib, is one of his most joyous films and is representative of his directorial style.

     The story, based on an Azerbaijani folk tale, is an utterly simple one. A young man, Ashik Kerib (Yuri Mgoyan) is determined to marry his beloved, Magal (Sofiko Chiaureli). The man and his mother celebrate the potential betrothal with a ritual bath, flower petals and pomegranates (all standard emblems in Paradjanov’s work), while the young couple wile away the time, like any young couple, counting the petals, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Soon after he and the mother meet with the girl’s father, bearing him a basket of flowers. Upon receiving the itinerant young man, however, the father is outraged. Who can dare to receive the hand of his “daughter from heaven” with a basket of flowers instead of money. The vagabond is cast from his house, while Magal swears she will wait 1001 days for Ashik’s return as he begins the long voyage in search of his fortune.

    Strangely, little of his presumed adventures are represented in Paradjanov’s film.  His rival for Magal, Kushud-Bek tricks him as he attempts to cross a river, stealing his clothing and returning home to declare Ashik dead, announcing his intentions to marry Magul.

     Old woman retrieves Ashik’s lute from the river and return it to him. Another minstrel, now an old man, dying in his home town, receives Ashik’s music and attentions, as the young man returns him to the road (“minstrel’s must die on the road,” declares the young man) where numerous camels are passing; the old man dies as Ashik pours pomegranate juice over his lips and buries him with the small treasures tossed to the minstrels from the caravan.

     Guardian angels, both blowing upon conch shells summon him to play at a wedding for the blind—at which he joyfully performs—and, soon after, call him to the wedding of the deaf and dumb—at which he again joyfully sings.

     At another point he meets up with a wild band of thickly mustachioed men; Ashik himself steals a man’s mustache and beard (glued on his face) and enters the house wherein the chief’s harem sits shooting machine guns. When commanded to perform, he finds himself unable to play and is sentenced to be fed to the lion, a large papier-mache beast with a spinning head. The evening before, however, he spends in the harem, enjoying their sexual pleasures.

      Escaping doom, Ashik is given a magic steed to ride through the skies, arriving back in his hometown in time for the 1001st day! He still has no money but wins the bride’s hand by magically returning his mother’s eyesight with the sweat of his stead.

      The brief story I have recounted, however, can hardly give one of sense of the wonderment of Paradjanov’s work. For, as in his earlier masterwork, The Color of Pomegranates, Paradjanov reveals these brief adventures through a long series of tableaux vivants, brightly colored ‘scenes” that portray everything from beautifully carved Azerbaijani bowls and chalices and other vessels, paintings, rugs, mosaic tiles, holy books, and drawings, as well as his highly and often outrageously costumed characters. Although these often hint at original Azerbaijani dress, they are, at heart, almost campy theatrical dresses in which the characters, also highly painted, dance, gesture, and gesticulate in a manner related to Kabuki theater, gay camp comedy, and puppetry. Most often filmed head-on, Paradjanov’s frames represent a kind of delightful, child-like story-telling that makes its own artifice absolutely apparent. And while these iconic objects and costumes often make reference to the culture, they are very seldom “symbolic” in the way Andrei Tarkovsky’s—Paradjanov’s close friend to whom this film is dedicated—natural images, artworks, and household possessions are. Entering a Paradjanov scene is more like drifting through the topsy-turvy world of Gilbert and Sullivan, where cultures and their stories are lovingly revealed while simultaneously being satirized.

     Only Paradjanov, who spent five years in Soviet prisons, tried for both his art and his homosexuality, could have created these stunning pastiches—dark worlds with glittering jewels at their heart—and there is nothing like his films anywhere else. Lionized in France and elsewhere in Europe, little is known about this great director in the US. I can only hope that with time that utterly changes for it is American audiences who are missing all the fun.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).

 

 

 

Bar Friedman | Homo Sapiens / 2019

passing the exam

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bar Friedman (screenwriter and director) Homo Sapiens / 2019 [20 minutes]

 

Slow and rather uncomprehending students Bar (Bar Friedman) and Meni (Meni Gross) are attending a classroom lecture, but neither of them can even slightly discern what the professor is talking about. All they seem interested in is the upcoming preview of their favorite franchise move, “Manlyman,” obviously a satirical dig at all the tough heterosexual macho films that dominate the movie theaters these days.

     Yair (Yair Israel) is an outstanding student, although I already question some of his comments concerning “racial theories.” But we have to ignore that, apparently, since Meni soon after observes to Bar, the Yair is a homosexual.

     Bar does wonder how he friend might be able to recognize him as one, but again that question is shelved in this rather negligible comic work, by the fact that Bar is afraid he might fail the course and because he lives nearby asks to study with him so that he might pass and enjoy “Manlyman” without remorse.

     Yair, who clearly is just happy that someone is friendly to him, readily agrees, particularly since they both live in Netanya. Just to be sure that Yair knows, however, that he’s not interested in sex, he makes it clear that he’s not gay.

    When Yair wonders why he might be telling him this, Bar relates it to the possibility of making a “move on a girl,” Yair, rightfully wondering whether the rather ignorant boy has ever made “a move” on anyone.

      Bar can only equate his comments to things he’s seen in the movies.

     But he doesn’t stop there, as Bar equates it to the attraction that some straight men have to lesbians, with Yair asking whether he himself has ever been attracted to a lesbian. Of course, we recognize Bar’s full knowledge of human relationships is basically based on the “Manlyman” kind of movies of which he is so fond.

      What Bar doesn’t know is that Yair also studies with the good-looking Amir (Amir Keren)  

     Poor dumb Bar can’t even imagine that since he is not attracted to boys how he might know that Amir is good looking, as if he were blind as well as ignorant.

      As if he needs to prove his ignorance, Bar wonders if Martin Luther wasn’t the one involved with the revolution of the negroes. He perceives the phrase “Homo sapiens” to have something with gay people with even realizing that he is one. The problem with this short film quickly becomes believability.

     Strangely enough, when Amir does show up, even Bar, perhaps for the first time in his life, sees just how handsome the man is. He has begun, just a little, to see things from a gay man’s eyes. Bar asks perhaps his first gay question: “If I am gay can I be attracted to myself?” It is, obviously, the question gays have to ask themselves, given the myth of Narcisus.

      The next day Bar is back with his friend Meni attending a movie preview of “Batman vs. Dracula,” not as good as “Manlyman,” obviously, but worth the visit. There he encounters, outside the theater, two men kissing one another. Bar is more than intrigued. Suddenly the manager of the movie sends the two men away for their public display, and our poor dumb hero is more than ever confused. He startled that they were sent away just because they were gay. And suddenly he wonders what they might do about the injustice, and muses even the fact that the two of them never have done anything about any social matter.

      It appears that our backward student is learning faster that his mind can ever assimilate what he is perceiving about the world. Entering the theater, he suddenly confronts the ticket taker, telling him that he should be ashamed of behaving that way in 2019. “How can you dare not let people into the movies just because you decided, you have some stupid opinion?” People behind him want to know what’s going on, and suddenly, again for the first time in his life, Bar turns and speaks out in a public matter explaining what truly is going on. “What’s going on is something I’m so embarrassed to tell. This man doesn’t let people into the movies solely on the basis of their sexual identity.” The people wonder why he has let his “partner” in and not him. And now, even more confused, Bar makes a public apologia for the way we treat homosexuals. It is a slightly amazing transition in his whole behavior that is more than touching, despite the film’s comic intent. And running forward to take one of the gay man’s hand, Bar goes even further, proclaiming “This homo is much more of a person than you are.”

     Yet the reality is far different from what Bar can imagine. The ticket manager speaks out: “This homo has been the love of my life for the past five years. And this homo left me for that son of a bitch,” he screams pointing at the man who whom he friend had been kissing. They have come to show off their love in front of him, and he has reacted in a personal manner that Bar could simply not comprehend given his imaginary “Manlyman” life with his friend Meni. Meni pulls his friend away, suggesting it was a mistake for them to attend the film as they hurry off.

     When Bar and Yair get together to study together again, Bar goes on about the difficulty he has with trying to find a woman, suggesting that it is so much easier with men. Yair reminds him that they are there to study. Suddenly Bar makes a connection: if Darwin is about the survival of the fittest, how can gays who cannot reproduce survive? Another important question, clearly, for gay men.

     Yair answers in a most curious and clearly sarcastic way, claiming that he’s surprised that Bar has not heard that homosexuals are the fittest. Finally, Yair breaks down into a laugh, one of the few moments where he reveals he is not just about his studies, and an endearing moment for both of them. Clearly there is nothing better to break down ignorance and prejudice that simply sharing time with a gay friend.

      Finally, their studies over, Bar thanks is new friend for helping him and hopes that they get to know one another better. He really feels like he has learned something. We never experience what he has come to know about history for the course he is taking, but we do he has learned something about interpersonal relationships that we will never forget.

    After the exam Meri joins him, asking a rather homophobic question: “Who gave you all the answers, that homo?” as Bar looks over to see the handsome Amir having a conversation nearby with Yair.

    Now they can celebrate, suggests Meni, by seeing the newest installment of their favorite movie together.

     But something has changed. Bar is tired, so he claims, after the exam and is ready to pass on the movie. “It’s not a movie,” insists Meni, “it is Manlyman, ahhhh!” as he imitates their macho cry. 

      It’s means perhaps a true closure of Bar’s and Meni’s relationship as the latter walks off disgusted.

     Bar moves toward Yair, inviting him out to celebrate after the exams. Yair agrees, but soon after a new figure, Michael (Ben Manofla), obviously Yair’s boyfriend joins them, Bar a bit confused by the new addition to his growing acquaintances.

    Bar tries to bow out, suggesting that actually he is planning to go to the movie; but they are perfectly willing to join him. He tries to explain about his hetero obsession, but they simply describe it as something they’re interested in as well, “men in underwear.”

      He walks off. Michael describing him as perhaps a little homophobic. But that is not Bar’s problem. He has formed an attachment with Yair, and he realizes that it is not a world he can fully enter as a straight man.

      This time he is hailed by the ticket taker he formerly assaulted who compliments him on his taste for “Manlyman,” introducing himself as Roei (Gary Babadjanov). Roei now expresses his appreciation how Bar had previously stood up for the community and invites him to meet with him later. But now Bar can only try to mutter something about his own sexuality, but immediately noticing the open smile of Roei has no choice, ultimately, but to agree to a meet-up. Suddenly looking around the theater Bar notices straight couples, young lesbian girls, even a polyamorous trio, all attending the same movie, joining them with a new sense of liberation.

     If this Israeli film asks you to leave reality behind you, the engaging character Bar, nonetheless, has been transformed, and what a lovely journey that has been, although it is hard to know where it might lead him.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).