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Home
13min, S8, 1998-1999
Director:
Luther Price
"clothes
lines all the while remembering that car ride when they
drove over the flower patch destroyed caught a butterfly
and let it go but the wing was still in hand you're
free it dropped to the ground the sky turned people
didn't see brown dirt and ground they will go soon and
maggots will come too they forget flesh is meat i want
you dead thing i miss the way you sing make teeth in
my mouth show green and the wall was great, and solid
the floor made me fall splinter get up push forward
stiff into dark let someone else eat the pie and hold
it still for a moment the dress will keep still too
sucking baby turns his head he wants pie too moving
not really alive but give him a piece anyway"
"[Luther]
Price is an anomaly on many levels. Hešs gay but unwelcome
by the gay community, which reviled him for the alleged
homophobic excesses of Sodom. He invents alter-egos
including the short-lived "Fag" and the more enduring
"Tom Rhoads." Hešs worked as a waiter, played in bands
(and started a country band), and "committed suicide"
in one of his performance pieces via a candy overdose.
Much of his personal history is mysterious, in spite
of his frequent use of himself and his family and their
history via photos and home movies in his films. He
was nearly killed (and was heavily scarred) in a shooting
accident in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. He works in
a disreputable format, appears in various guises in
his own work from stylized, frozen-faced drag queen
to naked performance artist to clown. And he occupies
the same contested cultural space as artists like Karen
Finley in being so controversial that his work has occasioned
the immediate firing of programmers who have dared to
show it. Increasingly revered as a filmmaker, hešs also
made a strong impact in his sculpture, photography,
and performance art.
Home
Pricešs film work has an oppressive intensity, envisioning
an alienated world of often mindlessly repeated rituals
and poses that entrap and suffocate his subjects. He
sets up a constant dialogue between his compromised
victim-subjects (often himself or his own family) and
the equally compromised film stock itself. Images of
ruptured flesh and ghostly birthday parties are further
ruptured and drained of life by Pricešs torturous manipulations
of the film, which can include chemical processing,
filters, optical printing, re-photography, and even
holes punched in the frame. What emerges is Pricešs
great subject the breaches, breakdowns, and collapse
of body, family, and society, and by extension all of
life, in the face of unstoppable philosophical forces.
What makes it work is the nonstop flow of extraordinary,
unforgettable imagery." - Gary Morris, Bright
Lights Film Journal http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/29/lutherprice.html
Stay
in a Friendly Country 14min, super/single 8,1995
Director:
Paul Tarrago
Formally
eclectic but heartfelt tribute to the holiday home
movie heritage of low gauge formats.
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"Aged
15: given Super 8 camera for birthday. Camera malfunctions
with second reel. Put it to back of cupboard + forget
about it for quite a while. Aged 26: go back to college
as a postgraduate to learn the impractical art of making
films beyond one's financial means. Present day: Super
8 camera functions just fine. I've been making films
with decidedly minimal budgets for the past fourteen
years - performing all tasks (from camera operation
to sound recording to final edit) myself. I've shown
most recently at the New York Underground Film Festival,
the Lux, and De Balie in Amsterdam - a flurry of activity
saw me popping up at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Yale
Center for British Art, and the Xeno International Film
Festival (in their programme Cinema from the New Europe)
shortly before that, and I was invited to show at the
last Chicago Underground Film Festival. One of my films
also features on the recent LUX touring package Animal
Magic.
Despite the North American bias of this list I am in
fact (south) London-based, and for the past seven years
have combined my filmmaking with my activities as a
member of the Exploding Cinema - a film and video maker
run collective dedicated to originating alternative
methods of exhibition. Otherwise I spend my time - and
earn my living - in the time honoured filmmakerly tradition
with a couple of teaching contracts supplemented by
various bits of dull dull temp work inbetween.
And
what are my films like? Spanning several tomes worth
of techniques - narrative, formal and attacking and
sticking things to the film-wise - they've ranged through
travelogues, dramas involving an ice baby and a wheely
dog, document(ary), animated performances, cinematic
sketchbooks and re-constructed reveries. Realising quite
early on that economics and an inscrutable funding structure
precluded the pursuit of 'production values' and all
the trimmings of higher gauge cinematography - or at
least pushed them way down my list of priorities - my
Super 8 work has developed an aesthetic born of pragmatics
(e.g. a needed link shot of a raft ride becomes a thimble
sized plastic baby on a bed of pencils floating in a
bath overseen by cotton wool clouds). This is a visual
shorthand of sufficience (and not of kitsch).
All
the way along I've attempted to refine a method of filmmaking
that combines experimental practice with familiar forms
in an effort to engage with diverse audiences.... these
are no rarefied dips into avant garde waters, but impassioned
stabs at making that celluloid sing - a few more tugs
on the leash of film language." - Paul Tarrago,
http://bak.spc.org/maldoror/screen.html
Whole
Note 10min, S8, b/w
Director:
Saul Levine
Saul
Levine has been making films since 1964. He works
in Regular 8, Super 8. 16MM, and DV. His works have
been shown on every contintent except Antarctica.
Saul has been a film professor since 1968 and teaching
at Mass College of Arts for the last 22 years.
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