Luther Price: The Body Alone

Luther Price is one of the most prolific and unique film-makers in the world today. With films like A and Run he has won the respect of directors ranging from Kurt Kren and Stan Brakhage to Todd Haynes. And screenings of films like Me Gut No Dog Dog have led to the immediate firing of film programmers. Despite an increasing concentration of partial retrospectives and gallery screenings, the notoriety of his 1990 film Sodom, and his perilous live performances, most of the body and range of his work is relatively unknown, particularly in Europe. In a little over ten years time he has migrated through two personae and completed close to 50 highly wrought films exclusively in Super8. He reworks his films so obsessively that some films have physically defied being printed and others have been revised into multiple versions. His cinema stops at nothing in order to arrive at a deformed and transfiguring beauty.
Initiated often from ‘found’ footage that deals with the body ‘in extremis’, be it ‘porno’ or surgery documentation or from documentation of his own performances, Price wounds and repairs his films with splices that scar across the images, filling the film strip with dislocated images. This frequent treatment of the film strip (as seen in Sodom, Bottle Can, Meat, A, Jellyfish Sandwich and Me Gut No Dog Dog, to different degrees) shows an aggressively ecstatic seizing of the material/chemical epidermis subjecting it to surgical butchery and a form of celluloid sculpting. Anomalous but canny analogies prevail in the eruptive superimpositions of colliding images and invaded spaces.
Price’s work combines unflinching truthfulness with melodramatic flamboyance and transgressive excess. His appetite for permutation and breakage and tireless sing-song repetitions open into unexpected places. The film can be a commemorative memory ribbon where childhood experience and misperception can be evoked. Visceral mutability, sexual transformation, transitive genders – both the banal and impermissible are explored. But in the end what is always returned to is what Samuel Beckett has defined as the ultimate measuring stick: the body alone.