As an echo to Luther Price: New Utopia and Light Fracture (presented Sunday, March 24 at CounterPulse) and in celebration of the life of filmmaker Luther Price, Cinematheque proudly presents this rare screening of early works by the artist’s pre-Price avatar Tom Rhoads.
“I actually changed my name to Luther Price [in 1987] because I couldn’t make the film [Sodom] under the previous name. He was much too innocent to make films like Sodom. Tom Rhoads, he made films about birthday cakes and mothers. Luther was thinking about other things. He had a different cake in mind.”*
In 1985, following a near-fatal shooting suffered in Nicaragua in 1985, the artist later known as Luther Price (and previously known by myriad appellations, including LA, Brigk Athey, Laija Brie and others) suspended his physically-demanding sculptural/installation practice and turned to filmmaking, adopting the persona Tom Rhoads. Just as obsessive and fastidious as Price would later be, Rhoads immediately dove deeply into Super-8 filmmaking, creating elaborate works which radically extrapolate on home movie aesthetics while enacting primal domestic psychodramas and complex expressions of familial portraiture and which assail audiences with assaultive walls of mid-century American kitsch, aggressive audio collage and gender-confounding drag performance. Screening to include Green and Warm Broth (both 1988, both screened in Super-8mm) and the confounding late-period Price work, Dipping Sause (2005), a fetishistic meditation on the adversities of childhood in a godlessly mechanistic yet absurdly mocking and humiliating universe. (Steve Polta)
*Luther Price: Lecture given at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, November 12, 2012. Cited by Tanner Tafelski: “An Experimental Filmmaker’s On-Screen Exorcisms.“
SCREENING:
Dipping Sause (2005) by Luther Price; 16mm screened as digital video, b&w, sound, 7 minutes Warm Broth (1988) by Tom Rhoads; Super-8mm, color, sound, 36 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema Green (1988) by Tom Rhoads; Super-8mm, color, sound, 37 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
Event tickets here
