Kittens Grow Up

“Edie, the faded starlet of “A.” is not so much a literal figuration of a woman, but a nightmare memory come to life. Nothing in Price’s cinema is quite what it appears to be. Daytime broadcasts implode into personal confessions. Edie is not Price-in-drag, but Price living within the ethos of the woman’s pictures that his mother obsessively tuned into when Price was growing up. Audio recordings Price made with his sister Sally, re-enacting the films Streetcar Named Desire and Imitation of Life invade the film. The memories engendered on these lazy afternoon are poured into Edie’s unsteady form. “A.” took years to film and the interior locales stretch out over 3 or 4 of Price’s apartments….it was a turbulent period of production in which Price became severely depressed and suffered a near-fatal accident while filming the suicide sequence.

OVER A DECADE NOW , I FOUND A STACK OF PRINTS...3 16MM PRINTS...FROM THIS DOCUMENTARY FILM...TITLED ...'OLD BLACK AND ALIVE'...THEY WERE ALL IN MANY DIFFERENT CONDITIONS...AND FROM THE LOOKS OF THE PRINTS , YOU CAN SEE THAT TOO...A LOT OF AGE AND DECAY...VINEGAR...THAT PINKISH / PURPLE...THAT SAYS DESEASE...'DEATH OF THE RIBBON'...BUT NOT THE DEATH OF FILM...WITH THIS FOUND FOOTAGE , I FOUND MORE THAN 13 MULTIPLE REELS OF FILM...I FOUND A LOST HOPE...A LOST WISH...AND AN APOLOGY..."THE BISCUITS'...RESORECT. WHAT IS NOW DUST AND BONES...AND WITH THE COLLABORATION OF PROCESS...THROUGH FILM MAKING...WE ARCHIVE THESE LIVES...AND GIVE THESE PERSONS A SITUATION ...TO PROJECT BACK TO US...SO WE MIGHT NOT FORGET SOME OF THE GREATER THINGS LIFE AND DEATH...HOPE ..LOSS...EMPTYNESS...SORRY...REGRET...AND FORGIVENESS...LUTHER

“MEAT is viscerally consuming in its sterile, antiseptic and static giving over of the flesh. Poked, prodded, pinched and disgraced, the humiliated body is sacrificed and the metamorphosis begins … the fly becomes the shit … the maggot becomes the bone … the bone becomes the food … the food becomes shit and the body becomes the wound … the institution becomes teeth … throat and stomach.” Luther Price

An 8mm home movie inserted into a 16mm frame.

With Pop Takes, Luther Price transforms a terrific thrift-store find into a reflexive Warholian catwalk upon which twirling women and jaunty men sashay with decadent, late-seventies zeal, the film's coarse optical sound and images in negative creating a strange dissonance with the poppy polka-dotted scene.

Price created his “Biscotts/Biscuits” series by re-editing the same bits of footage from 13 prints of a 1970s documentary about a nursing home. The film itself is aged, worn and faded, doubling the existential intensity of its subject, while his use of multiple copies generates a brutal Musique concrète through variation and repetition.

A film without images — only the sounds of interviews from a documentary about domestic violence. “Shelly Winters” is a deeply unsettling experience, intensified by the incongruous joke of its title, suggesting how, even in the most abject of moments, we cling to the melodrama of our own lives.

Experimental film juxtaposing found footage scenes of military training, leisure time and gay pornography.

Price created his “Biscotts/Biscuits” series by re-editing the same bits of footage from 13 prints of a 1970s documentary about a nursing home. The film itself is aged, worn and faded, doubling the existential intensity of its subject, while his use of multiple copies generates a brutal Musique concrète through variation and repetition.