Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

In 2015, the Harvard Film Archive hosted The World Made Flesh and Freed by Song and Sadness, three evenings of screenings and conversations with Luther Price. This is the audio recording of the introduction and discussion from the first program on January 31, 2015. Also participating are HFA Director Haden Guest and curator/critic Ed Halter.

Haden Guest  0:30  

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest, I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. What a night. What a crowd. Thank you all for being here for and recognizing the importance of tonight and of this weekend, in which we celebrate the work of a truly protean and extraordinary artist, Luther Price, who we're very proud to call a local artist. He is in fact, one of the central figures of a really vibrant, dynamic, experimental, and avant garde scene which has long flourished in the Cambridge and Boston area, and I think remains under appreciated. Luther Price is best known as a filmmaker, and yet, his work as a sculptor, as a performance artist is equally strong and remarkable and has recently been rediscovered in a number of very important shows. 

This weekend, we're going to be focusing on a really wide-ranging and very exciting archaeology of sorts of Luther Price’s cinematic imagination. Here in this theater, we're going to be seeing three programs which range from separate work from the 1980s, when he began as a filmmaker through to more recent 16 millimeter films. Upstairs in the lobby of the Carpenter Center, you'll be able to see through tomorrow night, the end of a really mesmerizing show of Luther Price’s, Light Slides, 35 millimeter slides, which he often calls his static films. 

Luther Price began in the field of sculpture and performance. He received an MFA from the Massachusetts College of the Arts and I know we have many students and faculty from MassArt and to you we give a very special welcome tonight. And in truth we can see, I think, that as we look at these films, that Luther Price is truly multimedia artist, I think, in the truest purest sense in that his films and his art practice, reaches across different media, and is very much about the sort of dialogue between the sculptural and the cinematic, between performance and cinema. And I think that it's understanding and seeing these different aspects of his work that we really appreciate the richness of his really singular vision as a filmmaker. We're going to be seeing tonight four Super 8 films, and then a 16 millimeter film. 

And joining us, we have Ed Halter, who is a film curator. He's co-founder of Light Industry, a really remarkable microcinema based in Brooklyn. He's also a faculty member at Bard where he is now critic-in-residence. And then tomorrow night, we're going to be seeing another program focused on films very much about family. This is a very intimate and emotionally potent body of work that is really at the center of Luther Price’s cinema. And on Monday, we're going to be seeing a really pyrotechnical group of films, which ranges wide across Price’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Luther Price is with us tonight, and he'll be with us throughout this weekend to speak about his films and to answer any questions you have. 

I want to thank James Vorhees. He's the recently appointed Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and he also organized the show upstairs in the lobby. There'll be a reception afterwards and you're all welcome to attend and to talk about this body of work, which I don't think really has been seen in such a wide range in a very long time and appreciated like this. Please turn off any cell phones and electronic devices that you have. And now please join me in welcoming Luther Price. 

[APPLAUSE]

Luther Price  5:15  

Thank you Haden and thank you for inviting me here. I think the last time I showed here was 1995. Right? And I got someone fired. Right? Bruce Posner. So we're in good hands tonight, I think. [LAUGHTER] I'm older. I just had my birthday. I just turned fifty-three. And anyway, I'm so excited to work with you and I really respect you so much for re-envisioning my work and we'll have a chance to sit down later with Ed and I tonight and hopefully have a conversation. So thank you so much, especially with all this weather. I cannot believe that you came out. I'd be home lounging with my cats myself. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  6:31  

And now Haden Guest, Ed Halter and Luther Price.

Haden Guest  6:36  

Projecting super eight is not easy and when it is married with a live soundtrack on cassette, it's even more difficult. I want to thank our projectionist. John Quackenbush, an artist in his own right. [APPLAUSE] And now, please join me in welcoming Ed Halter and Luther Price. [APPLAUSE]

Ed Halter  7:13  

Haden had such a great introduction for you. And I really liked the way that he said that your work is in the middle of or in the dialogue between performance, cinema, and sculpture. And I'm wondering for you, which of those comes first? Is there something that's primary for you one of those forms that then the others grow out of? Or how does that work for you?

Luther Price  7:35  

No, it’s sculpture. It's all about tactile. It’s physical. You know, otherwise, I'd be working. I've avoided the digital video. I worked in video. And I just, I just couldn't. I just wanted to rip the tape out of the cartridge. And I did some naughty things, which I would be arrested for now. They used to rent films from Blockbuster and re-edit them. [LAUGHTER] And imagine if you did that now, right?

Ed Halter  8:16  

How would you do that now, Luther? There's no more video stores! [LAUGHS]

Luther Price  8:18  

Well, right, thank goodness. But no, it's all about being physical. Tape and glue. It's always been about tape and glue. I told you once my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said “tape.” And of course my father bought me a case of tape from Building 19 which is a surplus place in Lynn, it’s like damaged goods. So, you know, we've all gotten tape, especially packing tape or something like that, where we start to peel it and then it just sort of like starts to shred, and then years scraping we had it with your fingernails. That's what I got. But now that I'm a grown up, and I have my own money, I buy nice tape, good tape, but I still want tape for Christmas and my birthday. And glue!

Ed Halter  9:24  

Well, you're still using the tape bubble or the air bubble as a primary formal element in the slides upstairs. 

Luther Price  9:31  

When you think about Run—which is the film with the pigeons—I didn't need to use all that tape. I just became obsessed with the power lines the pigeons were sitting on and marking that with tape. So pretty much every single frame was covered except there's a couple of sections that weren't. And it wasn't necessary. I only needed tape to splice, right? No, I needed for that texture and it became a monster, of course. Who printed that film? Oh, yeah. Super 8 Sound. Back when we had– There was such a, you know, you don't remember what you miss until it's gone. But they were amazing. You know, they would just understand that, you know, I wasn't some crazy person giving them this film.

Ed Halter  10:32  

This was the Boston area couple right? that ran…

Luther Price

No, not Brodsky and Treadway. But they also are wonderful. Super 8 Sound! And then they went out to California.

Ed Halter  10:41  

You know, it's funny, though, I mean, thinking about twenty years ago. I mean, that controversy that happened here—not to get back to it again. Don't fire Haden, please. He's awesome. Well, it was controversy about the content of a film, right? Content that, as far as I can tell, is not radically different from some of the content that we saw tonight. But I think it's interesting that twenty years later, you know, we really don't care about the content as much anymore. I mean, we do care, but we're not in an uproar about it. But what I find interesting is that back then, people talked about your work much more in terms of its content, that it was shocking, that you were performing in it, that it was gender-bending, or whatever. But over time, you've become really considered much more of a formalist artist, like people pay attention to a form so much more now, to the point that now I think there's a whole generation of people who are accounting your work for the first time now. And they're seeing primarily the slides like upstairs, which are almost some of them are almost completely abstract. And the hand-painted films like the one we saw last, again, many of them, this one even has a little more imagery, representational imagery, than we'd expect in these. So what do you think about that shift that's happened in your work?

Luther Price  11:52  

Well, you know, I imagine if I was making the same films, right? No, I take rests, and I take big jumps. Which is a good thing, you know, but I can't imagine if I stayed on a single path, which was very autobiographical. And I think I did come to an end. I think one of the reasons why I chose to work in Super 8 or film… Well, Super 8, say, because most of my work was used in that medium and it was different from say if I chose 16 back in the 80s, 16 is different to me now. I treat 16 like Super 8.

Ed Halter  12:34  

What does that mean to people? I mean, what does that mean for you to say you treat 16 like Super 8?

Luther Price  12:38  

It's intimate. I keep it intimate. I modified Regular 8 Moviolas so it stays really close to me. And, you know, it's all so close, it feels like Super 8 except, you know, my eyesight is gone now. So I need the bigger frame. I blew my eyes from looking through a loop for years, you know? I’m blind. I can't read a menu, that's for sure. Uh, but what were you saying?

Ed Halter  13:10  

The shift in your work over the years. You know, related to that, though, is for the people who don't see your work a lot. You’re showing films in the series with Haden that you've not ever shown, like what a couple of the films here are extremely rare for you to pull out and show like Yellow Goodbye and House are not films that you really show that often.

Luther Price 13:28  

Well, Haden found them. You know, my work is scattered around. Patrick Friel from Chicago Filmmakers asked me, I think, two years ago, if there might be something obscure of mine, and I said, “Well, I have a whole suitcase that I can send you.” There might be some things that I've never shown even, you know, and, I said, “What I'll do is I'll check out the suitcase and maybe see if everything's fine for projection, projection ready.” I opened up the suitcase and I literally felt like I was being eaten alive, like I was dying, not from the mold from the suitcase. [LAUGHTER] But it was just the thought of even picking up these reels and going back to the 80s? Even just to check the leader, I was like Patrick, “I'm sorry, I can't even do it.” I can't go backwards. It's taken me so long to be where I am in the present. And I just am really grateful for that. I want to live in the present and the future. You know, I couldn't go back. So I said, “Well, I'm just going to send you the suitcase.” And we had a little shout out there. And he's hung on to the films. There's quite a bit. Things that have never been screened, ever. You know, very autobiographical. And you got some of these from him. But he did a good job. I'm really pleased with tonight. 

But I had to escape myself. I remember... when was it? Yeah, right after my mother died, I think, I stopped writing in my journals. I remember after my mother died, I was on the train on my way to Filene’s to meet my friend, and we were going to pick out an emerald green gown for her to be buried in, and I knew it had to be emerald green, because it always had to be, remember? I mean, a lot of my films predict things, and I knew. And she even started talking about the emerald green dress like in the hospital. And I was like, “Oh, my God, you're freaking me out!” This was charted from the day I was born. It was all there. It's crazy. It's all mapped out. And so I remember writing in my journal, about the experience of, you know, my mother's last hours, and I just stopped dead in my tracks. And I realized I can't do this anymore. I can't relive this. I don't want to. And I put down my camera, I stopped filming. And I thought, well, you know, it's terrible. I'm in a horrible position here. Because I love working in film. It's helped me survive in many ways. But I can't do it anymore. Because I keep talking about awful things. I was just incredibly sad. I was like, I don't want this. But I found that I could work in found footage and still, you know, investigate certain things without it really penetrating me personally. But I think you know, god, it's been a while. But I think I you know, if I have the guts, I think I could pick up the camera... But then I'll end up like making a clown film with me jerking off. You know it, right? That's the first– or I will like, you know, have an ice cream cone covered in maggots or something. I already know what I'm going to do.

Ed Halter  17:50  

But you've been throwing yourself into the slide work immensely, though. How many slides? Upstairs, how many slides are we looking at?

Luther Price  17:56  

Well, it switches out twice, it can switch out twice. So each carousel is six projections, and each carousel holds eighty slides

Ed Halter  18:06  

And each slide is a unique object, right? I mean each one is… You make each one almost like a tiny painting or tiny sculpture unto itself.

Luther Price  18:13  

Yeah, they're all original. And I can get to sit, you know, in a different way. It's a different way of working still, it's like the cousin of film. It's in the film family. But I get to work in a different way and really focus on one frame at a time and a composition. But then when I do put the carousels together, I'm really thinking of them as a, you know, as a one-piece, you know, choreographed. So for instance, in this case, I have timing off and the timing is different. So usually I go for about seven.... It works out that one carousel rotates about seven minutes, more like my average 16 millimeter film, but I kind of wanted these to dance a little bit. But even the slide work is changing. Because in the past two years, I think the past two years…. It's funny how you forget because you just get involved. But, I just became, you know, not obsessed, but just involved in Light Fractures. So it's the largest body of work I think I've ever made. Ever. Well, it is. Because well, there’s 1000s of slides, you know, and I'm trying to organize them into carousels. So this was good for me because these are all set. Do they feel set to you? Well, I'm not going to change them. I'm trying to get them to the point where I sit down and get them into carousels, do my editing process which is always– So I have all these outtake slides. They aren't trashed slides, but they just say something different, or, you know, like there’s muted blue slides, and there's different magenta slides, something that feels different. But I'm still going through that process. So I'm organizing them, and some of them are different formats. But, I'm moving on to another set of slides and a new body of work in 16.

Ed Halter  20:28  

Are you going to be going back to your older work in that slide-making or the new 16 work as well?

Luther Price  20:33  

I'm doing both. I’m trying to do both. You know, the thing is, is that I'm like a factory worker, because I acquired about, I don't know, maybe sixty or seventy found footage films. And you know, instead of getting really excited, and you know, of course, I'm excited. Instead of taking one and just right away starting to make a film out of it, I couldn't do that. Right now, the whole process, I think, it started in July. I was like okay, take a break from the slides for a bit. Well, I kind of finished up some work on the slides, and then I dedicated... just to dissect all of this footage. And now everything is in reels. And there's a whole trunk full of footage that is pretty much... I don't care, it can go into the ground and become garden films and rot. But that's a whole process. And it really is kind of like you have to be patient. And one thing that I realized about myself is that I'm patient, you know? Wait. Why not wait? Because now, as you know, what I like to do, my favorite thing to do is work on multiple pieces at once. So although it seemed like I'm not getting anything done, I'm not getting anything done. [IN INCREASINGLY AGITATED VOICE] I'm not getting anything done! Now, because I'm working on seven pieces at once, I'll have seven pieces coming out at once. 

Ed Halter  22:09  

Well, the thing that this reveals about you that might be a surprise if people don't know you— I mean your work looks very dirty, messy, hairy, you know—but your working methods, you're actually incredibly organized to a level I've never known anybody... that you can work on seven projects at once. I mean, you go to your house, home studio, everything is organized into bins perfectly clean. It's like an archivist's dream in there. And it's interesting, because the work then you make seems like it's almost coming apart and coming out of control as it's going through the projector.

Luther Price 22:42  

Well, anyone who makes films knows that you're better off knowing where everything is. Because you could spend hours trying to find something. Everything has to be labeled, everything should be put in a place. It makes so much sense because I gained some weight, so I went through my pants, which I realized... I realized something else about myself: I've become like a clothes hoarder… all of a sudden. One minute, I didn't care about clothes. Now, like why do I have all these pants that fit me last year and I can't even fit my legs in now? So I'm getting rid of those. But I became obsessed because there was one pair of pants that I knew was in there somewhere and I couldn't find them. So I spent like the entire blizzard looking for them. [LAUGHTER] Even though I knew they weren't gonna fit me.

Haden Guest

Are you wearing them? 

[LAUGHTER]

Luther Price

No, but I knew they weren't gonna fit me. But I was like, I was obsessed! I was like, Where are they?! And I still haven't found them. [LAUGHTER] So no, you're better off.. You have to be organized. Like, you know, you have... to... be... organized, right, Saul? [LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest

Is Saul here?

Ed Halter  24:01 

Maybe we should see if anybody has any questions they'd like to ask about individual films or your recent work or anything or your pants if they have pant recommendations. Anybody have any questions?

Luther Price 24:16  

Any questions? Yes. Hi.

Audience 1 24:29  

This soundtrack was really monotonous throughout the film. It sounded like film, like a...

Luther Price  24:40  

What are you saying? The film sounded like film?

Audience 1 24:44  

Yeah, kind of. [LAUGHS] Like running through the Steenbeck or something like that.

Luther Price  24:47  

I love you. She's one of my new students at MassArt.

Audience 1  24:53  

[LAUGHING] And then...

Luther Price  24:54  

But how did you get that right away? It's actually coming from my Goko. My Super 8 Goko. My Super 8 Goko is sort of like dying on me. I really put it through a lot of stuff. And, you know, when you spend so much time with a piece, you start to listen to the things around you. So if you're playing music, which I used to do a lot, but you know, I'm listening to this, this Goko just sort of grinding and the sound, and it just made sense. So yeah, you were right, it is the sound of film.

Audience 1  25:31  

But then suddenly, you like, blasted a scream that sounded like whaaaaaaaa! [LAUGHS] I just got really curious about your decision about making such a shift sonically? 

Luther Price  25:46  

It needed that I think, you know. [SCATTERED LAUGHTER] You know, it was me, screaming. It was a very personal film. And I really, you know, when I think about it, this is the thing that makes me miss making my own films, because I used to make these types of decisions, which in a sense now I'm sort of using sound in a different way and images in a different way. So this is maybe this was a good thing, because I don't see my films all the time. I haven't seen a lot of these, you know, I don't. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that, you know, I don't, I just don't, but I kind of miss this method of working, especially in sound. And then the transition from the screaming to that other sound, which is just my fan in my studio. Isn’t it amazing? That's when I had my Walkman Pro, which I still have, it's like a relic. I spent so much money on that thing. You couldn't give it away, right?

Ed Halter  26:51  

I doubt you could, Luther. 

[LAUGHTER]

Luther Price

[LAUGHING] You couldn't give it away! 

Ed Halter

Any other questions or comments? There’s a question in the back.

Luther Price

I’m so proud of that.

Audience 2  26:59  

You talk about your studio being very organized when you're dealing with individual frames. And so your filmmaking is really personal, individual, private. And then we're all here looking. So do you create with the notion of audience. How does that...? 

Luther Price

No, I don't think filmmakers do. I don't think any filmmaker really does. You know, it just so happens that this is a very public medium. I really don't think any of my peers make films with that in mind. It's not. It wouldn't be. I think if you did have it in mind, it would change things really.

Unknown Speaker  27:53  

I don't know about that, Luther. You often talk about—maybe not having the individual in mind in that sense—but you often talk about really thinking about the audience. For example, you don't like to have programs much longer than an hour, for example, because you know...

Luther Price  28:08  

Oh, but that's after the fact. After you’ve made the work, you know? And I love what Haden did, because, you know, we kept the programs under sixty minutes, which I think is a great thing to do.

Ed Halter  28:19  

But also your editing is so musical and so in tune with people. I mean, I don't think that it's true that you aren't thinking about how the audience is experiencing it... 

Luther Price 28:31

Oh, after the fact. Yeah, but I don't think I sit down and think, you know, who's my audience? Who is this for? Sometimes it's not even for me; it's just something that needs to come out, and then I figure it out later. You know, I go through a point where I'm very close to the work, and sometimes it's just a mystery to me, but I trust it. I trust myself, I trust the work, I trust the relationship. And sometimes, you know, with Green for instance—which scares me to death, that film—it took me I think, oh my goodness, like a month to make, which is incredible! But it's I made that in what 1988? But it predicted everything that would come. But I knew it. When I shot that film and I was thinking about that film, all of these things were just coming and I thought, Don't even question it. If you start to question it, you're just interfering. And oh my god, it scares me to death. It’s predicted everything that would come even... still. There’s still all the information in that film. And you know, I showed that at Oberhausern, and I... completely... that evening? Remember me? I was just affected by it. I don't want to see that film again. Don't want to see it. 

Ed Halter  30:07  

It's not showing in the program.

Luther Price  30:08  

It's about ghosts. Not in this program, no. It's about ghosts, and I don't want to see it. 

Ed Halter  30:17  

Any other questions or anyone thinking of any other questions? I'm wondering, I mean, is it hard for you to see a film like tomorrow night the program is showing Home, which is about your mother and your father. 

Luther Price

Is it? 

Ed Halter

Yeah, Home. And then n this program, we see images of your own wounds after, I suppose that was after Nicaragua, and you're in the hospital as well. Is it hard to look at all this stuff now still? There's so much of it in your films.

Luther Price  30:45  

Well, you know, I was so much younger, huh? in that film. I shot the Meat footage in 1990 right after Sodom. I moved right to that. I remember that. And I started my first shooting of A at the same time, 1990, which took me five years to make. So that travel through... and Meat, I was obsessed with that film, you know?

Ed Halter  31:17  

A film we saw tonight, which is... You actually film off video that you've taken about ten years ago.

Luther Price  31:20  

The film was made in 1990, and then I rephotographed and made three, sort of, you know… I don't know what I'm saying. Three other films attached from that through rephotography. And using performance and things like that. The performance, do you see eating the liver and Karen Carpenter singing? That was done in a performance out in San Francisco at the Eye Gallery, a really beautiful photography gallery. And I did a two-night performance. Each night was an hour. It kept being layered because I would project images and then have whatever I was doing live, projected. And then the next night that was projected plus what I was doing live and a lot of that was done backstage in little vignettes. And then I'd come out live so it was very layered. A fun piece. But you know, I was cooking liver on a hot plate for two nights. And I purposely closed all the windows shut. So some people got sick. And they had to close the gallery down forever. [LAUGHTER] They couldn't get the liver out of the walls. The smoke of the liver. They hated me.

Ed Halter  32:54  

Yeah, in 1999, you did a version of that with me at CBGBs. And I remember a year later–

Luther Price  33:00  

Oh my god! Again, I would be... If the Patriot Act...

Ed Halter  33:03  

Yeah, no, a year later, the owner of CBs told me that she was infested with rats, because all the meat had gotten into the corners of the floors.

Luther Price  33:13  

Not only that, because we were doing the fashion show at CBGBs. And so I cooked liver. But instead of using Pam to spray the pan, I sprayed it with Glade. [LAUGHTER] And I tell you one thing, one woman had to be rushed to the hospital. She was sitting in the front. I lost consciousness, but I was still walking. [LAUGHTER] And I just remember being in a jockstrap [LAUGHTER] and I lost all my clothes.

Ed Halter  33:57  

Um… [LAUGHTER] I think that we should end it there! That's a really good ending. Thanks so much, Luther!

[APPLAUSE]

Unknown Speaker  34:12  

Please come back for two more incredible nights of programs, and Luther, you'll be speaking after each one, right?

Haden Guest

Remember there’s a reception upstairs in the lobby!

© Harvard Film Archive

A reception in the Carpenter Center follows screening and discussion.