PRE-ORDER NOW! Books to ship April 1, 2024
Remembering Luther Price, a two-program series, screens in San Francisco and Oakland March 24 and 28. Details here.
Published by San Francisco Cinematheque, Luther Price in San Francisco: A Remembrance is a visually oriented zine focusing on the renowned filmmakers’ relationship to San Francisco Bay Area film culture. Edited by Brett Kashmere, Director of Canyon Cinema Foundation and Cinematheque’s Steve Polta, Luther Price in San Francisco features brief oral history reflections, film stills, never-before-published photos of Price’s 1992 Meat performance and the equally infamous performance Clown Part II: Scary Transformation (1994), scanned ephemera from Cinematheque’s archives, images of Price’s astonishing hand-collaged film cans (courtesy of Canyon Cinema) and reprints of texts by Michael Wallin and Price himself.
From the introduction: The radical filmmaker, visual artist and longtime Canyon Cinema member Luther Price (1962–2020) was an inscrutable crucible of cinematic intensity. “At turns confessional and enigmatic, sensual and violent, Boston-based artist Luther Price manufactures extreme cinema. From early Super 8 performances to his more recent 16mm found footage excavations, Price’s films are exercises in disfigurement. He manipulates image, stock and soundtrack—with dirt and rot, with markers and scissors, with scalpel precision and chaotic intensity” (Canyon Cinema Confessions, September 2014). Price—known at the time as Tom Rhoads—began experimenting with Super 8mm in the 1980s, under the tutelage of filmmaker Saul Levine, and continued working with the film medium throughout his artistic career, reimagining and transforming 16mm found footage through visionary expression and roughly-exquisite formal procedures. Price’s burning passion for celluloid and its shifting surfaces evoke a vast range of emotions from anyone who encounters his films, handmade slides, filmstrip objects and collages. Price’s unique, handmade film canisters, which currently reside in Canyon Cinema’s office, are collaged artworks in and of themselves. The following oral history traces Price’s various intersections with the Bay Area film community across several decades, including his many now-legendary San Francisco screenings and performances. (Brett Kashmere)
Contents:
Introduction by Brett Kashmere
Remembering Luther Price by Steve Polta
Reminiscences by Steve Anker, Ken Paul Rosenthal, David Sherman & Rebecca Barten/Total Mobile Home
Photos by Ken Paul Rosenthal
In Defense of Sodom (reprint) by Michael Wallin
“I Want to Keep Truth…” (reprint) by Luther Price
Published March 2023 by San Francisco Cinematheque
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 8.5
38 pages
Design: India Nemer