Luther Price

On Tuesday September 20th, I saw experimental filmmaker Luther Price at the Union Theatre. Nine of his films were shown, all the only copy of them, which I thought was really great. Especially in our technological age when everyone is obsessed with backing everything up and making as many copies as possible, having just one print of each of his films has such a personal and almost magical feel to it. My favorite film was one titled Shelly Winters. The film was mostly a sound-based film, where you’re listening to stories while looking at a white screen. It was a found footage documentary about domestic violence. I found it deeply disturbing and profound. There was an account of a woman talking about getting abused by her husband, and a man also told his story of beating his wife. At one point he said something along the lines of “I told her I would rather kill her than get a divorce.” That was so chilling to me… I could tell everyone around me in the theatre was feeling just as uncomfortable and upset by it. To me, taking the images from the original film away helped me to imagine these gruesome tales and made the film so much more effective than if I had just been looking at talking heads. This way my imagination was doing most of the work, and we all know our imaginations can do wild things.

(The image is of a picture of part of one his film strips, where you can see that he took a 35mm film and cut it to be the size of a 16mm film. )