Luther Price's GREEN @ Black Sun on Thursday 8th
A new edition of Black Sun, Cork's regular weirdo/outer limits music/film event, is happening this Thursday, March 8th, at Plugd Records, located in the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are Mike Gangloff, Yawning Chasm and Brigid Power Ryce.
The film screening, which I programmed, will be of Luther Price's Green (1988). It's one of my favourite films and by a filmmaker whose work I've been wanting to show in Cork ever since discovering it. Coincidentally, Price is getting quite a bit of exposure this week. Take a glance at this rave write up by Tom McCormack of his contribution to the current Whitney Biennial:
http://altscreen.com/03/01/2012/whitney-biennial-2012/
And then have a peek at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLjBW09BiiY&feature=player_embedded
Here are the programme notes for this screening:
Luther Price’s films are distinguished by a raw, jarring and sometimes shocking intimacy that stems equally from their inextricably linked form and their content. The Boston-based Price’s work, which spans three decades and includes sculpture, music and performance as well as film, dwells in, picks at and sometimes even soothes wounds, physical, emotional and psychic. The emphasis on the materiality of the Super-8 and 16mm film he works with reflects this: roughly spliced and frequently altered, the film strips he projects are themselves ‘wounded’. Using both original images, sometimes shot to pastiche the memory of 8mm home movies, and found footage, his morbidly camp iconography generates a decayed, oppressive beauty that is as oddly moving as it is impossible to forget. His embracing of extreme, especially sexual, imagery has won him considerable notoriety, but the emotional depths of his often visionary work are undeniable. And even if affliction and isolation are his subjects, he is not without a sense of humour.
Black Sun is proud to present one of his most searing films, Green (36 mins, 1988). As Gary Morris wrote in Bright Lights Film Journal: “at first glance [it] appears to be a simple formalist study: the still close-up image of a dead starling... But Price himself shows up in one of his most bizarre and powerful guises — as a partially masked drag queen, standing like a statue in what appears to be entropy (the title, suggesting life, is clearly ironic), in a scary wig and heavy gown, holding an ice cream that gradually melts in his hand.. The mysterious queen he portrays is being strangled by her own permanent smile and the impossibly rigid pose she must assume in the film’s empty, dead world. The image is at once campy and shocking and poignant…”
The film screening, which I programmed, will be of Luther Price's Green (1988). It's one of my favourite films and by a filmmaker whose work I've been wanting to show in Cork ever since discovering it. Coincidentally, Price is getting quite a bit of exposure this week. Take a glance at this rave write up by Tom McCormack of his contribution to the current Whitney Biennial:
http://altscreen.com/03/01/2012/whitney-biennial-2012/
And then have a peek at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLjBW09BiiY&feature=player_embedded
Here are the programme notes for this screening:
Luther Price’s films are distinguished by a raw, jarring and sometimes shocking intimacy that stems equally from their inextricably linked form and their content. The Boston-based Price’s work, which spans three decades and includes sculpture, music and performance as well as film, dwells in, picks at and sometimes even soothes wounds, physical, emotional and psychic. The emphasis on the materiality of the Super-8 and 16mm film he works with reflects this: roughly spliced and frequently altered, the film strips he projects are themselves ‘wounded’. Using both original images, sometimes shot to pastiche the memory of 8mm home movies, and found footage, his morbidly camp iconography generates a decayed, oppressive beauty that is as oddly moving as it is impossible to forget. His embracing of extreme, especially sexual, imagery has won him considerable notoriety, but the emotional depths of his often visionary work are undeniable. And even if affliction and isolation are his subjects, he is not without a sense of humour.
Black Sun is proud to present one of his most searing films, Green (36 mins, 1988). As Gary Morris wrote in Bright Lights Film Journal: “at first glance [it] appears to be a simple formalist study: the still close-up image of a dead starling... But Price himself shows up in one of his most bizarre and powerful guises — as a partially masked drag queen, standing like a statue in what appears to be entropy (the title, suggesting life, is clearly ironic), in a scary wig and heavy gown, holding an ice cream that gradually melts in his hand.. The mysterious queen he portrays is being strangled by her own permanent smile and the impossibly rigid pose she must assume in the film’s empty, dead world. The image is at once campy and shocking and poignant…”
posted by Maximilian Le Cain at Saturday, March 03, 2012
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