on fire
by
Douglas Messerli
Luther
Price (creator and director) Sodom / 1988-1989
On
June 13, 2020 the noted and notorious performance artist and filmmaker who,
after various pseudonyms, including Brigk Aethy, Fag, and Tom Rhoads—performing
as an unassuming clown, and various of his family members, including his own
mother—chose while making his most controversial work, Sodom, as his name
for the rest of his life: Luther Price, died at the age of 58. His final pseudonym
was an amalgam of names calling up the great Protestant religious reformer,
Martin Luther, the important religiously inspired black rights leader Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Vincent Price, actor in dozens of films of horror and
sleazy pleasure.
The transformative film created over to
years, 1988-1989, combined gay porno films he found in dumpsters behind Boston
strip theaters showing X-rated films, darkly lit biblical epics, and Gregorian
chants looped to play backwards. Like Stan Brakhage before him—Ed Halter
described Price as being “Brakhage after Punk”—he scratched the surfaces of his
17-minute tape and, more innovatively, punched holes in the Super 8 frames which
he carefully filled in with other images from the porno figures, ecstatic faces
and penises, as Roberta Smith described it in her The New York Time obituary, "jumped feverishly back and forth, almost as if the film were trying to escape the projector."
Superficially, Sodom might be
described a being connected by depictions of fire: the biblical masses are seen
often carrying torches and flaming pieces of wood to which they often set fire
to everything around them; the Gregorian chants are now and then accompanied
with candles set with glass tumblers; and the male bodies heat up and symbolically
burn with the friction of their inserted cocks and masturbatory hands. This can
be described on all levels as a truly “hot” piece of film making.
Quite predictably, more conservative
viewers—although given the obscurity of Price’s films and the paucity of their
showings, one can hardly imagine who such viewers might have been—found the
filmmaker’s work as being scandalous, in a way similar of the early reactions
to some of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic J. Hoberman perhaps
expressed their viewpoint best, suggesting that Sodom might almost be
seen as an “illumination of Jerry Falwell’s unconscious.”
Far more surprisingly, many influential
figures of the gay world refused to show it at such otherwise open-minded film
festivals such as those in Los Angeles and New York, describing Price’s cinema
as being “homophobic.”
Although eventually the film grew in fame
as its iconic imagery came to be recognized over time for a new opening for gay
cinema, that initial reaction—probably still held by some—completely stymies my
thinking. Who’s kidding who, I immediately wondered at reading of this
response? Didn’t nearly every gay boy and many a lesbian learn about their own
hidden sexuality in the days before computer availability through porno
magazines and films, to say nothing about all those heterosexual kids who were
exploring the more normative variations?
The director himself, although surely
knowing, given his name change, that what one critic described as his “Boschian
vision” of gay sexuality might rub some even otherwise sympathetic viewers in
the wrong way. Price himself, however, argued against the viewpoint that
maintained he was presenting gay life was a monstrous Rabelaisian-like hell: “I
became known as this gritty, badass, gay filmmaker and…I’m not. Yeah, I’m gay,
I like to look at guys’ asses, but Sodom is not a pornographic for to
me. It’s just very fleshy and visceral, and it talks about a story.”
Instead of seeing the sometimes almost violent
gay sexual activities as representing all the negative images called up by the
Biblical visions of Sodom, I think we have to ask at least one important
question questions: if the porno images represent Sodom, where then is its twin
evil, Gomorrah, in this picture? (The historical cities were apparently part of
a series of six cities along the Dead Sea, which were probably destroyed by
earthquakes).
I think we have little choice but to
perceive those images torn from the biblical epics the director employed as
being far more violent than are the sexual interchanges. In almost every brief
scene that this film shows us of the biblically recreated world, the crowds
seem to be massed with arms held up in anger or revenge, sometimes, as I
mentioned above, holding burning beams of wood or torches, while in many scenes
these religiously inclined men are burning down everything that lies around
them.
Mightn’t we then ask if the sometimes seemingly
tough sex scenes are more horrific than the men of god revenging, one presumes,
the heathens around them. Both visions are single-minded in their intensity,
and both involve, to a large degree, the ecstasy—bodily (expressed also in the
obvious materiality of the film itself) and spiritual, both enhanced by the perverted
(spoken as in the Devil’s language in reverse) monkish chants, which at one
point sound almost like a series of howls before they return to the quieter
male choral monophonic sacred songs of the 9th and 10th
centuries. In none of these worlds are women allowed, and all three share a
commitment of patrimonial action and belief that is implacable, unable to be
mitigated as faith generally is.
In a very clear way Price’s film is similar
to the famed photograph of two years earlier, which also received severe criticism
from both conservatives and established artistic communities: Andre Serrano’s Piss
Christ which pictures a small plastic crucifix floating in a tank of the
artist’s urine—yet another statement of the body linked to the holy. Indeed,
Serrano’s reaction to the outrage his art received is remarkably similar to
Price’s reaction: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the
attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been
a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."
The
major apologist for Price’s film, Michael Wallin, describes it in terms quite close
to those I have used in my linking of the sacred and the profane:
Beauty, pain, compassion, power, pathos
decay, tenderness…
These words all come to mind trying to get a fix, as it were,
on this super-8 film by Luther Price. It is elusive. Sodom is a
visceral experience of such passion and intensity that coming
to terms with it in words seems a futile exercise. Yet
it’s a film so provocative and confrontational that it demands
response.…It hits somewhere in the solar plexus, that nebulous
area where emotional and physical sensations converge.
These words all come to mind trying to get a fix, as it were,
on this super-8 film by Luther Price. It is elusive. Sodom is a
visceral experience of such passion and intensity that coming
to terms with it in words seems a futile exercise. Yet
it’s a film so provocative and confrontational that it demands
response.…It hits somewhere in the solar plexus, that nebulous
area where emotional and physical sensations converge.
If the word “emotional” can in any way
linked to the word “spiritual” or as something of the imagination and mind,
then I think I very much agree with Wallin, despite obviously my own commitment
to attempt to come to terms with this work in words in order to better
comprehend it.
Los
Angeles, July 22, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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