Films by Luther Price and Tom Rhoads

Presented by Revolutions Per Minute Film Festival 2021

Acclaimed Massachusetts experimental filmmaker Luther Price (also known as Tom Rhoads) passed away last June and now Boston’s avant-garde film community comes together to celebrate his life and work with this special 16mm screening of three of Price’s early films.
No Brattle member passes accepted for this event ($12 discount tickets are available for Brattle members)
Green
Tom Rhoads (Luther Price) | 1987-1988 | 36 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Preserved by Bard College through the National Film Preservation Foundation

Green is a world where ghosts live.
Emerging from silent memory,
they enter an image of reality, cool, crisp and static.
Tromping forward,
time unravels tracing to points of the past,
conjuring the familiar,
reliving events unresolved, revealing very little.

Beauty is continually redefined,
celebrating life and death in a plastic world haunted.
It is a romantic suicide.

– Tom Rhoads

Warm Broth

Tom Rhoads (Luther Price) | 1988 | 36 minutes

Preserved by Bard College through the National Film Preservation Foundation

Carolee Schnneman had once [remarked] that watching Price’s Warm Broth (1988) was “an indelible experience.
That really is the apposite word when describing Luther’s movies—indelible. They stay with you, like a childhood memory, or a scar.”
Warm Broth, made when Price was going by the name Tom Rhoads, is directly informed by Price’s own childhood memories.
He appears dressed as his mother as she goes shopping, hangs laundry, and so on.
“There’s a moment in the film when sound and image sync exquisitely,” wrote Tanner Tafelski or Hyperallergic in 2015.
“During a rigid and recurring shot of the mother from the chest down, we see her hands peeling potatoes (shades of Jeanne Dielman) at a counter.”
At one point, “her hand swiftly goes to her wrist. It’s gasp-inducing, even though she doesn’t cut but merely scratches herself.
In the next shot, a fudge bar melts, or associatively bleeds, and a pool of chocolate forms around a wooden stick.
Through editing and montage, Rhoads reveals the violence inherent in such charged images.”

–David Hudson

Sodom

Luther Price | 1989 | 16 minutes

“a vision of hell crafted from old gay porn, cheap color films faded into a sickly shitlike yellow-green-brown, with faces of men jittering inside hole-punched haloes, evoking at once ecstasy and torment.”

– Ed Halter

All Films produced on Super 8 and presented on 16mm