The Biscotts Series

Featured prominently at this year’s Whitney Biennial, Luther Price’s body of work (spanning over 25 years) is one of the most significant—and underseen—achievements of contemporary American experimental filmmaking. Tonight’s screening focuses on his astonishing “Biscotts/Biscuits” series.

The difficulty in seeing Price’s works stems from his working method. He only projects original, fragile 16mm prints, which are often spliced together from multiple sources, distressed, or painted on. The “Biscotts/Biscuits” series is made up entirely of reassembled footage from 13 aged, identical prints of a documentary from the 1960s or 1970s about a nursing home for poor African Americans in the rural South. Price has obsessively reworked the prints, which he found in a dumpster, into a series of nine films that empathetically work through repetitions of the original documentary, resulting in a devastatingly emotional and confrontational experience. This is only the second time that all nine films will have been screened in the same program. (program app. 90 mins., 16mm)

Program contents:
Nice Biscotts #1 (2005, 10 mins.)
Nice Biscotts #2 (2005, 10 mins.)
Same Day Nice Biscotts (2005, 5 mins.)
Nice Baskets (2006, 10 mins.)
The Biscuit Day (2007, 12 mins.)
Singing Biscotts (2007, 6 mins.)
Suffering Biscuits (2007, 20 mins.)
The Biscuit Song (2008, 5 mins.)
Old September Biscuits (2008, 11 mins.)