During his 22 years teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, the legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage helped many filmmakers find their own voice. The best of them would produce work that would thankfully avoid being too closely linked to his inescapable influence on the American avant-garde, including such important filmmakers as Bill Brand, Louis Hock, Marjorie Keller, and Saul Levine. One of the lesser-known names to emerge from the Chicago scene was Bruce Wood, a Massachusetts-based painter whose love of Brakhage’s classic Window Water Baby Moving and the animated films of Robert Breer had him specifically coming to the Institute to study under Brakhage. After a five-year period of prolific filmmaking in the 1970s that led to greater recognition in Europe than in the United States, he largely returned to painting and subsequent work as an art dealer.
Wood’s almost entirely black-and-white body of cinematic work both predates the B&W works of the better-known Andrew Noren, and suggests an alternative route for monochromatic abstraction that is closer to Franz Kline’s paintings and a private form of calligraphy than conventional photography. His use of multiple exposures and superimpositions, rescaling images, and single-frame manipulations turn initially realistic imagery into sensual shadow motions. Spectacle is pleased to announce the first-ever complete retrospective of Bruce Wood’s 16mm short films, with all titles projected on 16mm, and with Wood in attendance for introductions and Q&As.
Co-programmed by Andrew Reichel & Forrest Sprague. Special thanks to Bruce Wood and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
PROGRAM 1: EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWS
SATURDAY, JULY 18 – 5 PM (w/ Intro by Bruce Wood)
ACE NUMBER 5 (RED VERSION)
1974, United States.
8 min, 16mm.
Silent.
This program of Bruce Wood’s earliest works consists of a rare (and deliberately) red copy of his debut film ACE Number 5. “The breakthrough which led to the rest of them.” – Bruce Wood
LATEX SKY
1975, United States.
8 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“Throughout the sequence of films, a certain tension is maintained by oscillating around the border between what is abstract and what can be referred back to its source – a concern which is reflected in Wood’s choice of [titles:] ‘Latex Sky,’ for example.” – Jeremy Spencer
RIVER OF STARS
1975, United States.
10 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“…as if one were participating in the physical act of painting itself…one feels the sensation of the applying of strokes in black and white, of various feathery textural layers…There is tremendous variety of patterns. They blend effortlessly one into the other through a constant variety of means.” – Bob Cowan
ARCTIC DESIRE
1976, United States.
7 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“Almost without exception both hard vibrating abstract images and softer, slower, sustained images exist within the one film but one may well overcome the other as, for instance, in ‘Arctic Desire’ where the latter predominate.” – Jeremy Spencer
SILVER TRACES
1976, United States.
6 min, 16mm.
Silent.
AIRLESS PASSAGE
1976, United States.
13 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“[Films such as] ‘Silver Traces’ and ‘Airless Passage’ in particular deal more with the assembling of images within time and the resultant superimpositions, some lattice-like, others which tease the eye from one layer to another: but most interesting are those which, especially in ‘Silver Traces,’ appear to interact with the film surface itself.” – Jeremy Spencer
TRT: 52 min + reel changes
PROGRAM 2: BRIDGES AND PASSAGES
SATURDAY, JULY 18 – 7:30 PM (w/ Intro by Bruce Wood)
ISLAND DESIGN
1976, United States.
6 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“In the later films, ‘Island Design’ and ‘Molten Shadow,’ it is the assemblage [of images] over time which has become more important.” – Jeremy Spencer
EDGE FORCES
1976, United States.
11 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“EDGE FORCES is an abstract collage of rapid nebulous forms and calligraphic lines. The frame is used as a “canvas” for thousands of fleeting images that try to expand beyond its confines. Viewers are compelled either to comprehend the dynamic flow of the images, or to make free subjective associations with them.” – Bruce Wood
MOLTEN SHADOW
1976, United States.
8 min, 16mm.
Silent.
THE BRIDGE OF HEAVEN
1977, United States.
32 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“THE BRIDGE OF HEAVEN features elements both starkly structural (frames in frames, grids, x’s, A-frames) and sensually dancing (swirling clouds of grain, creeping white suggestive blobs).” – Josh Mabe
TRT: 57 min + reel changes
PROGRAM 3: FLYING INTO THE VOID
SUNDAY, JULY 19 – 5 PM (w/ Bruce Wood Q&A following screening)
THE SMELL OF DEATH
1977, United States.
16 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“The probable masterpiece of the night is THE SMELL OF DEATH. The film alternates between three modes. First, the slowly fading image of an “X”–suggestive of a failing system (medical equipment? the body?). Then skeletal fingers caressing the surface of the film (from the viewpoint of the dying’s last sense of this world? or of the dying’s reaching out onto the next?). Finally, stuttering torn pulses of light–something like flesh being destroyed. It’s a great film–and perfectly encapsulates Wood’s talent for giving a fully formed world born of simply Black and White.” – Josh Mabe
FROZEN FLIGHT
1977, United States.
33 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“Many of Wood’s individual frames also involve several different overlays of separate exposures. He really is most crucially involved with producing the virtuoso ‘moment.’ It’s an understatement to say that his [film Frozen Flight], whose…33 minutes’ running time juxtapose[s] hundreds of these complex, hinged-together compositions, [is] overloaded with startling, intense, undeveloped information.” – C.L. Morrison
BETWEEN GLANCES
1978, United States.
14 min, 16mm.
Silent.
“Brakhage’s influence can be felt most keenly in BETWEEN GLANCES which (only half-jokingly) seems like an expression of “closed-eye vision” from inside of one of Warhol’s Silver Clouds.” – Josh Mabe
TRT: 63 min + reel changes