The Wold Shadow

The Wold Shadow
An image from The Wold Shadow
Directed byStan Brakhage
Release date
  • 1972 (1972)
Running time
2 ½ minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

The Wold Shadow is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage, produced in 1972.

Production

The Wold Shadow was inspired when Stan Brakhage, while walking through a forest, had a vision of an anthropomorphic shadow.[1] The experience led him to film a homage to the "god of the forest."[1] The Wold Shadow was produced by placing glass on an easel between his camera and the forest. Between each individual frame, Brakhage painted on the glass, before repeating this process.[1][2] Production of The Wold Shadow took a full day.[1] Brakhage credits the film with reigniting his interest in painting,[3] and described his choice of title as follows:

"Wold" because the word refers to "forests" which poets later made "plains" and because the work also contains the rustic sense "to kill" - this then my laboriously painted vision of the god of the forest.[4]

Reception

Martin Rumsby cites The Wold Shadow as a rare instance of Brakhage attempting a work of structural cinema in Senses of Cinema.[1] He nevertheless acknowledges that the film is more "romantic" than most structural films, in that Brakhage is "trying to capture or evoke something mysterious and unknowable."[1] P. Adams Sitney considers The Wold Shadow a continuation of themes expressed in the poetry of Ezra Pound.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f "The Wold Shadow" by Martin Rumsby Senses of Cinema, CTEQ Annotations, 26 July 2004 - accessed August 11, 2011
  2. ^ Elder, R. Bruce (1998) The films of Stan Brakhage in the American tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, p190
  3. ^ Scott MacDonald (2005) A critical cinema: interviews with independent filmmakers, University of California Press, p100
  4. ^ The Wold Shadow Canyon Cinema: Film, Accessed August 11, 2011
  5. ^ P. Adams Sitney (2006) "Brakhage and Modernism," Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, Indiana University Press, p172