The Wold Shadow

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

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

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]

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See also

References
  1. "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
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