Flying Into the Void
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 with Forrest Sprague. Special thanks to Bruce Wood and The Film-Makers' Cooperative. "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