Fred Worden

When it comes to motion pictures, I’ve always been a lot more interested in the motion than the pictures. Images, in fact, have always been for me primarily a medium through which motion (or energy) can manifest. In ALL OR NOTHING abstract images are made dynamic by an infusion of energy imposed by me from outside. I’m tempted to describe this as a conversion of biological energy (mine) into cinematic energy. The individual frames collide and new things appear. It’s almost like a jerry-rigged, homemade version of the Large Hadron Collider. On the web page for the Large Hadron Collider it describes the Hadron Collider’s mission as “tunneling to the beginning of time.” A no-nonsense mission, I’d say. The mission of All or Nothing might also be described as a kind of tunneling, but for the life of me, I can’t say exactly where its tunneling to.

I had a strong, slightly illicit, urge to commandeer the original train sequence from the 1931 film Possessed and make it move in such a way as to give the girl (Joan Crawford) what she thought she wanted: a position on the inside. To do that, I had to create my own (all encompassing) vehicle. By my count, the original sequence provides three orders of motion: the motion (and stillness) of the passengers on the train, the motion of the train itself, and finally the motion of the girl (Joan) outside of the train.

“An experimental film structured as a kind of specialized playground in which highly representational images are freed from their duties to refer to things outside of themselves. The images run free in their new lightness making unforeseeable, promiscuous connections with each other and developing an inexplicable, non-parsable plot line that runs along with all the urgency of any good thriller. When worlds collude, something outside of description is always just about to happen.” (FW)

LSD is illegal. 1859 is not.

“I made The After Life using images out of a tiny mini-camcorder called a Flip that I bought on amazon.com for $98.00. All I did with the material was work with arrangements of frames along a timeline to setup what Eisenstein called “collisions” (for him a colliding of shots, for me, a colliding of frames). On rare occasions, Eisenstein substituted the word “copulation” for the word “collision” in describing the dynamics of his montage theory. In The After Life, it’s all copulation all the time. Bodies attract, bodies intersect and new creatures stream forth. In The After Life uninhibited promiscuity is what makes the world go round. It can’t be all bad.” (FW)

“Where the big ones break and the undercurrents push-pull an ancient, silent tune.” (FW)

“Out on my freeway, directionality is elusive. The faces in the windows appear and then disappear, some moving out ahead, some falling behind, some moving so fast as to be beyond registering, others sliding by so languidly you’d think they want something from you. What’s irreversible is the plain fact that once they disappear from view, they’re gone forever. No amount of freeway jostling is ever likely to bring them by again. Each time I think to myself: one more person I’ll never know.” (FW)

Like picking shards of broken glass out of pile carpet on a hangover morning.

"Blue Poles (2005), a wholly abstract piece which fills the screen with what appear to be white sparks, variously suggesting scraps of burning paper floating away from a fire, frost crystals on a window, or the visual phenomena which appear when holding one’s eyes shut tightly – a beautiful, haunting effect..."

A Technicolor charge on horseback is mashed up with a series of early silent films from the Melies brothers.

The human susceptibility to delusional thinking has, at least, this defining characteristic: easy to spot in others, hard to see in oneself. The filmmaker, racked by the inescapable observation that it is delusional thinking that is the common denominator driver of so many contemporary man-made disasters gins up a vehicle meant to ruthlessly uncover and expose his own particular brand of pathological believing. This film is about us. I believe its true. See the iron jaws of the mechanism at work as the filmmaker falls into the biggest and most obvious delusion of all: the belief that he can master his own delusions by making a film about them.

"And so the intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole's light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they're custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here." (FW)

A guided adventure for the eyeballs. And as such, also, of necessity, an adventure of the mind (how could it be otherwise ?). (...) I believe there is a current which runs at the core of all beings, call it life force, a dynamic which in individuals reflects both the personal and the universal. Up on the screen, frames in motion, a rushing stream of articulated energy to resonate with that inner biological current. Adventurous eyeballing then, in the ideal, an epiphanous moment of mutual recognition and commiseration between energy forms. "There is a vibration which exists to enrapture and console us." (Rilke). I like to think this vibration can be detected streaming out of The Cloud.

Trying the surrealist notion of automatism as a practice of exploring the mysterious zone where light and non-light mingle in an unstable and fertile equilibrium.

A single image in play, colliding infinitely with itself, in order to reach us beyond our defenses.

A half-baked, but tenderized world view offered up for the new arrivals. An abstracted experimental narrative based on three images: face, figure, and crowd. A collage film of representational images of the human figure without being portraiture or performance.

The camera is spinning. The points accumulate to form a line, a line of horizon, which like any line draws a hidden curve. The traffic disengages from its components - water, bridges, cars, smoke, facade - to become an endless trajectory. The current of energy, which wanders over the various objects: the photographed thing of an immediate familiar reality, a chain of points of inertia.

Short direct animation film by Fred Worden.

An accident on a frozen lake. A story told in a visual matrix paralleled by the spread of melting ice.

"A more or less true story from my days as an art handler in 1980s New York City." (FW)

1985, b/w, silent, 7min

The story of Willard from Ashley's opera Atalanta, recounted in 3 parts.

Two simple and progressive accumulations mingle with the confines of the Moffit Tunnel in the Rockies.

A lyrical study of the World Trade Center occupying space and reflecting space.

A sleepless night.

"An introductory sequence of flickering color frames serves as a conceptual architecture for the single-frame exploration of a multi-cornered New York intersection that follows. Urban geometries and temporalities converge and deconstruct with a rhythm of eyeblinks and double-takes." (Mark Toscano)

A short by Fred Worden

An experimental film by Fred Worden.

"Color/form, light/shadow, flatness/depth, figuration/abstraction, landscape/paint, all collaging and colliding in an exploratory, arrhythmic, kinetic dance constructed a frame at a time by Fred Worden on his optical printer. This early film now reveals itself as a revelatory early warning sign of Worden#s filmmaking to come, comprising ten minutes extrapolated from only four frames of source imagery." (Mark Toscano)

I made this film in 1976 as an attempt to consider the flow of the scrolling frames in the spotlight as a field of experience of continuity, if the representation and naturalism were rejected. I have not shown this film since the early 80s. But while I finished One, I realized that some of the questions I was trying to solve at that time came from this film, and that is how I rediscovered.

A day at the beach in Malibu, at the northwestern edge of what Reyner Banham calls 'Surfurbia.'

No montage, no human subjects, minimal visual content, and the artists basically pissing on the fourth wall by calling attention in every way possible to the artifice of what they’re doing.

Coming in the wake of a whole movement of wild, ecstatic, psychedelic films loaded with unchecked energy and abandon, Throbs demonstrates a remarkable subtlety and restraint, as Fred explores variations in loops and cycles, weaving unlikely combinations of found and original footage to envelop us in a free associative dream world. —Mark Toscano