In the recent Motion Over Pictures: Two Evenings of Fred Worden retrospective at New York’s Spectacle Theater (co-organized by Paul Attard and Stephen Cappel, with introductions by Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive), Fred Worden’s voice made two appearances across 24 films. The first appearance was from the start of his career in Venusville (1973), where Worden and his co-director Chris Langdon show footage of a palm tree and make jokey comments about how the footage looks. The jokes don’t always synchronize with the material, so payoff comes when the imperfections of hairs and dirt finally blow their way across the scene — it would look like deliberate ineptitude without the commentary, but it’s not quite that. Worden’s voice came back for something like his second first film, Amongst the Persuaded (2004), which found him finally making the shift to digital. Worden once again opened a new chapter with jokes, monologuing about how digitally shooting a light in the dark produces flares and artifacts that would have ruined the famous anecdote about spectators running from the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. He ends it with a riff on Michael Snow’s Wavelength, in a rare case of a filmmaker not named Owen Land doing a parody of specific experimental films.
Fred Worden’s career spanned 40 years, until his 2013 retirement, and he frequently found himself in the best of both worlds: some of the most distinctive 16mm film and digital cinema of their eras, silent and with sound, and with friends and supporters in both the East and West Coast experimental film scenes. In California, the similarly comically-inclined Robert Nelson was a supporter and friend of Worden’s in his early days of producing short sketches as one of his students. Worden came onto the scene with one of the greatest thesis films ever made in Throbs (1972), his joyous “first ride” on the CalArts optical printer that transfigures the joys of car and circus footage into a series of glowing loops, with a similarly repetitive groove of a score that turns it into something reminiscent of a more circular version of Warren Sonbert’s musical montages. While subsequent Worden films were typically interested in graphic effects and structure rather than human behavior, he’d create a similarly humanistic piece during his video art period with Time’s Arrow (2007). Despite starting out as a motion blur film about driving at rapid speeds on the highway, the intercutting of a Greek statue and a shift into looking at the faces of the human passengers results in a strangely empathetic experience about everyone’s potential to achieve immortality through art.
From the New York scene, Ken Jacobs’ Eternalisms, with their alternating and contrasting single frames to produce illusions of motion, were an enormous influence on Worden, and Jacobs thought just as highly of Worden’s own work, calling his later One (1998) the best film of the 1990s. If any film could stand as being Worden’s magnum opus, One being his longest and most thorough explication of one of his most favored techniques would make it the likely choice. A single piece of moon imagery from a slide is optically manipulated and reframed into a shifting sea of something resembling dancing ink blots over an epic 25 minutes. From here, he’d continue working in black-and-white abstraction for the remainder of his film work. The Or Cloud (2001) transfigures monochromatic swirls of paint into something like a storm gale, while If Only (2003) uses bubble-like flecks of white against black that first resemble dancing stars and moons, then cells. Worden was not entirely satisfied with the original Automatic Writing, but the revised, expanded, and extraordinary Automatic Writing 2 (2000) is practically a suite of visual music in its manipulations of paint and optical effects, going from exoskeletal branches to forest canopies and deep black eye patterns.
Worden’s sense of humor was another constant across his career, and he would continue maintaining it in titles like the rhythmic film Lure (1986), which comes up with goofy ways to interrupt water sounds and imagery with colored frames, and several of his video works. Among the videos that are similarly cheeky, Here (2005) alternates and edits material from a panicky Georges Méliès conference scene and a Laurence Olivier Technicolor horseback charge into a mélange of graphic patterns, with an odd score making it weirdly mournful. His silent The After Life (2007) alternates between shots of mall escalators to result in visuals with hints of slapstick. When Worlds Collude (2008) is a highly disparate assemblage of material with a pastiche of cheesy blockbuster sound design, resulting in something so excessive that you can’t help but laugh. All My Life (2009), which swipes its name from a classic Bruce Baillie film that also features a white picket fence, finds Worden rotating himself under a canopy when it’s a rainy day on the beach, but the rapid fire alternating between the different views over 20 minutes and a radically different song choice makes this film decidedly different in tone than the short-form ethereality of its namesake and its choice of Etta James.
Worden would continue taking very limited source materials and manipulating them via optical printing and editing effects throughout his career as a way of making the banal seem brand new, and as a way of exploring the odd humor behind imperfect visuals. 4 Frames (1976) uses nothing but the titular frames to create a rapid-fire collage, while Here, There Now, Later (1983) manipulates the pacing of trips through a car tunnel in the Rocky Mountains so that it goes from serene to jolting. In & Out (1983) makes the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center into flashing geometric patterns, and Plotting the Grey Scale: 2 or 3 Quick Traverses (1985) goes from pure flicker to a barrage of monochromatic plant imagery. From his digital period, it’s eventually given away that Everyday Bad Dream (2006) is manipulating the googly eyes of something that looks to be a Donald Duck statue and using an aggressive soundtrack to make it more nightmarish, but the silent North Shore’s (2007) brown viscous liquid and strangely facial light patterns result in a hallucinatory abyss to the degree that even the retrospective’s programmers weren’t sure what was being seen. (Theories I heard included oil, coffee, water at night, and car headlights.) Worden’s tendency to use this kind of material eventually became a trick he could play on the viewer: Blue Pole(s) (2005), featuring a superb score by Tom Hamilton, fooled some viewers who saw it for the first time into thinking it was made of pre-existing material, when it was more akin to something like animation due to being constructed entirely out of optical effects to produce paint-like streaks of white against black.
Some of Worden’s sources, particularly during his film period, were so limited as to serve as a kind of joke in their own right. Bon Ami’s (1977) scratches and color patterns were born out of using the titular cleaning agent, while Insomnia (1981) uses nothing but white holes punched in black leader to produce a minimalist version of a Busby Berkeley dancing polka dot. His homage to Len Lye’s legendary scratch-and-music film Free Radicals, Boulevard (1989) uses its scratches to resemble the tracks producing the train sounds we hear on the soundtrack — it might not cause people to flee the theater like the Lumière film did, but it can still feel like it might just crash. But despite the potency of his film work, the most stupefying of Worden’s minimalist expansions might be the digital 1859 (2008), which reportedly caused a Rite of Spring-esque furor at its premiere due to the sheer intensity of its flicker. A very brief digital lens flare effect, the sort that comes pre-installed with programs like Final Cut Pro, suddenly expands into a rapid fire bombast of color that is as visually overstimulating as the best of Paul Sharits, despite frequent nods to the source’s fundamental chintziness. Worden’s transfigurations of the recognizable are consistently startling, but it’s the wit in what he selects and how he alters it that makes his bombastic alterations closer to charming jokes about what and how we see objects in motion, rather than mere exercises in technique.
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