Thursday, January 22, 2026 at 7:30 PM to 11:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck presents F*red Worden: A Cinema of Pure Energy.* Thursday, January 22, 2026 For their first event of 2026, Lightstruck is extremely excited to present a double feature of programs from one of their very favorite artists and individuals, Fred Worden. Since 1970, Worden has produced a wide range of experimental filmmaking in the purest sense of that term - his work engages in deeply thoughtful, endlessly exploratory investigations into the ecstatic adventure of primal perception and optical phenomena that are unique (elemental, even) to motion pictures. Probing the thrillingly audacious adventure of sight with his keen and playful sensibility, Worden has produced a career’s worth of magical filmmaking that, in his words, “tries hard to up the ante on the notion that film is a visual rather than literary art and that seeing as a perceptual process precedes and models thought.” Longtime friend Ken Jacobs once stated that Worden’s work “loosens the brains good”, and we're not sure we can top that description. Many of Worden’s films thrive in a vast and cosmic space of pure experience, and beyond language, which makes them exceedingly hard to describe. But for any enthusiast of the fundamentals of cinema and the absolutely, irreducibly elemental psychedelia (if you will) of visual perception, Worden’s films are crucial documents. Our two-program overview of Worden’s world will consist of diverse 16mm and digital works produced over a nearly forty year career of lovingly nudging eyeballs and brains toward vistas of the infinite, and including his 1998 16mm film One, in which Worden manages to extrapolate a 20-minute-long cosmos from literally one frame of source imagery. RIYL: Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, abstraction, optical printing, monochrome psychedelia, hypnagogic cinema, complete transformation of objective reality ∆ Please note these programs contain multiple films with stroboscopic flicker. Program 1 will begin at 7:30pm. Program 2 will begin at 9:15pm. One ticket is good for both! ∆ Programs by Mark Toscano and Zena Grey. Notes by Mark Toscano. 16mm prints and digital files courtesy of Fred Worden and Monique Ernst. Big thanks and big love to Fred, Monique, and Fred’s entire family.