The Wold Shadow is an experimental

Experimental film

Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...

 short film by Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage

James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....

, produced in 1972.

Production

The Wold Shadow was inspired when Stan Brakhage, while walking through a forest, had a vision of an anthropomorphic shadow

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities. The term was coined in the mid 1700s...

. The experience led him to film a homage to the "god of the forest." 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. Production of The Wold Shadow took a full day. Brakhage credits the film with reigniting his interest in painting, 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.

Reception

Martin Rumsby, writing in Senses of Cinema

Senses of Cinema

Senses of Cinema is a quarterly online film magazine founded in 1999 by filmmaker Bill Mousoulis. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Senses of Cinema publishes work by film critics from all over the world, including critical essays, career overviews of the works of key directors, and coverage of many...

, cites The Wold Shadow as a rare instance of Brakhage attempting a work of structural cinema

Structural film

Structural film was an experimental film movement prominent in the US in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the UK in the 1970s.-Overview:The term was coined by P...

. 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." P. Adams Sitney considers The Wold Shadow a continuation of themes expressed in the poetry of Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

.