Film Show 067: Bruce Wood
An interview with the Massachusetts-based artist about moving to Chicago to study under Stan Brakhage, feeling alienated by his filmmaking peers, and the creation of his 16mm works during the 1970s
Bruce Wood
Bruce Wood (b. 1951) is a Massachusetts-based filmmaker and painter who became interested in avant-garde film while studying at MassArt. Even though he went to school for painting, seeing Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Mothlight (1963) led to him moving out of state for grad school, intent on studying under Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, he’d find a way to translate his interest in abstract expressionist painting into film, utilizing his Bolex camera to craft striking monochromatic works dealing with the basic elements of the medium: light and rhythm. He’d make multiple shorts on 16mm before abandoning filmmaking for several years, eventually returning in the 2000s to craft one digital piece and a single narrative feature titled The Door (2005). Wood has started making new films again this year, invigorated by a renewed interest in his work as evidenced by a retrospective of his films at Spectacle in New York. This three-program retro screens today, July 18th. Tone Glow will also present a selection of his works in two cities: in Pittsburgh on August 2nd, in collaboration with Pittsburgh Sound + Image, and in Chicago on August 12th. More details can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Wood on July 16th, 2026 to discuss his childhood memories, his feelings of alienation while at SAIC, and the sexual energy of his films.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Were you born in Massachusetts?
Bruce Wood: Born and raised in Boston. For college I went to MassArt to begin with, then I moved to Chicago when I saw that Stan Brakhage was teaching there.
What are some of the earliest memories you have of growing up in Boston? What was Boston like in the 1950s?
Well, it wasn’t Leave It to Beaver land (laughter). My neighborhood was Hyde Park and it was all houses with yards, but not many single families—lots of two-flats and three-flats. The interesting thing is that my neighborhood was jammed with people my age. It was often like an episode of The Little Rascals, as a lot of it was just us running around and trying to get into trouble. We had puppet shows in barns—some of these houses had barns, and my house had a big one behind it. There were skits and shows and stuff like that. Usually a parent decided to teach us how to put on a play, and my mother did a bunch of that. The kid across the street owned a movie projector at the time and he showed 8mm films in his garage, and that was cool. I remember he showed Laurel and Hardy.
Were there any particular plays or shows that stood out to you as a kid? Any adventures you went on that were impactful?
We’d pack up our bologna sandwiches and go to the Fairmount Theatre in downtown Hyde Park. We’d see 13 Ghosts (1960) and Three Stooges movies and other comedies. Oh, and before all that, I lived right down the street from the high school and they had these minstrel shows. We’d go once a year, and these were absolutely politically incorrect, but the parts I remember, the most memorable parts, were when these girls wore big fluorescent dresses and spun around in the blacklight. And people would wear white gloves and you’d see these disembodied hands moving around on the stage. Later on, when I saw Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), my memories of that came rushing back.
Did you make art yourself at all when you were younger?
That only came up later. My mother wanted to make sure I was well-rounded. I played clarinet in the band and learned how to paint when I was in 4th grade. I remember being in class and painting the house across the street that I could see through the window. That was good, but I had no intention to follow through on that.
What did you study at MassArt?
I ended up going to MassArt for painting. Here’s the thing: in order for me to get out of Hyde Park in the summer, when all these kids would be getting into trouble, my parents started bringing us to Gloucester, which is up north on Cape Ann. We’d go there to camp and my father would commute to work from there. We stayed in an art colony, and it was mostly artists from Canada and New York. All the dads were painters, and in the morning they’d go out in their station wagons, and then they’d come back in the afternoon with station wagons full of paintings. I thought it was magic. Every month or so they’d show off their works in the pine grove that was right there. This was at a time when I was thinking that I needed to make money, but I didn’t know what I could do. I asked one of my friend’s fathers—because my parents were not artists—if he could teach me to paint. He gave me a list and said, “If you can save money and buy all these art supplies, I can take you out.” I don’t think he ever thought I’d do it, but I did. I learned how to plein air paint and went from there.
When I went to MassArt for painting, I thought it’d be realism. I had no idea what contemporary art was going on. I didn’t even know Pollock’s name or what he did, so I got exposed to a lot, but I felt that painting had died. It’d come to a dead end and nobody could do anything else that would be exciting. And then discovered film. It was like, yes, this is what’s missing. I was doing abstraction expressionist stuff but I wanted them to move—the time element wasn’t there. Suddenly, I realized I could do something with film. I graduated in the first film class at MassArt; they started the film department while I was there, so it was a very interesting time.
Do you remember the first films you saw that made you realize all this?
I remember the first one, but unfortunately I don’t even know if it has a name. It was an accidental projection. A guy who was running the film class was projecting an image of a single dancer—I think it was a dancer in white against a black background—and he was projecting it on the wall while the room had the lights on. Again, it felt like magic. This woman was moving across the wall and it was like, “Oh shit, this is interesting.” I had no idea how to get there, but that was probably the first or second week of class.
The college film program brought in works by Brakhage—Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Mothlight (1963)—and with those films, I saw how to string images together in a way I might like. I didn’t know exactly how to do it, and my instructor was more interested in teaching us how to film motocross races (laughter), but I went through with it. I started making abstract work, though not as abstract as the works I made later on, but it was a start—I was throwing stuff together that didn’t have a narrative. I didn’t know that Window Water Baby Moving was a narrative. I never understood that Brakhage worked in narrative until I got to Chicago. I thought he was a totally abstract imagemaker, and I thought he was a painter, but he wasn’t.
So were those Brakhage films the only abstract works you saw at MassArt?
Actually yeah, that was it. Some Warhol films came up and that was interesting. Warhol was like a hero to me. There was Lonesome Cowboys (1968) and Empire (1965), which I didn’t get whatsoever, but it was fine. There was nobody in the film department that was interested in abstract art. It was only like a dozen students and none of them liked abstraction—they thought I was nuts. The instructor insisted that I make a print of my first film, and I hadn’t titled it—I just thought it was an untitled collage. He titled it Hellzapoppin’ (laughter). It’s like, okay fine, yeah just send it to the lab with this title. This was 1972.
So you finished school in Massachusetts and decided to go to school in Chicago right after?
It was the only place I applied to, and I was really sure of myself at the time. I got in, and I didn’t realize that the master’s program at the Art Institute was only 10 people as well, but Brakhage was there, so I had great expectations. Those expectations were dashed when I discovered he wasn’t actually teaching or critiquing film; he was just teaching film history. I didn’t realize how valuable that was until I got more into it, when I got on his wavelength. When he stopped talking about the films he was showing, he would start rambling, and I liked that—that was valuable. One of the first classes that I really remember is him introducing us to the idea of numen, or the spirits of places and how recognizing numen in life was important. It was about going with the flow, pretty much. He just started talking in a language I could understand. A lot of students would rehash his ideas afterwards—some of them were really into it, some of them weren’t.
There were all these stories he’d share about the filmmakers and why he thought they made certain choices. I think he showed a Buñuel film once and said, “Buñuel probably made this choice because he actually saw that in life, and then he recreated it on the screen.” But still, I realized that I felt so out of water in that place because I was the only one in the department who came to film from painting, or with a painter’s ideas and aesthetics. Everyone else was waxing poetic over Michael Snow, and it was very different. Jean Cocteau’s films were really influential to me, almost overly influential at one point, but I realized that he wasn’t an artist either. I mean, he is but he’s also not—he’s a poet. And Brakhage was a poet. That kind of firmed it up, that my idea was not that of a poet.
Early on, a few weird things happened with my films where they came back from the lab and weren’t exactly what I thought I was shooting. There were visual glitches happening, and some of it was because I was using a malfunctioning camera. Things weren’t constant, and there would be little surprises, and with Brakhage talking about numen, something hit home. I thought, oh, I shouldn’t throw that footage away. Like, this is giving me a visual that relates more to painting than I ever thought. So I went with that, and I was pretty much on my own—nobody encouraged it.
What you’re describing with these “errors” reminds me of your film ACE Number 5 (1974).
Yeah, that was like my second film, and the only one that had something longer than a mild glitch. So that film came back, and I was amazed by it. It has minor variations in the visuals, but they were enough to get my imagination going. And it was black and white. Then I decided to explore color and made a red one, a yellow one, and an orange one. It was the first film I made that other people got excited about. I showed it in class as black and white, and everyone was like, “Well, it looks like your camera’s off.” But when I made the color versions of it, it was like, “Oh, we wanna buy this for the collection [at the Art Institute].” I elevated it a little with the color.
Did Brakhage ever give feedback on your films?
He had this deal where he wouldn’t look at anyone’s films in person. He never went near the film department or anything, but if you wanted him to look at your work, you had to ship it to Colorado with a check to cover return postage [Editor’s Note: Brakhage would travel between Chicago and Colorado while teaching at the School of the Art Institute, often having film(s) shown one week and then arriving the week after for a lecture]. So that’s what I did. I think I sent him Latex Sky (1975). I don’t think he sent a note, I think he actually told me in person, “I looked at it and my kids liked it, but I don’t get what you’re doing.” That was it! That was all of my Brakhage feedback! (laughter).
This further steeled the idea that he was not a visual person, really. He stumbled upon visuals as a way to promote his ideas about poetry and narrative. Even with some of the films I really love that are really abstract, I don’t think he really meant for them to be what they simply are—it was always attached to this idea of seeing in his mind’s eye or reflecting his state in life or whatever. There was always this extra thing attached to them.
When I got to Latex Sky and the films that came after it, I started expanding the vocabulary: camera shakes, film manipulation, light manipulation. I pushed it to the point where I realized that what I was doing was extending the legacy of abstract expressionist painting. People would say, “Why don’t you add sound to it?” It bugged the hell out of me. The people I went to school with all edited to the sound. I would watch their works and think, nope, I don’t want to do that. I wanted to create a visual rhythm that was purely cinema. So that’s what I did. I started putting together these collages of stuff that came out of my camera. Three seconds of this, thirty seconds of that, splicing them together, and creating a rhythm. While looking at the film, my mind would hear a sort of rhythm.
I’m kind of surprised Brakhage didn’t get what you were doing. The reason his films work so well is because they’re silent, and that he trusts in the rhythm inherent to the images. Do you mind talking about how you made these early films like Latex Sky and River of Stars (1975). Where are you shooting these films? How are you making them?
In the beginning, I was getting these almost accidental camera movements and thought, oh, this creates a really interesting blur. I’d think about what I did and how I got there, and then I’d push the camera and shake it around. Then I discovered high-contrast negative film, which pushed things further. And as time went on, I realized I could rewind the camera and double expose, triple expose, and have four exposures. In shooting with my Bolex, I could shoot one frame at a time and adjust the exposure of those frames. That led to creating lines by moving the camera while pressing a single frame.
So a lot of the frames were done one at a time. I’d say, okay well this line I’m making is going left to right, then I’d rewind the camera and do some right to left, then rewind the camera and do some that were vertical. I’d then see what came back from the lab and I eventually ended up having control of what I was doing. And there was also a lot of going with the flow of water, with the camera steadily capturing it, but then I’d rewind and do another view of the water from a slightly different angle.
Were you doing this at Lake Michigan?
Yeah, I had an apartment that was right across the street from it. I lived north of Fullerton and south of Diversey.
So at the beginning, it was more of a trial-and-error thing before you really got a handle on things?
Yeah, it took a few films before I really got control of it, and I think you really see it when you watch them consecutively.
Was there a film where you felt you finally knew what you were doing?
Edge Forces (1976) and Silver Traces (1976). I considered my works to be collages, and because I wanted to increase my visual vocabulary, there were ones like Molten Shadow (1976) that were mostly blobs. I had blobs there and lines in a different film and I just kind of went with it. With the velocity of lines, they start pushing out on the edges of the film frame when projected, and that’s why it’s called Edge Forces—it’s all the bombardment on the edge of the screen with these images. My hero Franz Kline was probably rolling over in his grave to pay attention to that (laughter). So that was very satisfying. With Silver Traces I wanted things to be delicate, so I chose different light forms. All the images are just different manipulations of light on the film plane through exposure and whatever else.
It looks like there’s hair in that film in particular.
It wasn’t hair. I didn’t film stuff that was literal. There are curtains in one of them that flow, and that’s a reference to my late husband’s paintings. William Janosco. He and I both worked in black and white, and it was very interesting that we were the only ones at the Art Institute who did that. I liked some of his compositions and tried to make them move. We didn’t collaborate, though, his works were just a reference.
Did you meet him when you went to Chicago?
Yeah, he sold me a ticket to a movie (laughter). It was my first year there. He had this student job selling tickets at the Film Center screenings at night. A little flirtation went a long way, and we were together 50 years—how about that? He was a really talented painter. And this goes back to the numen aspect of things. When I decided to go to the Art Institute, they sent a little packet of information about the place, and it was reproductions of artwork made by students to get us excited about going there. He had made a colorful painting of bowties flying, and it just struck my imagination. I really liked that one a lot. And then there he was—he was the one. He was doing brightly colored things at the time, but then eventually went to black and white.
Do you feel your interactions with William informed the way you thought about your work beyond that homage with the curtains?
No. He wouldn’t critique my films. He’d just remain silent and watched. The best compliment he ever gave to me was when I overheard him talking to someone else. They asked, “What’s Bruce’s films like?” “They’re what I wish my paintings would do.” But outside of that, no response. Even when I made The Door (2005), which he has a cameo appearance in, he never read the screenplay or talked about the movie. He came to a lot of showings but never said a damn thing about them. He was supportive, but it was one of those things where he just wanted me to do what I wanted to do.
How did you end up making Frozen Flight (1977) and The Bridge of Heaven (1977)? These are longer works, around half an hour each, and I’m curious how you approached those works given the longer runtime. It’s clear that there’s more of a consideration for structure in these pieces—you have the “X” symbol appear on the screen at times.
Like trying to find different images to make—the blobs, the lines—I realized that I had no stillness. I also realized that some of the films would leave strong afterimages if there was a black area afterwards. But it was like, okay, how do I make a still image and put them in with all these moving ones that aren’t representational? I just started making lines, and sometimes the “X” would appear to float and have a movement, even though the camera’s not moving. It was like catching your breath.
Some of those lines I borrowed from William (laughs). With some of his paintings, he’d put white lines through them and they were geometric—he was into architectural form. I thought, well, I could make something simple: a square, or a fan shape. The “X” turned out to be best. But that’s what it was: “Okay, let’s take a breath.” People would look at my other films and not realize the collage aspect—it’s such a continuum happening on the screen that you don’t get different scene cuts as in a drama, so this was a way to say, “That section is over, here’s a new one.” The husband of one of my friends at the time was a computer programmer. He said, “Well, you’re creating associative systems. Any math guy is gonna know that.” And I thought, associative systems—that’s what it’s all about.
When I first saw the “X” I thought of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971). But based on what you said earlier, it seems like you weren’t a fan of his works?
No, I hated them. If I ever want to be bored I’ll watch his films (laughter).
What other experimental filmmakers did you like? Or did you just feel removed from this community in general?
I mostly related to films from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s: Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye. I don’t think I borrowed anything from them, but I realized, these are my people. They’re painters who went into film, and that’s what I related to. You know who else? Pat O’Neill.
I just showed four of his works on Tuesday.
I love Saugus Series (1974). It’s pretty different from what I do but it’s enriching to see it. The control and matting is something I admire a lot. I also felt like his personality was right there.
Do you feel like your personality comes through in your work?
I guess it does (laughs). I was showing my films in London—I think it was the International Avant-Garde Film Festival in 1979—and right before the show, I met some filmmakers and we were yakking away. Afterwards, a woman came up to me and said, “Talking to you beforehand, I thought these films would be really boring, but they’re not, they’re really sexual!” She really got it. I put my bedroom energy into those films. It’s a reflection of sexual energy 100%, whereas in my day-to-day life I’m perceived as being grounded and slow.
I used to get a lot of flak for being aggressive in marketing. It was not cool to be making postcards or posters about your stuff. One woman said to me, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you took all that energy and did something else with it?” (laughter). After that she goes, “Well, you can tell me to fuck off if you want.” “Yeah, fuck off.” (laughter). She was just full of herself.
Do you mind talking about the sexual energy that appears in your works, especially given that they’re abstract? Usually when I think of that with experimental film I think of someone like James Broughton, but his work is so literal.
It’s more the feeling. The rhythms I create in the films—the crescendo of emotion—the images reflect that to me. I think the way my brain works means that a lot of the world is abstract to me. With images, I can create that longing or the frenetic pace of interacting with someone. And, you know, that energy kept me up at night, and I poured it into these films.
Did you pretty much film all these in your home or at Lake Michigan?
Yeah, in my apartment and Lake Michigan. Sometimes I’d bring my camera with me. Island Design (1976) has a little bit of that. Some of that might’ve been filmed at Saint Croix. That was during a time when my style wasn’t totally gelled and I was poking around, trying to find it.
You already told me that people at SAIC were focusing on sound in a way you didn’t relate to. I’m curious if you also felt alienated in the film world because of your sexuality.
Yeah. My sexuality mattered a lot. I wasn’t totally out as gay when I started there. I was bisexual when I started but when I met William it was like, yeah, that’s it. When I first met him I had asked if he had met my girlfriend, who was also a film student. That sent his wheels spinning in the wrong direction (laughter). I had to explain later that I liked everyone, and I asked if we could get together. But yeah, it was definitely alienating. When I started going out with William, it was obvious to everyone what was going on. But as much as I didn’t relate to documentary, they didn’t relate to my sexual energy. But some did, especially the women.
Meeting William and being exposed to his paintings made me think, “I’ve finally found someone who likes abstraction.” And that gave me free rein to move ahead making abstract painting but with film. Before that, I was caught up with emulating Maya Deren. My girlfriend was a great filmmaker, her name was Diana Barrie. She worked in Super 8 and made this one great film, The Annunciation (1974). With her, I was reading poetry and getting confused about my painterly direction since it wasn’t being appreciated. Like, okay I understand James Broughton, and the poetry you’re having me read, and I understand this idea of “visual poetry,” so I tried a little bit of that, but within six months I was going out with William and thought, ah, I like this painted stuff better. I felt like I was more a part of this painting scene.
What did these Maya Deren-like works look like?
Not good (laughter). I started pulling images of people into the films, structuring things according to what I thought was a supernatural or spiritual story. It was student stuff—they can rot in the can (laughter).
Why did you decide to stop making films in the ’70s?
I had like 100 one-person shows in the space of a year in Europe and the United States, going around to colleges. I was getting a really good response in Europe and I thought that if I kept building up my resume and getting my work out there, someone would eventually give me a job teaching. That didn’t happen. I’d go out and they’d give me $100 to go to Berlin to do my shtick and it barely paid the hotel bill, and then I’d come back with like no money. And then I’d want to make another film and have to put in hundreds of dollars for that, and it eventually got to me: I can’t continue doing this. I couldn’t make money.
Being mercantile with my methods, I decided that I’d make paintings again and that people would maybe buy them. I made paintings of my film images, and lots of them. I found the most interesting film stills and airbrushed black and white on paper. Nobody related to it at all. I made photographs of the stills and nobody related to that at all either. Well, I shouldn’t say that. There was one gallery in Chicago that showed them but nobody bought any works. And the French National Library bought several of the photos, and that was good. I mean, it’s a good collection there in Paris, but nobody ever sees them. So that’s why I stopped—I needed money to pay rent.
What’d you do to make money?
I went on unemployment (laughter). I made those paintings while I was on unemployment. Also, the Art Institute canned me. I was working for the school’s art history department. At the time they had a slide library and I was in charge of the people working in that department, making slides for the art history professors and cataloging them. The school encouraged me to go on these trips and promote the school, but one time I came back and they said, “We don’t really need you anymore, here’s your two weeks’ notice.” I ended up getting an apprenticeship as a photo retoucher. I opened my own retouching studio, and I did work on color transparencies, which is very difficult by hand—this was before Photoshop. I worked on Keebler and Quaker Oats and Helene Curtis packaging, making sure the lady’s hair matched what it was supposed to look like. The advertising agencies paid me well to do that, and it kept me going. I didn’t see any reason to make another film.
You made New Kisses (2004) as a digital iteration of your older work. How did that come about?
The guy who was in charge of Chicago Filmmakers at the time.
Allen Ross?
Oh no, not Allen. Poor Allen. It was Patrick Friel.
Oh yeah, I talk with him every now and then.
He contacted me and wanted to show a few of my films at Chicago Filmmakers. He introduced me to digital filmmaking. They were giving classes then using Final Cut Pro, and it just got me interested in what I could do. My 16mm camera got stolen, so I didn’t have one, but I had old footage. I took the old images, projected them, and recorded it on a MiniDV camera and put that into Final Cut Pro. I was thinking about color and sound, and I went through three soundtracks and then stuck with the last one, which had these abstracted sounds of bugs outside my window. That was about it.
Did you come back to Chicago, or were you in Chicago this whole time?
I was in Chicago. I went through many occupations while there. The last one involved being a floor trader at the Board of Trade. I traded Treasury bonds and after three years I burned out, and then I opened an art gallery in Michigan. That did really well so then I opened up another gallery in Lincoln Park in Chicago, and then one in Wicker Park. The businesses were going well and I had free time because of that, so I decided to learn digital filmmaking and made New Kisses. William actually got really pissed off, like, “What the hell? New kisses? What’s this about?” He thought I was having an affair (laughter). He was jealous of nothing! (laughter). “Dear, I’m remembering you when it was new, and I put that energy into this movie.” He didn’t believe me.
And then I made [my narrative feature] The Door because my interests had all changed. I wanted drama, I wanted to work with actors. Chicago is really good for this because there are so many talented actors. There was an independent filmmakers group whose screenings I’d go to. I met a couple people—one wanted to be a producer, one wanted to be a scripty. I decided that I could make this film for $10,000. It ended up costing $24,000 but still—pretty good. We had casting calls and we had these actors who took my words and added stuff to them, which added nuance that I didn’t see. The nice thing about that was that there were so many nice locations in Chicago. I went to City Hall, I went to one of the public parks, and at the time I had a house in Michigan and a nice apartment in Chicago—I used both of those locations. I used one of my shops in Michigan too. So it was a full month of shooting scene after scene after scene, and I loved it. I don’t think I’d do it again—there’s a lot of energy involved.
When I started bringing it to film festivals, I realized that I made some huge mistakes in terms of marketability. I shot it on 24p because I liked the flicker effect. At the time, even though it was high-def, distributors wouldn’t take on anything that wasn’t 30p high-def. And the film festivals also wouldn’t take it because I didn’t have any known actors in it. So I went to film festivals like South by Southwest and met people and learned things. It only showed at one film festival in Beloit, Wisconsin. I had a great time, but it didn’t lead to anything.
I made another screenplay and was ready to have another feature going. It was called The Deer Thief. I met a producer who said that they had a pool of investors they could approach. We chose what actors we could choose, these B-list actors from Hollywood who would work for $200,000. We had everything lined up and it was like, “Okay, it’s time to have a party for the investors.” My producer ghosted me. There were no investors; it was just a bunch of bullshit. So that film didn’t happen. And shortly after that, there was a big recession and my galleries closed and I went bankrupt. End of story on that one.
Did you move out of Chicago after that?
No, I stayed for a while. My dad got sick and I was asked to come out and take care of him in Boston, where I live now. I went to the hospital and the doctor said there’d only be a week or two to live, but that he could go home if I took care of him. So I took him home, and he lasted seven years. Talk about good care (laughter). And I’ve been here in Boston since then.
What sort of works were you exhibiting at your galleries?
Well it started with my paintings, William’s paintings, and paintings by people I met at the Art Institute. And then we supplemented that with local Michigan artists. It was pretty good. It was in a second-home community where a lot of people were getting established, setting up new houses, and they needed decorations so they bought from us. There were a lot of paintings and prints, but then the market changed and people stopped buying paintings—that was interesting. I was interested in printmaking so I went out to San Francisco and learned photogravure. I walked by a shop and they had these beautiful rugs. The guy who owned the place came out and one thing led to another. When he found out I had a gallery he said, “Take these 10 rugs with you and you’ll sell them right away.” I took 10 rugs back and sold them in a week. People weren’t buying paintings; they were buying rugs like crazy. So I went back to San Francisco and got even more rugs.
It turns out that this guy and his brother were enormous importers of antiquities from China and India. These were Afghani guys. When they showed me all this furniture they had, I thought it looked great and they said, “Take it. Take five pieces of furniture with you with all the rugs.” And that stuff sold all the way. It turned out that my galleries in Michigan and Chicago ended up being about ethnographic antiques. There was a lot of African stuff I got from people outside of these guys from San Francisco. But those guys gave me a $200,000 loan to get started in Chicago. It was a Middle Eastern loan, and I wrote out twenty $10,000 checks. I’d just write one every month, and luckily I was selling enough to pay that off. Good experience.
Did you start making films again because of the screening you have in New York and this new interest from [film programmers] Andrew Reichel and Forrest Sprague?
Yeah. When I went to New York, I sat and watched some films with them and it felt like the old feelings I had back in the day. There was a community. I had been working the past several years with models—I painted nudes—so with that, and having a digital camera in my phone, I realized that I could do all this. Some of the new films feature models, others don’t because they’re more on the abstract end. Some of them are more narrative, like Bathroom Fuck (2026).
You were talking about the sexual energy in your older films and that’s more obvious in these newer works since you actually see naked bodies. What’s it like making these digital works?
What I’m doing is taking clips of film and putting them in Final Cut Pro and doing the sort of image alterations that I used to do with my camera. I can do multiple exposure, I can put images upside down. It’s been a lot of fun making these collages, and a lot of it is about yearning. It’s still sexual energy, just not as frenetic as when I was younger. My husband died two and a half years ago, and going out now has been a big change. It’s been providing me energy to make films. If I weren’t at this stage in my life, I don’t think I would’ve been making them. Like, I started working with models at a studio in Boston because I needed to get out of the house after my husband died. It’s something I wanted to do. And now I’m more interested in making films; we’ll see where it goes.
Were you using a Steenbeck to edit your films back then?
No. There were no B-rolls, it was all A-rolls. The images you see in my old films are exactly as they came out of my camera. All I did was arrange them into a collage. I’d look at them and think, “Okay, this has lines, this has blobs, this has smooth water. What do I want the rhythm of this film to be?” I never liked seeing a splice in the film, so I made sure that every passage I filed started and ended in black so I could put my splices there. I’d look at my film on my rewinds and it was like, okay here’s the black for the beginning and here’s the black for the ending. Clip, clip. And then I’d decide what to do with it.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I love that I’m still alive.
Bruce Wood’s films play today at Spectacle. His films will also play in Pittsburgh on August 2nd at Harris Theater and in Chicago on August 12th at Elastic Arts. Info for these screenings can be found here. More information about Bruce Wood can be found at his website. Some of his films can be seen on his YouTube channel.
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