LIGHTSTRUCK is a Los Angeles based experimental film screening series curated by Zena Grey and me (Mark Toscano), and info on all of our screenings (and more) can be found here (and on IG @lightstruckfilm).
But LIGHTSTRUCK is also a website meant to function as a growing home for info and resources related to experimental film, archiving and archival whatnot, and other related stuff, including film programs, texts, anecdotal and tech info, artist filmographies, and even the film stocks database I’ve been working on for many years (and which will be in a perpetual state of being updated and added to).
I realize that a regular ol’ website as a useful repository of info is a notion that has become a bit antiquated for some, but I decided to commit to this approach because not only is it by far a more effective and flexible way to host and share lots of weird data and information about a specific esoteric topic, but I also like the idea that it acts as a virtual space that people can hopefully visit and dig around in. I also hope that the extremely basic nature of the site will make it easier to use and engage with its information, because I don’t know about you, but I find the contemporary tendency of vastly overdesigned and visually busy sites to be exhausting.
Please note that all text on this site is written by me (Mark Toscano) unless otherwise attributed, so please do credit me (and/or other authors attributed) if you quote or use it anywhere (if for no other reason than I’d love for people to know that this resource is here for them to use as well!)
I also have a blog/site called Preservation Insanity, which ideally I’d like to get back to contributing to, but which regardless still has a bunch of fun stuff about experimental film and archiving, including anecdotal tidbits and some longer-form articles I’ve written on this subject over the years.
OUR NEXT LIGHTSTRUCK EVENT:
Thursday, February 19, 2026 @ 8:00pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Tacita Dean & Robert Nelson: Acting on Film
Tacita Dean in person!
Lightstruck is honored to welcome artist Tacita Dean for a rare cinematic projection of her riveting 2015 film Event for a Stage, paired with Robert Nelson’s seldom seen 1982 short film Hamlet Act, both screening in their original 16mm format. These two remarkable films each explore the endlessly complex interplay between live performance and cinematic construction, as the camera, editing, and even the director’s presence complicate the illusion of narrative continuity, not to mention the presumptive reality that appears to hover at the margins.
Nelson’s film is a brilliant and unusual deconstruction of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, activated into multiple, recursive layers of artifice through its employment of film and video to extend the original text’s nested complexity. Outtakes, retakes, and the typically unseen ragged edges of live performance carry as much meaning here as Shakespeare’s precise words and stage directions, giving us an exploded view of the highly constructed nature of cinematic performance.
Also invoking Shakespeare is actor Stephen Dillane in Dean’s breathtaking film, in which the volleying interactions between actor and director frame an almost molecular exploration of live performance and its resistance and acquiescence to being captured. Dean filmed the absolutely magnetic Dillane over four disparate performances, recomposing them into an explicitly filmic thread of continuity as he navigates between themes of memory, forgetting, family, artifice, and above all, the slippery power balance between actor and filmmaker at the heart of every cinematic performance.
program:
Hamlet Act (1982) by Robert Nelson, 16mm, bw, 19.5m
Event for a Stage (2015) by Tacita Dean, 16mm, color, 50m
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Very special thanks to Tacita Dean, with additional thanks to Marine Pariente and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Event for a Stage courtesy of Tacita Dean and Marian Goodman Gallery. 16mm print of Hamlet Act courtesy of the estate of Robert Nelson and Canyon Cinema.
LIGHTSTRUCK 