Here’s where I’ll post any screenings coming up that Zena and/or I are programming!
(Click pictures for links to info/tickets!)
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Thursday, January 22, 2026 @ 7:30pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
**(note earlier start time!)**
Fred Worden: A Cinema of Pure Energy
featuring live sound accompaniment for the 16mm film One (1998)
by Elaine Carey!
Double feature!
Program 1 will begin at 7:30.
Program 2 will begin at approximately 9:15pm.
One ticket is good for both!
Elaine Carey performs in program 2!
For our first event of 2026, Lightstruck is extremely excited to present a double feature of programs from one of our 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 approximately 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. Extra special thanks to Elaine Carey! Big thanks and big love to Fred, Monique, and Fred’s entire family.
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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 