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, January 22, 2026 @ 7:30pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
**(note earlier start time!)**
Fred Worden: A Cinema of Pure Energy
Double feature!
Program 1 will begin at 7:30.
Program 2 will begin at approximately 9:15pm.
One ticket is good for both!
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. Big thanks and big love to Fred, Monique, and Fred’s entire family.
LIGHTSTRUCK 