Though by all accounts it was not intended, I took this as something of a history of Western painting, or perhaps a questioning of some of that history’s common conclusions. Brakhage alternates conventionally photographed and painted images. In fact, he alternates photographed and painted frames. In this The Wold Shadow qualifies as a structuralist film, which is an idiom or approach that Brakhage tended not to subscribe to. An interesting and important entry then, but the thing that I noticed most was bound up in my own viewing experience. We’ve noted it before: paint can be pretty abstract, but even at its most non-representational, it keeps reminding you of actual objects, things, the real world.