Luke Thompson is a Tulsa-based experimental filmmaker. After working in avant-garde film for multiple years, he has recently started the Available Light Cinema Club as a way to share experimental and underground film pieces with other artists of diverse backgrounds.Luke will participate as a panelist in the Sunday panel, Drilling Underground. 

 

Gabe Wyatt, WOEFF: So, in a broad sense, how did The Golden Bough come about? 

 

Luke Thompson: This kind of started out honestly as a sort of video diary of my summer in 2024. My general approach is to shoot things all the time. I will sometimes spend hours in my apartment just shooting through my windows. I find a lot of peace in that. And so a lot of times I'mshooting things very much spontaneously. Essentially, I'm shooting with the intention of bringing things together that seem to complement or rhyme with each other. With a very special experience, I had seeing several Stan Brakhage films that were new to me on 16 millimeter, I was just really reacquainted with what is special to me about cinema, which is the musicality of images. This was a weird limbo space in my life where I was feeling a lot of new emotion and passion. I experienced some personal tragedy and then immediatelyafter that, a lot of new joy. And so, that's really what it ended up being: an exploration. I feel like now all of my films, um, increasingly so, are snapshots of where I am emotionally and mentally at any given time in my life. Once I decided that I was going to limit the scope of this film to that summer, essentially, I found that I gave it a meaning that wasn't there when I was just looking at all this raw footage.  

 

GW: You're breaking it down to its most simple forms. It's just images telling a story. Obviously, there's no sound. Was that an important decision for you? 

 

LT: That was a very scary thing I’ve never done. Even though it was difficult to get accustomed to, it was very freeing to work without sound because I am usually so dependent on that guiding the tone.  

 

GW: I think, to me, these images give a sense of nostalgia and also a sense of meditation. When you looked back at the footage from the summer, did you get these feelings or did that come in the edit?  

 

LT: A little bit of both. I feel that I was very attuned to what I was shooting, maybe more so than I have been at other times. I was feeling very sensitive to the sensations of the world and what I was experiencing during the time that I was shooting all this. So I was already sort of preemptively feeling a sense of nostalgia. I feel that my work, at its basest level, is about the passage of time and recollection.  

 

GW: Does the opening quote tie into that a bit? 

 

LT: Yes, the film opens with a quote, as my films often do. Sometimes I find that a piece of text can inspire the shape of the film. Sometimes it's the other way around. The text that I use at the beginning of this film is from a Keats poem, “Ode on Melancholy.” It's just talking about the inextricability of joy and tragedy. It's the hot-and-cold, hungry-and-full situation, where they go hand in hand, and you have to accept both to experience either. I already had a feeling I couldn't express, and when I came across that poem, it resonated deeply with me. This film visually is very dark, but also very light. It has a fixation on light. I mean, that's a very kind of simple way to look at it, but I think it's also maybe one of the better ways to look at it.  

​

GW: You could say it's a simple way, but I don't see it as simple. Especially the end sequence of the film is nothing but light and shadow. It's at first hard to know what you're looking at, but turns into something beautiful. That being the final image, in silhouette, is just so powerful. Are you the silhouette in the ending frame and how did you do that final sequence?  

 

LT: All of my films, I feel, are from a first-person perspective, but some of them have a greater level of detachment. With this, I didn't want to shy away from the fact that this is an expression from deep within me. This is one of the first films I've ever made that has people in it. Like, at all. Which includes members of my family and, at the end, myself. I did feel like it was important to end with that image of myself. I feel like that sequence is also the best example of what I was talking about with the dark and the light. I mean, that's all it is, is the space, the lit space, and the negative space. I also, as I said, other members of my family are included in it, including my late older brother's son, my nephew. I shot that footage while he was still alive, and then edited it after he passed. It's all sort of frozen in time. 

 

GW: Yeah, absolutely. There's something about it that, even if you are a viewer who doesn’t know who the filmmaker is, you get a sense that it is the filmmaker pictured in the final sequence. We’ve been seeing through the eyes of this person.  

 

LT: Yes, this was another inspiration from seeing so many Brakhage films. So was the silence, the decision to make it fully silent. I was like, I think I am emboldened to make this choice because I see what kind of effect it can have for all of the musicality to be expressed through the image itself. With Brakhage, and with several other of my favorite filmmakers in my inspirations, are always self-inserting, and it's always moving to me because with this kind of filmmaking, it's as if you are representing yourself more clearly than you can as a physical presentation. You're more yourself in your film than you are.  

 

GW: Since you’re from Tulsa and avant-garde film is so grounded in community, what is it like being an experimental filmmaker, specifically in Oklahoma? Have you started to see this niche community start to grow around you in recent years? 

 

LT: Yeah! I appreciate that question because it's been on my mind quite a bit. I take great satisfaction in being able to make the films that I make within my means and where I currently am. That’s the most important thing to me in my practice: making films where I am and within my means. We’re in a place where outsider art, experimental art, and avant-garde art do not necessarily have the infrastructure to flourish, but something like WOEFF is. There's a reason I've been three years in a row. It's amazing and so inspiring to me that this space has been created in Oklahoma, which does not seem to lend itself on a broad social level to that kind of work. But what I think is important is we are, as a species, more attuned to each other and more global and more open-minded than we ever have been. We have a tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and expanding our sense of being. And that's what experimental film and art, in general, is all about. I've tried to make a change in my own small way.  

 

GW: Absolutely. On Sunday, the 26th, you’ll get to discuss that even more in depth, which is exciting! 

 

LT: Yes, my partner and I have started a group called Available Light Cinema Club. It’s been a very small, very committed group of people, and there are always new people joining from various disciplines and spheres of influence, but anyone who has never encounteredanything that could correctly be termed experimental joins us for screenings of films. I am completely blown away by how immediately they are attuned to it. A lot of people did not know what they were getting into. And every one of them came up to me afterward to say how much they loved and appreciated the experience of getting to see something like that.