ABOUT THOMAS WRIGHT
Thomas Wright (1951-1992) was a Colorado-born, New York-based filmmaker who made short, personal works that “[…]exist somewhere between diaristic film essays and landscape documentaries.” He began making films at the University of Denver in 1973 with equipment borrowed from the school. Wright made his films by himself, shooting with a Bolex and editing on an upright Moviola he kept in his basement.
Wright’s childhood home, third from left.
While Wright made over 30 films, most were only ever screened for friends and family, and his autodidactic editing process and haphazard archival approach meant that most of his films are incomplete or altogether lost. Wright died in 1993 from heart complications related to a lifetime of substance abuse.
Wright’s Moviola
Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright
Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright is a 2022 experimental docu-fiction film directed by George Matthews.
The film is an attempt to explore the narrative possibilities established by the found footage horror genre over the last thirty years. It is not a horror film, but rather found footage of the mundane; a reinterpretation and rearrangement of the genre’s ruleset that takes the form of the pseudo-artifact left by a documentary filmmaker whose untimely demise is foreshadowed in the presentation of the film itself. In this way, its core structure mirrors that of The Blair Witch Project or Creep.
By setting the film in 1992, Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright utilizes the structures of found footage to examine the aesthetics of history, nature, and remembrance on film and ask playful questions surrounding the value placed on older and more obscure media in critical and artistic circles.
Low Tide DLC
In the tradition of quickly produced sequels of dubious quality so common to the found footage genre, Low Tide DLC is an expansion on the outlook and personal, political and artistic philosophies of fictional filmmaker Thomas Wright, completed shortly after the release of Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright in 2023.
The film, set in 1988, is a study of American maritime landscapes, the shores of the North Atlantic and the Great Lakes. It is scored by an electroacoustic composition utilizing field recordings made on-site at the locations where filming took place, as well as archival audio sourced to the geographical regions portrayed in the film. The composition was made using period-accurate analog audio manipulation techniques.
491, VA
491, VA is the final installment in the Thomas Wright trilogy. The film was released in January of 2024. It consist of several tableaus of the various landscapes and textures found in Richmond, Virginia Beach and the Northern Neck, each lasting exactly four hundred and ninety-one frames. The film climaxes in a brief monologue from Wright himself, commenting on the weather-related anxieties and other fears he felt while shooting the film’s final chapter in Virginia Beach, VA.
491, VA is a fitting end to the Thomas Wright project, one that gives a figurative and literal voice to Wright as a filmmaker and grants him a life beyond the death sentence given in the opening frames of Low Tide: A Newly Restored Work by Thomas Wright.
