a meditation on the winter light flowing through two windows, as it is modulated and transformed by the window curtains blowing in the breezeand
the first of a series of films that have become known as
.
(originally entitled 'Kodak Ghost Poems') is a compilation of domestic moments, often tender, sometimes meditative, consistently lovely, and sometimes startling in their openness about sexuality. Other than Carolee Schneemann's
(1967), I know of no instance where a viewer shares so openly and directly in a filmmaker's experiences with a lover.
Since the completion of
(reworked in 1977), Noren has completed four sections of
these are
(1974) and
(1975), both currently out of distribution, being reworked, and the two most recent films:
(1978) and
(1987). Increasingly, Noren's interest is light itself, as it is captured and manipulated by camera and filmmaker. After his exploration of color in
and
Noren returned to black and white and has proved himself a master of black-and-white filmmaking. Of course, other contemporary independents have done remarkable work with black and white (Su Friedrich and Peter Hutton, for example), but if one thinks of the movie camera as an instrument with which a filmmaker can compose and perform visual music, Noren may well be the most accomplished visual musician we have.
reveals that Noren is at the peak of his form: the film is a visual phantasmagoriaexquisite, scintillating, sensual, sometimes nearly overwhelming.
My interview with Noren was conducted in an unusual way. Once he had agreed to do an interview, Noren asked me to send him a list of questions, which I did in the summer of 1990. He labored for some months on answers, and we worked together, by mail and phone, condensing and refining the interchange.
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When I learned you're originally from Santa Fe, and that you continue to visit New Mexico regularly, I was surprised. It helps account for your fascination with light, but I'm amazed that you've not used that section of the country as a subject for a film.
The light there had a great influence on me and still does. There's a sense in which it made me. I was drawn to it very strongly, early in my life, a natural and very powerful attraction. An early mem-
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ory is of sitting under a cottonwood tree behind my parents' house, September afternoon light of great clarity with a wind blowingyou know how cottonwood leaves shiver and tremble in the wind. I sat there watching the light and the leaf shadows dancing on the dust, listening to the wind in the leaves. It was my first movie and a great one. I was bewitched by it.
At night out there the stars are so vivid and immense that the existence of other suns and other worlds is made very apparent, commonplace. I couldn't have expressed it at the time, but I came to realize back then that light is alive and intelligent . . . the living thought of the sun, you might say . . . and what could be more intelligent than the sun? There's a very real sense, a very literal, unmystical sense in which this world and everything in it is made of the sun and by it. We are part of it. So my interest in light is quite natural; there's nothing esoteric about it. It's been one of the great passions of my life.
Over the years I've shot a great deal of material out there; some of it has been included in the films I've released, but there's more in existence that I haven't used yet.
Were movies an early interest?
Yes. At the time I lived in New Mexico it was still very wild, as though the twentieth century hadn't happened yet . . . in spite of Los Alamos. I didn't get to see many films, but I loved them. The communication of thoughts by means of pictures interested me very early. I taught myself how to read by means of comic books, studying the pictures and then asking what the words meant. I was fascinated by the way that words, which are literal pictures themselves, form pictures on the imaginary screen of the mind; and fascinated by spoken words and by sound itself and by music for the same reason, their power to conjure pictures. Radio and comics were most important to me. I was a passionate fan of 'The Shadow' and of Krazy Kat. Later on, I fought my way to books and records in quantity and devoured them; I was starving for them. Blake and Stravinsky, Scriabin and Raymond Chandler, Swedenborg and Django Reinhardt, John Donne and Jerry Lee Lewis, Yeats and Wolfman Jack from down on the border, who blasted out the international rock-and-roll beat to the backwoods.
When did you come to New York?
Noren: The mid sixties. Left home and caught the first thing smoking for the imperial city, where I hoped to find fame, money, and the love of beautiful women . . . all of which have continued to elude me . . . just kidding, all of which I found in one degree or another.
How did you support yourself?
