A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Huge Pupils,

although I didn't release it until a couple of years later. All of that was simultaneous. Up until this time I couldn't afford to shoot in color. I remember a golden age of black and white when it was incredibly cheap; you could buy and develop a one-hundred-foot roll of black and white for five or six dollars. It was almost like [Alexandre] Astruc's ideal of the camera-stylo, of film being as cheap as pen and paper. That was some time ago, but it's now possible again, or almost, with video.

MacDonald:

Each of the film's six sections is, I believe, done in a different location, and each explores somewhat different sets of variables, within the general subject of light/shadow and the movement of the wind in the waving curtains. Is the order in which we see the six rolls the order in which they were shot? If not, what was the logic behind your choice of order?

Noren:

I made

The Wind Variations

in a few hours on two winter days, two different windows, in a rapture. I shot eight one-hundred-foot rolls, later rejected two of them, and arranged the remaining six in the order in which they were shot. As you can see from

The Lighted Field,

the subject still fascinates me.

MacDonald:

During the late sixties, a number of people were beginning to do films that provide meditative experiences. Were you in touch with other filmmakers working in similar areas?

Noren:

Not really. I was aware of Bruce Baillie's

Still Life,

which I liked a lot, though I haven't seen it for years. And Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland's

Dripping Water

. But you have to remember, the meditative stare was in the air, so to speak, at that time.

MacDonald:

This is also the earliest film in which your fascination

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with lightI'm tempted to say your fetishization of lightis evident. At what point did light become the focus of your filmmaking?

Noren:

Around the time of

Huge Pupils

I suppose, although it's very hard to say. I don't care for 'fetishization'; it suggests irrational obsession, and that is inaccurate.

I've described my feelings about light earlier. There is nothing mystical or arcane or irrational about it. We are made of the sun. That's where we came from. Anything less than a consuming interest in light seems strange to me.

I was very amused recently when I came across a line of John Milton's in which he defines light as 'darkness made visible.' Not surprising from a blind man, but what a wiseguy!

At the risk of having my poetic license revoked, you could say that

The Wind Variations

is the solar wind made visible.

MacDonald:

Like

The Wind Variations, Huge Pupils

seems an experiment in broadening your dexterity with the camera. What led you to the diary form?

Noren:

I never thought of it as 'diary'; in fact, I doubt if I was consciously thinking in terms of any particular form at all. Jonas Mekas described it as such after the fact, I think because he

was

consciously working that form and saw some affinities, but that concept was never useful to me. I think what was really at work was my old fascination with 'news,' in this case news of what I took to be heaven. The style and stance are there, hand-held and eye-level, steadfast and innocent of artifice and mortalityinnocent, period. Trying to 'record' that light storm of ghostly beauty blowing around me, doomed in the attempt, as we always are. And ghosts they were and are: the people by now aged to unrecognizability, the animals dust long since, the rooms themselves demolished; the only remaining trace is a length of decaying plastic with a few inaccurate shadows, rapidly fading. But I was sincere.

The shooting was improvisatory in the extreme. It was very important to me to be able to respond immediately and completely to whatever moved me at a given moment, with a minimum of art thought. It was the Code of the West . . . shoot first and ask questions later. I never used a light meter or tripod. My fond wish at the time was for a cinema of pure telepathy . . . transmission of visual energy direct from mind to mind, no fooling around with machinery. Everything was done in-camera at the moment of filming, complete trust of intuition, 'first thought, best thought,' thinking that being 'right-minded' in the given moment would assure a successful outcome.

I was trying for a direct life-energy transmission, unrestricted by culture and by intellectualization about art.

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MacDonald:

When was the title changed from 'Kodak Ghost Poems' to 'Huge Pupils'? And why?

Noren:

The title was changed because I was threatened with a lawsuit by Eastman Kodak for copyright infringement