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Andrew Noren
Andrew Noren has been making contributions to North American independent film since the mid sixties. As interesting as his early films seem to have been, few survive, as a result of a fire in 1970. Noren began with a Godard-inspired experimental narrative,
A Change of Heart
(1965, lost in the fire), and thenperhaps as a reaction to his day job as an apprentice editor at a network news departmentbegan making films characterized by long, continuous shots.
The New York Miseries
(c. 1965 to c. 1967) was made up of single-take, 100-foot rolls of 16mm film (each approximately three minutes long) in which Noren documented "absolutely every aspect of my life." Though
The New York Miseries
was destroyed in the fire, Noren's quest to capture his own experience was dramatized in Jim McBride's
David Holzman's Diary
(1967). L. M. Kit Carson, who played David Holzman, later described Noren and his influence on McBride: "The un-camera-shy Norenin America, where most filmmakers either fear or worship the camerathis Noren who unscrewed the lens from the camera and pushed his fingers into the guts of the camera while it was running, he was onto something. . . . And when Jim talked to Noren now, Noren kept kicking Jim's imagination in the ass" (from the introduction to the screenplay of
David Holzman's Diary,
pp. viiiix). An unpublished interview McBride and Carson had conducted with Noren had already raised the question of cinema "truth," a central topic not only of
David Holzman's Diary,
but of
Say Nothing
(1965), the one surviving instance of a series of thirty-minute, single-shot films.
Say Nothing
is an "interrogation'' of an actress/character by the filmmaker that hovers between fiction and documentary.