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zling over
Heaven and Earth Magic
[1960]. He'd drop by the Co-op from time to time in various states of altered awareness and was often brilliant in conversation; Cabala and Bach, peyote songs and Haida masks, string games and dreamtime, riddles of the Rosy Cross. He was tiny, hunched, gnomic, wizardly, and I was young enough to be in awe of his occult erudition.
Hollis Frampton I met through Michael Snow. He and I had next to nothing in common, and so I saw very little of him.
Jack Smith was around a lot. He was at the height of his infamy then, because of
Flaming Creatures
. A strange figure . . . tall, gawky, long-beaked, storklike. I didn't care for
Flaming Creatures
[1963], but I'd often go to his slide show/performances at the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis, which was wherever Jack happened to be living at the time. They were often wonderful. There was absolutely no demarcation between what was "performance" and his "real" life. He was notorious for taking hours getting started . . . in fact things never really did get started. He just lived and you could share that.
He would show things that he'd dragged in off the street, play his favorite records, read aloud from books and newspapers, musing and brooding. You had the feeling that he'd be doing the same thing whether there was an audience or not. He was very political in the truest sense, and the only true socialist I ever met.
The Secret of Rented Island
and
Sacred Landlordism of Lucky Paradise
were political art of a very high order.
MacDonald:
I'm unclear about the chronology of your work, but from what you've said to me, there were a good many films, made at the beginning of your activity as a filmmaker, that no longer exist. I remember you telling me about a number of early single-shot films, made as a series.
Noren:
A lot of my earlier films were destroyed accidentally in 1970; I was working in film as early as 1965. I made
A Change of Heart
then, a long narrative film with sound, and
Say Nothing,
which still survives. I did several similar one-take thirty-minute films. One was an "interview" with a former concentration camp guard; another was an interview with a pair of twin brothers who were idiot-savants; and a number of other things in that format. Also, a very long film,
The New York Miseries,
which was made up of "one-take," three-minute, one-hundred-foot sections. This was the precursor of
The Exquisite Corpse
and was inspired in a way by the Lumière brothers, by Balzac, who I was reading at the time, and also by news reportage.
One of my first film fascinations was with newsreels. I was crazy about them. This was before television, if you can imagine that. I think what attracted me was that the people in them were not "acting," or so it