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was supposed to seem. This was the real stuff, a window on the way things really were in the Big World, which I was dying to get to. It was thrilling actuality, glares and flashes of "reality," what people really
did
. And I loved the stylesimple, straightforward, directand the basic idea of "witness": eyes and ears of the world you might say, Buddhalike, nonjudgmental eye on suffering and on joy. Every conceivable human emotion would be engaged in the seven or eight minutes of the format. And they were strangely innocent, elegant, and severe. The cameramen and editors were studio-trained and knew all the tricks of classical composition and montage ("Russian cutting," they called it). Newsreels were an endless source of innocent, unintentional surrealism. Sex, disguised, and death, made plain, were the great themes. Buñuel himself once said that on his best day he couldn't hope to create images as bizarre as one could see every day in the newsreels.
Of course, they were all produced and controlled by the major movie studios (Hearst Metrotone was the exception) and issued each week as part of an entertainment package, carefully calibrated to the comprehension level of some mythical hick in Indiana, and they were all hysterically patriotic, and fundamentally fascist and manipulative, but they were great all the same, and they affected me greatly. Not so strange that over the years I've always made my living working around "news" in one form or another.
(There's an amusing passage in a novel by Harry Crews where the narrator delays orgasm by remembering newsreels he has seen of death, disasters, and various horrors. He recommends Pathe News as a specific for premature ejaculation and for birth control in general.)
MacDonald:
What was
The New York Miseries
?
Noren: The New York Miseries
was meant to be a personal "newsreel," to document absolutely every aspect of my life, starting with the small domestic things and then moving out into the larger social context. I would try to shoot a one-hundred-foot roll each week, if I could afford to buy and develop a rollI was very poor. I filmed virtually every person that I knew then; I filmed family, landlord, employer, police. And I filmed myself cooking, eating, sleeping, lovemaking. I filmed in the supermarket, bank, and my workplace . . . you get the idea. Each roll was sort of a core-sample extracted directly from the heart of my life. The style was very simple and straightforwardminimum of artifice. I would simply focus on the situation, turn on the camera and let the roll run out. I was naive enough to believe that there was an objective "truth" that could be "captured" in this way. I later accepted ''version," instead of truth. There's some commentary on this period in my life in the published screenplay of
David Holzman's Diary,
by Jim McBride.