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Another project that occupied a lot of my time then was a script for a feature. The working title was
The Big Picture,
and of course, there was no chance of it getting made, but it still interests me in a way. The basic idea was simple enough: a movie crew shooting a movie about a movie crew that was shooting a movie about a movie crew that was shooting . . . film within a film within a film to infinity.
Another "truth" operation. The cardinal rule was that every last foot of film that was shot would be used, and used in the order in which it was shot. For example, if the "A" crew shot fifteen takes of Scene 7A, in order to get the "right" one, then all fifteen would be included in the final film. If the "B" crew shot ten takes of the "A'' crew filming the fifteen takes of Scene 7A, then all of those takes would be included, and so on. If a total of two hundred hours of film were shot, the final version of
The Big Picture
would be two hundred hours long. Mind you, the "A" crew would be filming actors pretending to be filming other actors who would be pretending to film other actors, et cetera. Much use was to have been made of "takes" and "mistakes" and "out-takes." Everything would be included. I've always been fascinated by out-takes, by what goes "wrong." An actor forgetting his lines or looking at the camera by accident, one fiction collapsing instantly into another; the shot at that moment changing from an "acted fiction" into a document, which of course it was all along; all narrative films are really documentaries about actors pretending. Anyway, it was to be about the impossibility of ever getting "behind the scenes." I was working on several other scripts at that time as well. It was the next best thing to actually making the films.
MacDonald:
Were there other kinds of work?
Noren:
I worked with loops for a while, using found footage. I did some cut-up films under the influence of [William S.] Burroughs/[Brion] Gysin. I would raid the waste containers at the Film Center Building on trash pickup day. There were a lot of film labs in the building and you could find thousands of feet of imperfect prints, rejects of all kinds: "educational" films, nature documentaries, pornography, military training films, everything. So took all of this material and cut it up at random into uniform lengthsI think it was twenty-four-frame sectionsand then put the pieces into a large box and tossed them until any selection would be totally random. Then without looking to identify the pieces, I would splice them all together and recut the whole thing, starting in the middle of the original twenty-four-frame piece, jumping the first splice, and ending in the middle of the next twenty-four-frame piece. Then I would recut and retoss these pieces and randomly splice them together so that each piece was now twelve frames long and so on. I ended up with shots that were about four frames long and thousands of splices. When it