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was physically impossible to continue I would print the result. This was very laborious and time consuming, needless to say, and very difficult to print, but they were interesting, especially the relation of the sound to the picture. At the time I sort of scorned them, I think because of the "found" nature of the material; my feeling was that because I didn't shoot the images myself, the process was invalid. I think they'd be very interesting today.
Anyway, all of the early films were shown, usually once or twice, at the Cinematheque when it was in the basement of the Wurlitzer Building on Forty-first street. If my memory serves, this would be around 196566.
I also did a series of ten-minute, one-take films of people bathing, stationary cameraa meditative stare at the act itself. The fascinations were, of course, the beauty of the human body and the peculiar, dreamy, self-absorption that comes over humans when they're submerged in warm amnioticlike liquid. Defenses drop and more private and vulnerable aspects of personality emerge. An interesting section from this series was of George and Mike Kuchar, twins, bathing together. George insisted on wearing a three-piece business suit in the tub because he was shy. Somehow a puppy got in there with them. I doubt if anyone got clean, but it turned into a strange and tender document. I always liked George because of his kindness to animals.
MacDonald:
So far as I know,
Say Nothing
is the earliest of your films still in distribution. It's an unusual single-shot film, thirty minutes long, and dramatic. Could you talk about the genesis of that project? [For some years one other relatively early Noren film was available from Film-makers' Cooperative:
Scenes from Life: Golden Brain Mantra
(1972), a double projection of buildings exploding in slow motion, in forward and reverse, that "was intended as mantra, to run perpetually, viewer to enter/leave at any point. Originally B&W on color stock. On occasion I provided live piano accompaniment, extempore, a la 'perils of . . .' " (letter to author, April 4, 1989).]
Noren: Say Nothing
was made in half an hour one afternoon in 1965. I was able to borrow an Old Auricon synch-sound news camera for the weekend. Great cameras, by the way; you used to see them around all the time. This one had a twelve-hundred-foot magazine, so that determined the length of the film. I thought of the film one Saturday morning over coffee and shot it the next week. It was shot on 16mm Tri-X reversal, a continuous twelve-hundred-foot take, optical sound on film.
Many fascinations were at work there. I was interested in the idea of the "screen test" as a form in itself and wanted to work with that. Also, I had a mischievous interest in subverting the cinema-verité ideas that had such currency then. [Jean-Luc] Godard's definition of film as "truth twenty-four times a second" was much quoted. One of the first things I