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From Noren's
The Lighted Field
(1987).
Noren:
No,
Change of Heart
was a sound film and all of the early one-take films I mentioned were sound on film. Also, I'm working on one right now.
I'm interested in how the mind manufactures pictures in response to sound, how it converts sound into imaginary light, so to speak, imaginary images. What exactly are these images, what are they made of, how are they made, where do they come from? A curious thing is that I always have a strong sense of a "projected" image, and of a "spectator." So where, exactly, is this image being projected, who is the spectator, who is the projectionist, and Where and what is the screen? Of course, the mind does this all the time, even without sound stimulus, as in memory and in dream images. And, as every child knows, sit in the dark with your eyes closed and you will be presented with an automatic "movie" of considerable vividness and detail.
We don't really "see" anyway, so much as "imagine." Our sight is imaginary, as R. L. Gregory demonstrated some twenty years ago. Each eye is separately informed, and the information supplied to each eye is constantly being synthesized and interpreted and processed into imaginary constructs. This is the continuous natural movie of the world, which each of us is busily engaged in creating all the time, even in sleep.
MacDonald: The Wind Variations
was the first of your films I ever saw. I was at the Whitney Museum screening room, with a small audi-