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I remember that Christopher Smart was on my mind. I found out about him from Benjamin Britten's working of
Rejoice in the Lamb
. And John ClareI picked up a ragged old copy of his poems in a London bookstall for fifty cents. No one had ever heard of him over here. I admired them both for their incredible openness. Neither of them was a very good poet technically, and both were as mad as March hares, but they both got the full lethal high-voltage jolt of life straight, without protection or defense, the undiluted juice right from the source. And it killed them both, of course, but for their few luminous moments they got it right, as Blake did. Smart was incarcerated for stopping people on the street and asking them to join him in kneeling on the pavement to thank God for the miraculous beauties of the world.
Anyway, I was a kid and aspired to such openness, and I had all the things I loved around me in those ghost rooms, now gone. Ghost-woman and ghost-light, and my familiars, ghost-dog and ghost-cat, beauteous apparencies, and I tried to catch them, with my little shadow catcher, to stop their vanishing, but they vanished anyway.
MacDonald:
In terms of technique, you seem to be exploring new areas in these films. Was this your first use of single framing?
Noren:
I think so. After a period of very long takes, I got interested in the possibility of twenty-four different images in a projected second, working with the individual frame as the basic unit.
There were a few people working in single frames then, but for the most part they all seemed to be trying to force techniques from other art forms onto film, which never seemed to work too well, that is, each frame as a word or syllable, or each frame as a musical note or a brush stroke, trying for a synthesis that was never really possible. I was interested in using single framing to convey kinetic energy. If it's done right, it can evoke states of high energy in the mind. Also, for me it's a much more accurate graphing of the flow of my own visual energy while shooting, more like a true picture of how I perceive. My seeing, at least while shooting, tends to operate in pulses and spurts of intensity, where thought and feeling and raw perceptual material coalesce and come into focus for distinct instants. Single framing is very attractive for that reason. I've refined my use of that technique over the years, and I think it came to real fruition in
Charmed Particles
and
The Lighted Field,
and I'm working with it now in other ways.
The long, Lumièrelike stare brings the mind to an attention of unnatural duration and intensity . . . an altered state, and that's the source of its power. With single framing, the constant interruption of focused attention forces you to a kind of heightened perception because the mind is racing to absorb a great deal of information very quickly; the