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MacDonald: Charmed Particles
is, as I remember, a physics term, referring to particles of matter so small that they can be said to exist half way between matter and energy. I assume your use of the title here has to do with this film's hovering between being a record of the everyday, of what surrounds you in your daily life, and abstract, mysterious fields of visual energy. Often you begin with a recognizable scene, then "riff" into a wildly energetic set of abstractions. Is that the primary sense of the title for you?
Noren:
It is a physics term, and what attracted me to it as a title is that it describes the point at which energy becomes matter, intangible "nothing" becoming somehow "something." What lies at the heart of each atom is nothing, the beast at the heart of the labyrinth, and from that nothing, the great black hole, comes the something we call the world. Being emanates from nothing and vice versa.
Also, the film is particles being "charmed" into form, the grains conjured into images.
MacDonald:
You seem less interested in overall conceptualizationeither before you shoot, in the structuring of your films, or after you shoot, in terms of editing what you've captured/discoveredthan in "being in the
now,
" in "playing" the camera as a musician plays a musical instrument.
Noren:
That's certainly true of
Charmed Particles,
which was totally improvised, starting with the very first image that appears in the finished film and continuing on from there. It was shot over a period of several years and the operating rule was that I would shoot every day, if at all possible and if the light was good, working with light and shadow and whatever was around me, not knowing in advance what I would be shooting, trusting that in the end, everything would cohere and come to meaning, which it did. Risé [Risé Hall-Noren] and I were living at that time in a tiny apartment on West Tenth Street, so small it was like living in a camera, although it got splendid light, and I took the basic elements of our life there and worked to see what improvisation and variations were possible, to see if I could charm the disparate elements into form. Being able to invent and improvise and consciously shape material in a given moment has always been important to me, and I've always felt that, given good light, even the commonest, most mundane things are wonderfully rich in possibilities, if you have the eyes for it. It's the old story of working to reveal the "ordinary" as being extraordinary, which in fact it is. I was very interested at the time in improvisational music of all kinds. Jazz, particularly Cecil Taylor and Charlie Parker, and Tibetan Buddhist musicbone trumpets and skull-drumsthe Mazatec mushroom songs and Morrocan Sufi music. Also, animal songs: wolves, whales, birds, cricketsthis was a special inter-