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a feeling that this is just the sort of thing you don't like to discuss, but is this how the film seems to you?
Noren:
Perhaps, although it's a little more complicated than that. But in general you're right, and you're right that I don't like to talk about it.
I began the film just after my marriage to Risé, which was extreme good fortune for me, for many, many reasons. It was made in a period of intense hard work, apart from work on the film, in which we tried to make a home. I was able to reprioritize things and to gather and focus my energies in a way I hadn't been able to before. It brought about a kind of very practical, utilitarian down-home "enlightenment." I don't really care to say more.
MacDonald: The Lighted Field
also refers directly to your work as an archivist and researcher, in the found-footage passages. Could you talk about your work at Sherman Grinberg?
Noren:
I work with news images daily, both modern material and material going back to the twenties and earlier, and that's how I came upon those shots. They were all originally shot on nitrate film and were in the process of decay when I found them, quite literally turning to dust, as nitrate does, so it wasn't really a question of appropriation but of rescue. I saved what I could of them and transferred them to safety finegrain. I found them very resonant and beautiful in themselves, and so I employed them, as though they were actors under my direction, frequently portraying me or acting as stand-ins for me. In their original commercial usage some fifty years ago, they were projected maybe twice at most. Some of them were never used at all and buried in the vaults and left to rot. So I was glad to be able to recirculate them, put them back into the light again.
I've worked as an archivist for a long time. My expertise is in knowledge of news, the ability to know about and locate very specific news images on request, very quickly and efficiently under intense pressure. And I'm extremely good at it. I also deal in the licensing of this material and in rights and clearances. I work on all kinds of projects: documentaries, features, television commercials, music videos, industrials, you name it. The stock in trade is war, murder, death, destruction, grief and weeping, disaster and degradation, greed, starvation, intense suffering, horrible human activities, crazed apes mad with blood lust! In short, news. Have you ever wondered why the news you get from TV and newspapers is all bad? Have I got news for you: there is no good news, none. The news is bad.
One aspect of the job is dealing with raw news material from the field, which is very interesting indeed. What you see on the evening news, compared to the raw material, is a very carefully constructed entertainment, disguised as reportage. This has always been true of