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news. The raw material is the real thing, and it is frequently horrifying. If you were appalled by the aired reports of the Valdez oil spill, or the Ethiopia famine, for example, wait until you see the field tapes. It was a hundred times worse than the media would have you believe. Working with this kind of material on a daily basis can have a profound effect on a person. It's an education of a very special kind, and in its way a very expensive one. It's not something you can buy at the Harvard Business School.
I also work regularly with a certain government agency that uses news material to make informational presentations to the president of the United States. I hope you're duly impressed.
MacDonald:
The particular archival imagery in
The Lighted Field
the dogs diving into the water and later "undiving"; the man who is put into the block of ice at the beginning and removed at the end; the boy and dog in bed; the X-ray material; the imagery of the laserseems to be used in a metaphoric way. The man going into and coming out of the block of ice is particularly suggestive, since it's a framing device for the film. I'm tempted to see it as a comment on your moving into and out of the filmmaking process; but I confess also to a more sentimental interpretation: that the warmth and happiness of
The Lighted Field
is a function of your coming out of a "colder" period as person/filmmaker.
Noren:
My use of those found images was metaphorical. There's a metaphorical progression from the first image to the last. This is something I rarely permit myself, although you can say that any film image is a metaphor, just by its very nature. Whatever else it is,
The Lighted Field
is a narrative, a carefully constructed one, the telling of a tale. Of course, every film is a narrative, isn't it, whatever other pretensions it might have, simply by virtue of the fact that one frame must follow another in time. Our minds are such that we are obliged to make a story out of everything we experience, obliged to frame things to make them comprehensible. We are constantly telling ourselves stories that allegedly interpret the play of light and shadow on the retina screen, and the play of imaginary light on the screen of the "mind," or "the lighted field," if you will. I think we probably became conscious in the first place by struggling to tell ourselves stories, to make meaning of the chaos of sensory input that afflicts us. "Story" is the absolute basic essential of thinking. Our minds consist of a "teller" and a "listener.'' Consciousness is the mind communicating with itself about itself, telling itself the story of itself, story of past, future, now. We have to have "story" to survive.
And our "story" of consciousness is dream by definition. We live in a dream of waking, we dream that we're "awake," imagining past and future, telling ourselves elaborate stories about both. We flatter ourselves that we recognize a delusional present moment, not past or future