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changed dramaticallysometimes jumping through months. The visual extravaganza of this film makes it difficult to be thinking of overall structural devices, though I have a sense that in general we move from what I'd call camera performances of one kind or another into a period of domestic portraits (of your wife, the kids, the cats, the wash, the garden . . .) then back to camera performancesall of which is framed by the found footage material. Could you talk a bit about what you had in mind for the film's overall structure.
Noren:
It is carefully constructed and works on many levels simultaneously. There's a straightforward "documentary" level on which it's "about" being at home, going to work, and being at home again. That is the basic rhythm of my life, after all, so that's the "ground." I described it best in the original program notes: "the Ghost in love, at work, at play with bright companions in the Lighted Field.'' It's a tale of a dreamer, who dreams what you, viewer and also dreamer, "see," and
is
what he sees and what you see. It's a film about dreaming and is literally, physically a dream. This is a dream of sleep and waking, death and resurrection, which is the central theme of the film, and is of course the central theme of anyone's life, manifest on a daily basis, the "dream-film" of consciousness, of which we are solitary spectators in the theaters of our own skulls. I have little interest in psychoanalytical dream-interpretation by the way, which I've always found to be incredibly cynical. My interest is more in the mechanics of the process.
MacDonald:
Having just recoveredat forty-six yearsfrom turning forty, I feel very close to
The Lighted Field
; it feels to me, the way
my
life feels to me: "Hey! being middle aged is OK, it's better in many ways than being young!"
Noren:
Measuring your life in terms of time will make you old. Time as we speak of it here is a dubious hallucination of sequence and cause and effect. In many ways I feel younger now than I did at twenty. Personal force is what matters. Most people do their best work as they get older. It takes a long time to be good. There aren't many Mozarts around.
This is from Hokusai, who was wise: "I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature . . . birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I will have developed still further, and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line I draw will be imbued with life."
MacDonald:
There's always been an element of performance in your filmsalways, at least, in the films I'm aware of.
Say Nothing
was very