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much about performance, as
The Exquisite Corpse
films have been. But in
The Lighted Field
this performance dimension seems more overt, more frank. I'm thinking of those sequences when you put your feet, or your shadow into a spin, or into high-speed motion along the street. We can see how you do it; but we're astonished at the results. It's like juggling: you pick up the camera, the way a juggler picks up bowling pins.
Noren:
There's no animal behavior that is not performance. That's all we do. Whether you're in front of the camera or behind it, you're always acting, always performing. I've sometimes employed my image as an actor on the screen, an actor portraying my-"self." Who is better qualified, after all? Performance art as such doesn't really interest me.
In the sequences you mention, what's really at work is extracting visual power from something quite common and ordinary. Motto: "make it jump!" Con brio!
MacDonald: The Lighted Field
seems, even more than earlier films, a demonstration of the range possible for a 16mm camera and black-and-white filming. What have you been doing since that film? It feels so much like a culmination of your career as filmmaker that I can't help but wonder whether it presages a major pivot in your direction, back toward color perhaps.
Noren:
It's not a culmination, at least I hope not. It's a good piece of work. A lot of my life went into it. Taken with
Charmed Particles,
it's almost an encyclopedia of black-and-white possibilities, but the possibilities are endless. In a way, I feel I've just begun to work in that medium. There are many, many more things I want to do. I love black and white for its severity. By comparison color seems almost sentimental, and the range of color stocks that are available now is very limited. I'm still mourning Kodachrome II. Most of the things I've seen in color recently would have been much more interesting in black and white. Anyway, I'm very sensitive to color, and I have very strong feelings about individual colors, so that working in black and white frees me from a lot of restrictions.
Since finishing
The Lighted Field
I've been working on a long black-and-white film with sound, called
Imaginary Light
. It seems like all I do is work. There isn't any occasion when I'm not working in one sense or another, and there's no such thing as finished.
MacDonald:
At times during
The Lighted Field,
I get the sense that you're consciously demonstrating that cinema can do, comparatively easily, much of what the other arts struggle to accomplish. Sometimes, particular segments of the film remind me of the work of particular painters and kinds of paintingthe sequence of light on the drinking glasses reminds me of certain superrealist painters (Janet Fish, for exam-