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Andrew Noren’s Lights and Shadows

by Andrew Reichel

Filmography of Andrew Noren:
Say Nothing (1965)
The Wind Variations (1968)
Scenes From Life: Golden Brain Mantra (1972) – installation piece
The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse:
Part I: Huge Pupils, previously Kodak Ghost Poems (1968)
Part II: False Pretenses (1974)
Part III: The Phantom Enthusiast (1975)
Part IV: Charmed Particles (1978)
Part V: The Lighted Field (1987)
Part VI: Imaginary Light (1994)
Part VII: Time Being (2001)
Part VIII: Free to Go (Interlude) (2004)
Part IX: Aberration of Starlight (2008)

If most of the early films of Andrew Noren had not been lost in a warehouse fire circa 1970, he might have set them on fire himself. Ken Jacobs wrote in 1970 that “my friend Andrew has gone through changes and no longer wants the film-output of a more tortured phase of his life to be screened, feeling that it’s a negative reinforcement people do not need… I will keep imploring him to re-release his early work (painful only because so much love is chopped up in it). Meanwhile, in some deference to my feelings, he’s making Say Nothing available – that perfect movie.”1 Say Nothing, the earliest surviving Noren film, is also his most atypical of what we can still see, despite serving as a synecdoche for what is gone. A half-hour single take of an actress, it plays like a parody of Warhol one-shots and screen tests in how Noren aggressively interrogates her with questions, kisses her, makes her read pornography, tells her he loves her, and asks her to strip. The backdrop wall features the famous Vietnam War photograph of napalmed children by Nick Ut. Behind the scene(s), it was supposedly a much more collaborative process than it looked, if Noren’s interview with Scott MacDonald is to be believed —since he infamously performed it by mail and rewrote it entirely as he saw fit, it ought to be taken with a grain of salt.2 It is simultaneously one of the few signals we have remaining of Noren’s early films and their excessive probing and provocations, and a sign of what was to come regarding Noren’s persona of a controlling director.

Noren has arguably become more famous for his self-imposed obscurity than for his films in recent years, along with the difficulty of determining what still exists—I’ve seen ten with my own eyes, and issues such as mixed-up reels, inaccurate frame rates, and inaccessibility were brought to light along the way. Broadly speaking, his extant filmography seems to consist of eleven films and one installation, but whether the two of those twelve I have not seen are still extant is currently debatable. Everything else from his early period of filming what he called “absolutely every aspect of [his] life”3 seems to have been lost in the fire, although the Film-makers’ Cooperative files hint at the tortured phase that Say Nothing confirms: soundtracks from groups called The Legalized Abortions and Auschwitz String Orchestra for titles like Die and The New York Miseries, a film called Forget It that claims to be about an ex-Nazi “just back from his vacation in Argentina,” a portrait film of his friend and fellow filmmaker Harry Smith where he calls Noren a fag and apologizes for the film “[turning] out so rotten.”4 Noren was interested in newsreels and worked at an archive devoted to their use for stock footage to pay the bills, and his fascination with hard truths sprung out of his belief that “there is no good news, none. The news is bad.”5 There were also lighter subjects, such as a series devoted to people in his life taking baths – one entry supposedly featured both Kuchar brothers, George fully clothed in a suit, bathing with a puppy.

The seemingly extant Noren catalog mostly consists of the ongoing project that he began in 1968 and continued until his death in 2015, The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, nine films in all with a compilation-like structure inspired by the titular surrealist drawing game. Two films predating that cycle survive in the form of Say Nothing and The Wind Variations, and there are allusions to the installation piece Scenes From Life: Golden Brain Mantra in most writing about his filmography before he doubled down on retiring titles from any kind of circulation. Always a protective perfectionist, this withdrawal was initially spurred by a desire to re-edit the first three Exquisite Corpse entries, then developed into a full retraction of nearly his entire body of work, along with banning some of his most erstwhile supporters (J. Hoberman, P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, and Anthology Film Archives) from checking titles out from the MoMA collections.6 His widow Risé Hall-Noren seems to have largely continued this policy despite starting a now-defunct website devoted to his work, with rumors that the two bore a grudge against Mekas for providing bootleg copies of Noren’s films on a trip to the Japanese cinematheques.7

Charmed Particles

Scenes From Life: Golden Brain Mantra and the third Exquisite Corpse entry, The Phantom Enthusiast, are currently unviewable. The former involved looping footage of buildings exploding at varying speeds and occasionally reversed, with Noren himself sometimes accompanying it with live piano. The latter was considered a darker entry in the series from what little contemporaneous information exists, and was the last Noren to be predominantly in color.

Of the other Noren film that predates his Exquisite Corpse, The Wind Variations is the easiest to summarize: Noren shot eight silent three-minute rolls of his apartment’s curtains blowing in the wind, removed two he didn’t like, and released the rest as an 18-minute compilation. He’d go on to remake it repeatedly. It bears a curious similarity to films by Barry Gerson, a friend of Noren’s who worked with him at the same film archive for a time8, and made both at least three curtain-centric films and a portrait of Noren himself. It is perhaps one of the most straightforward illuminations of Noren’s primary thematic interest: light and shadow. Having famously referred to himself as a “light thief and a shadow bandit” who dealt “in retinal phantoms,” virtually every extant Noren film (with the possible exception of Say Nothing) is about “the lovers, light and shadow, and their offspring space and time…working with their particularities is my passion and delight.”9

1968 and the release of Huge Pupils (originally entitled Kodak Ghost Poems before a cease and desist) was a key year in Noren’s early canonization among the burgeoning experimental film scene, but it did not come without troubles. Huge Pupils found itself in censorship battles due to its sexual explicitness, with at least one copy being destroyed by the lab.10 Sitney infamously claimed it made “all the other diary films look a little strange in their modesty,”11 Mekas called Noren “the sublime romantic of cinema today,”12 and one source claims that a female filmmaker in the scene referred to Noren’s early work as “a catalog of all the women he’d fucked.”13 Originally a two-hour work, Noren eventually cut it down to 50 minutes. Rumors that this was due to embarrassment over its explicit sexuality14 are hilariously false. Some sequences include superimpositions of female genitalia (one intriguingly entitled lost Noren film, with no further information available: Ghost Pussy), one of Noren’s lovers (Margaret Lamarre) holding the camera as he performs cunnilingus, and sequences of Noren holding the camera to photograph his own sexual penetrations in pornographic closeups. In a world where anyone who would seek out Huge Pupils would at least pretend to have read Laura Mulvey, Noren’s clear affection for what he is capturing and the dark possessiveness underlying its hedonism are both present, standing in stark contrast like his lights and shadows. (A subtle allusion to Noren taking LSD sums up the contrasts nicely if one catches it.) While the still-shocking sex scenes are what stand out, nudity isn’t entirely used to provoke in Huge Pupils: the light reflecting off a woman’s strawberry blonde hair and perfect skin, or how it plays off a nipple as makeup is applied, are every bit as striking. A possibly repurposed remnant of one of the more tenderly erotic bathing films also appears. Sequences at a wedding, and portraits of fellow filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Ken & Flo Jacobs are easier to appreciate for the prudish experimental film enthusiast: Ken lovingly brushes Flo’s hair on a rooftop, while Gehr and one of the many black cats that recur in the Corpse corpus are given stereoscopic qualities via rapid fire editing as he sits in front of a Rembrandt. (Gehr’s own film featuring Noren, Reverberation, reverses the approach and goes for slow-motion.)

False Pretenses, the second entry, took a while to show up. It was completed and released after Noren returned to New York following an arrest and jail time for hashish possession in Canada. His correspondence from shortly after his arrest is a tough, frantic read, but time may have allowed him to make a little joke in the opening: repurposed footage from a narrative film, showing a prisoner being hanged during a thunderstorm at night. Two sequences descend into pure redness: one involving images of film tails, one involving photographs. Images of both Marlene Dietrich under Josef von Sternberg and Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, appropriately shadowy films to reference, make appearances – Noren was a cinephile whose lost early works were reportedly Godard-influenced. There are a few sequences of nudity (more statuesque than sexual this time), but the film is generally a foreshadowing of Noren’s moving away from thornier content and into further everyday abstraction. With The Phantom Enthusiast currently missing in action, it feels like the transitional moment between his provocations and his subsequently intensified focus on light and shadow that resulted in his three most famous works.

His marriage to Risé and their raising a family resulted in Noren releasing approximately one film per decade for the remainder of the 20th century, covering Parts IV to VI. He also shifted to black-and-white for the three films in question due to a lack of his preferred Kodachrome stock, resulting in three works of great sensuality and starkness that intensified the purity of his vision as he began to shoot several scenes one single frame at a time, and with a very high contrast to all but eliminate shades of gray. Charmed Particles, The Lighted Field, and Imaginary Light are likely his three best-known and best-loved films: stripping away color seemed to heighten Noren’s ability to express himself as he delved further into unreal zones.

Noren’s interest in light was also a matter of physics, and Charmed Particles referred to energy becoming matter: “What lies at the heart of each atom is nothing, it is the beast at the heart of the labyrinth…and from that nothing comes something we call the world. Why is there something rather than nothing?”15 He opened and closed the film with shots of his eye, with the closer featuring him examining film strips in the ultimate statement of principles regarding the language of movies and how they imprint themselves as “retinal phantoms.” Another movie reference, this time to the silent Gothic The Man Who Laughs, appears. He filled what came between the bookends with images like lightning against the night sky for his weirdest and wildest movie. Starting with more representational images such as crystal cups and wet dishes ecstatically sparkling, the film eventually descends into the abstraction of a barrage of leaves and lights shining through windows, resulting in a psychedelic latticework. Even more seemingly banal images like his hand wiping fog off a window turn into a game of compositional variations and light shifts. Noren somewhat eschewed his labeling as a “diary filmmaker,” and Charmed Particles in particular is more of a transfiguration of documentaries, rather than the more autobiographical approach taken by Jonas Mekas. It is something like a roman à clef about the quest to see.

Charmed Particles

Despite initial plans for Part V to be called The Instructions of the Sun and conceiving it as “a mural of three panels to be synchronously projected so as to run perpetually,”16 the nine-year gap resulted in Noren marrying work and pleasure to make his archivist movie, shown on a single screen at the conventional 24 FPS to allow for the older material to move naturally. (Noren’s choice of frame rates when working silently vacillated: The Wind Variations, The Phantom Enthusiast, and Charmed Particles were initially meant to be shown at 16 FPS, but he’d later allow them to be shown at 18.) The Lighted Field features some of the most memorable images from his job’s newsreel collection alongside his own footage. A film that was in part about ensuring that his new domestic bliss with Risé, his children, and their cats would be preserved in their own right, the film found him in a playful mood. Something as simple as a cat in a drawer, or appearing in front of him and Risé, found him blatantly manipulating the content of the shot and its editing rhythms to produce his effects: he would open and close the drawer for the fun of seeing the shadows change shape, or kiss Risé repeatedly while the cat was teleported via flashing edits. Most of the archival footage was similarly humorous and light-hearted, such as a man being placed into a block of ice or a man playing with squirrels in a park. One science film involving footage of X-rays to show the human skeleton’s movements was also used in Barbara Hammer’s more colorful Sanctus.

Sometime after The Lighted Field was when Noren produced his interview with Scott MacDonald, wherein he mentioned being at work on a “long film with sound.” Imaginary Light wound up being the shortest Exquisite Corpse entry by quite some measure at only half an hour, but sound returned to Noren’s work for the first time since Say Nothing in the form of chiming gongs that shift into pure reverb. It was perhaps the first Noren to owe debts to structural filmmaking in its triptych design: stop-motion time-lapse footage of the sunlight in his garden and then his house, which transitions into a similar approach applied to the surface of a flowing body of water, one fluctuating frame at a time. The final section’s resulting streaks of ever-changing white light patterns flashing against a black surface possess a stereoscopic intensity comparable to staring into the sun.

Noren did make a long film with sound to kick off the 21st century, Time Being. It wound up being his last sound film, his partial return to color, and (most critically) the start of his late period shift to shooting and editing digitally. He compared his use of digital to a “great visual piano,”17 and it arguably found him returning to the influence of Godard via Histoire(s) du Cinema’s use of video textures. It also resulted in an increasing prolificacy, putting out the final three Exquisite Corpse entries within the entirety of the 2000s. While his approach to color varied throughout these final films depending on the project, Noren’s black-and-white material generally went from high-contrast to all-contrast in digital. Where the last three celluloid Exquisite Corpse entries merely tried to reduce all the shades of gray, Noren’s digital entries frequently completely removed them via editing, turning everything into either a shadow puppet silhouette (“something”) or a blank void (“nothing”), and all with the un-nuanced edges of large pixels. Time Being used a more “normal” B&W approach at points, but the final two films never approached anything even remotely resembling the 1978-1994 trilogy. The complete lack of gray in the polarized shifts of light and shadow is like a computer’s take on the shadows of noir and horror, and he’d frequently alternate between the two in single frames to produce all-consuming flashes resembling a glitchy take on Arnulf Rainer and The Flicker.

He also began repurposing old material and thus rendering it brand new via this technique: Time Being repurposed material from Imaginary Light, and he also shot what was functionally a remake of The Wind Variations in one of the few moments of digital B&W that didn’t turn the screen into silhouettes. Despite lasting only an hour and starting off with a soundtrack, Time Being gradually becomes increasingly silent, and its sequences are either fast-paced barrages or radically overextended pacing manipulations. The flickering water of Imaginary Light is slowed to watching the ripples slowly shift their patterns (Noren also recycles and extends a bookending shot), while the color sequences feature figures moving in such slow motion that they dissolve into smears of oversaturated jewel tones. Noren’s manipulations of time reach their epoch when we return to black-and-white: a lengthy scene of flashing monochrome patterns of total abstraction, lasting for ten minutes of silence with nothing recognizable on screen. The sound of the thunderstorm that Noren cited as his favorite piece of cinema in the MacDonald interview returns for a barrage of flickering home footage, but the culmination is a particularly terrifying Wind Variation where the digitally altered curtains are sped up to blow so rapidly that most projectors (seemingly) cannot keep up and rainbow shades begin to peek through. It’s only fitting that a film so preoccupied with cinematic pacing would end with watching a candle burning, although no candle has ever melted quite like the one in Time Being.

Free to Go (Interlude) returns to silence, and borrows the triptych structure of Imaginary Light for an homage to psychedelia and a testament to the power of trips in all their forms. The opening B&W section is once again heavily focused on Noren’s freeway commutes, functioning as a little pun on the title. The middle section pushes Noren’s use of digital color to its furthest-ever depths via a visual strategy resembling a heat sensor camera. City street images are warped into an ever-shifting color field of pixels, resembling a square version of Georges Seurat, or a prototype for Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT. Born in Santa Fe and remaining loyal to the area, Noren’s oft-noted fondness for Native American turquoise jewelry appears in both his appearances in his own films, and his performances in films by Gerson and Gehr.18 The final shift back into monochrome transfigures the city’s pedestrians into Rorschach-like patterns that resemble both the Native American designs he knew well, and psychedelic mandalas.

Aberration of Starlight wound up being Noren’s final film—and at 90 minutes, the longest by far of his surviving works. Noren once again features a remake of The Wind Variations, this time taking the material from the original 1968 film and transforming it into the B&W style. Noren’s use of ever-flickering B&W, with some of the most unceasing uses of pure white becoming pure black and vice versa over alternating single frames, takes cues from his friend Ken Jacobs’ Eternalisms. The fact that the camera tends to have the appearance of movement, even when a shot is clearly being looped, results in a dizzying sensation during the early commute sequences, particularly during a shot where the camera seems to be flying over a road. Noren eventually returns to his house and stays there for the remainder of Aberration. A funny window washing sequence recalls how birds bang into perfectly clear glass because they cannot see it. Some of the most fast-paced flicker sequences give Noren’s black cats their most aggressive showcase: he would answer very few questions at the New York Film Festival premiere that represented one of his last public appearances because, he claimed, he needed to go home and feed them.19 The shift to color in Aberration makes the Noren residence look like it has stained glass windows in its tints. Color is also used for a charmingly dated sequence of square wipes and zooms paying homage to treasured belongings, such as a portrait of Harry Smith amidst some of Andrew Noren’s books, jewelry, and loved ones. When Noren returns to B&W and begins reconfiguring them via flicker, it eventually renders the title literally in the grand finale of the house windows seeming to explode with star-shapes. It knocks viewers off their axes, and is a fittingly unreal conclusion to a filmography that always looked to find new ways of heightening the beauty of ordinary days.

Andrew Reichel is a film writer, programmer, and archivist living in New York City. He has written for In Review Online, archived various audiovisual materials in New York City and Buenos Aires, and programmed screenings at New York University, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Film-makers’ Cooperative. He has recently completed his Master’s thesis on the preservation of analog film projectors for NYU’s Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program, and is building an archive from scratch for the artist Jeff Weber. You can find him on Letterboxd, Twitter, and Instagram.

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  1.  Jacobs, Ken. “Say Nothing by Andrew Noren.” Received by Film-makers’ Cooperative, Aug. 1970. ↩︎
  2.  MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. 1st ed., University of California Press, 1992. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/jj.2711562. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024. ↩︎
  3. MacDonald. ↩︎
  4.  Film-makers’ Cooperative files ↩︎
  5. MacDonald. ↩︎
  6.  Kitty Cleary, “The Circulating Film & Video Library: How-to and Notes,” Online, circa 2019. ↩︎
  7. Cleary. ↩︎
  8. Attard, Paul. “Interview: Barry Gerson.” Film Comment, 8 July 2024, www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-barry-gerson/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. ↩︎
  9. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. The Lighted Field by Andrew Noren. 1 Apr. 1988, jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/09/the-lighted-field/. ↩︎
  10. “[Frameworks] Andrew Noren,” frameworks.jonasmekasfilms.narkive.com, 2015, https://frameworks.jonasmekasfilms.narkive.com/HFFTdRTu/andrew-noren. ↩︎
  11. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film : The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩︎
  12. MacDonald. ↩︎
  13. Kleinhans, Chuck. “Re: [Frameworks] Andrew Noren.” Mail-Archive.com, 2015, www.mail-archive.com/frameworks@jonasmekasfilms.com/msg10800.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024. ↩︎
  14. MacDonald, Scott. “In Common Hours: The Films of Andrew Noren.” Artforum, October 1, 2009. https://www.artforum.com/features/in-common-hours-the-films-of-andrew-noren-192156/. ↩︎
  15.  Noren, Andrew. “Charmed Particles.” MoMA, www.moma.org/calendar/events/1945. ↩︎
  16.  Kardish, Laurence. Of Light and Texture. Museum of Modern Art, 1981. ↩︎
  17.  Noren. ↩︎
  18. Hoberman, J. “Andrew Noren, Avant-Garde Filmmaker, Fades to Black.” The New York Times, December 24, 2015, sec. Movies. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/movies/homevideo/andrew-noren-avant-garde-filmmaker-fades-to-black.html. ↩︎
  19. Phelps, David. “NYFF08: Imitation of Light (“Aberration of Starlight,” Noren, 2008).” Mubi Notebook, 14 Oct. 2008, mubi.com/it/notebook/posts/nyff08-imitation-of-light-aberration-of-starlight-noren-2008. ↩︎

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