Andrew Noren

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

The only film that remains from Noren's early period. "a thirty-minute, single-shot interrogation of an actress/character that hovers between documentary and fiction" - Scott MacDonald

Charmed Particles is a physics term... it describes the point at which energy becomes matter, intangible ‘nothing’ becoming, somehow, ‘something.’ What lies at the heart of each atom is nothing... the beast at the heart of the labyrinth... and from that nothing comes the something we call the world. Being emanates from nothing, and vice versa. Oldest question in the world: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

"Intuitive conjuring and orchestration of retinal phantoms, refined by abstraction into music for light and mind. Light, both wave and particle, alive and moving, making shadow and, therefore, time."

Part II of Andrew Noren's The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse

“Cinema isn’t materials…it is refined, imaginative seeing…darkness made visible…[it] existed long before modern devices, since the first opening of the first animal eyelid…scene one, take one.... We invent the world as we are seeing it. Anything can happen” (Andrew Noren)

A meditation on the winter light flowing through two windows, as it is modulated and transformed by the window curtains blowing in the breeze.

Ghost pictures from the "other" world, which is this world. The ghost is in love, at work, at play with bright companions. Flutter of phantoms, trick of light, sleight of the eye. A comedy of mirrors. Love advice from the grave... remember you must die.

Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window is savored and shattered and seen for what it is.

"Reverberation began as an attempt at a portrayal, a representing of a life situation by way of film, and turned in the making of it into a presentation of the physical movement of film itself, stranding the photo-memory of persons/objects/their relationships in a cinematic force-field wherein images are offered up and simultaneously swept away by conflicting energies. Sound as it comes from a speaker has its own quality. No matter how close it comes in reproducing sound of living beings or objects, this quality is always the sound of the projector, the wires, the tubes and the speakers. This is its actuality. And it can be heard and experienced as sound, a form of energy." -Ernie Gehr

A rhythmic study of materiality and melancholy in human form.

“Aberration of starlight: the apparent displacement of a star resulting from Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun. It depends on the ratio of Earth’s orbital speed to the speed of light and Earth’s direction of motion and thus provides confirmation that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the reverse.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia Noren’s last major work is a visual symphony of astonishing variations on light, shadow, time, and spatial illusion. This is what Noren, quoting Lao-Tsu, called “practicing eternity” and “what the light was like.” According to Noren, “working electronically provides a kind of non-mechanical fluidity, a sense of floating, if you will. For me the digital apparatus is like a great visual piano of wonderful sophistication.”

GROUP VII: PORTRAIT OF DIANA (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) PORTRAIT OF ANDREW NOREN (1972, 4 min, 16mm, silent) These films are personal light portraits. I consider them unique and beautiful.

In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.