Yes. Noren was an amazing filmmaker with an incredible body of work that threw done some serious aesthetic challenges and expressed, in purely visual terms, a very complex aesthetics-based philosophy that to me is incredibly deep and profound and still shakes me up to think about. I posted the following to facebook and paste it here too...
Today I learned that the great filmmaker Andrew Noren died a few weeks ago from cancer, age 72 (I think). For those who don't know, Noren's films were among the most visually intense and overwhelming films ever created. Noren was a master 16mm photographer, a master of capturing motion and a master of 16mm black & white (I never had the opportunity to see his color films but I'm told they were amazing as well). Noren's films tended to be long-form (30+ minutes) and were (the ones I've seen) relentless barrages of imagery—very fast cutting, incredible single-framing and time lapse—that only would pause for the briefest of moments. Generally (the films I've seen) shot in cities during the course of daily life, the films emphasize the passing of time and—in their speed and Noren's uncanny way of rendering solid forms as fragile and ephemeral—seem to be constantly concerned with not only passing time but the brevity of life. By the time I came to film, Noren—a contemporary and filmmaker-in-dialog-with Brakhage, Dorsky, Gehr and all those guys—had largely withdrawn his films from distribution and had done the (probably deliberate, although I don't know) slow fade into relative obscurity. Each rare screening of Noren's aggressive (if overwhelming) films was an occasion for ones personal sense of visuality (as well as filmmaking and film history) to be altered permanently, and for the better, in that these films feel like wake-up call jolts to the senses and made you feel exhileratingly alive (albeit in intense ways—given that they stressed—to me—the brevity of life and the non-reality of the physical world, they also really shook me up in ways that few other films have). His earlier films (which I've not seen) were attempts to document all aspects of his life on film and were—this is documented—the direct inspiration for DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY. It's really too bad that his films didn't screen more often but in later years Noren—a classic, intensely opinionated curmudgeonly filmmaker—did not make it easy. I was really glad to have seen him in person (and meet him briefly) at Pacific Film Archive in 2005 and to have screened IMAGINARY LIGHT, via San Francisco Cinematheque <https://www.facebook.com/sanfranciscocinematheque>, at SFMOMA in 2012... On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 9:42 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > I can understand that. There was a moment in the early 2000s when Susan > Oxtoby brought some of his films (and him) to Toronto over the course of a > few years. I likely saw about 4 or 5 of his films over that period and > still think of them often. A quick description --- rich high-contrast > imagery, long point-of-view shots down pathways and evocative time lapses > of domestic spaces -- doesn't do them justice; there was something > especially stunning about the experience. > > Chris > > > Those of us who were there at the time can recall the excitement when a > > new film by Andrew was released. We anticipated them almost like we did > > the next Brakhage or Godard. > > _______________________________________________ > FrameWorks mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks >
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