THE LIGHTED FIELD
The lovers, light and shadow, and their offspring space and time are my themes, working with their particularities is my passion and delight. –Andrew Noren
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Andrew Noren’s lovely 59-minute The Lighted Field–part five of his ongoing work The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, which has engaged him over the past two decades–belongs mainly to the nonnarrative realm. The experience it imparts is at once so invigorating and soothing that it makes one doubly aware of how monotonous and limited–as well as limiting–an exclusive diet of narrative films can be. The conventional wisdom about nonnarrative, “experimental” films is that they’re esoteric, difficult, boring, and specialized, but this one is so pleasurable and engrossing that it makes most ordinary movies I’ve seen this spring look complacent, ugly, and dull by comparison. You don’t have to worry about “getting the point” with this kind of movie, as one conventionally does with narrative (a process that sometimes has more to do with work than with play). The Lighted Field is an exercise in direct sensual pleasure, and that is the point.
The principal difference between parts four and five of the series is that the range of visual and thematic material becomes broader. While the former concentrated (exclusively, if memory serves) on the filmmaker’s city apartment, the latter not only moves out to the street and countryside, and gives us people and pets that might be regarded as characters (rather than as mere figures and/or textures), but also contains fleeting patches of other material that appears to be archival, such as a man being encased in (and later removed from) a huge block of ice, and a bearded man reading and playing a flute while squirrels and birds climb over him.
Come shadow, come and take this shadow up
and up, come, take shadow, come this shadow . . .
