Notes
348 A Body of Vision their distinctiveness, their particularity, their objecthood; thus, this film establishes a more complex balance between the beings of the particular objects represented and the being of light—and between particular objects and the Being which light's ontological status closely approximates. But this is really only a half-truth. The Lighted Field reconciles self and world, human beings and natural objects, personal space and the space of the world, spirit and matter. We must consider the terms of this reconciliation. The Lighted Field, contains many references to shadows, illusions, reflections in mirrors, and, importantly, cinematic imagery. What is most important , the insistent, though subtly modulating, rhythm of the pixillation alludes to the flicker rhythm that is the very basis of the cinematic illusion itself. Noren presents these images to suggest that objects are no more real than shadows on the bedsheets and walls, reflections in the mirrored facades of buildings, or shadows that are the film image itself.352 The impulse towards formal transfiguration is more pronounced in The Lighted Field than it was in Charmed Particles. Consequently the objects it represents appear to be more natural, less imposed upon by Noren's aesthetic imperatives. (Wemust stress, though, this is only a comparative measure , for by any other gauge, the filmmaker's power to creatively transform the world would be deemed to be impressively great.) But the reality the objects have is not that which we ordinarily understand them to have, for they belong to the realm of illusions, of fleeting appearances with only evanescent existence. Yet they are also revelations of the miraculous Being of light from whose energy light derives its own. As the frequent allusions to cinema in The Lighted Field point out, and as its pixillated movement, the rhythm of which inheres in the medium itself, continually suggests, objects have the same reality as cinematic images. But perhaps a created being whose essence is light is Ultimately Real anyway.Then what one films, viz., created reality (or natura naturatd), and what creates the reality one films (or natura naturans), are identical—something that Spinoza and the romantics have claimed all along—for both are light. While previous films in The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse had incorporated a dreamer motif, this motif seems more structurally important in The Lighted Field (1987) than in any other section. With The Lighted Field, The Adventures of theExquisite Corpse modulates into another register, more pure and less material even than CharmedParticles.The inclusion of X-ray images and the use of the greyer tonalities that were lacking in the hard-edged, high-contrast imagery of Charmed Particles reinforce this impression. More than any other section in The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, The Lighted Field suggests the dynamism of light's divine energy and power. Lengthy The Films of Andrew Noren 349 sections of the film are inventories of awe-inspiringvibratory motion or fulgurant energies. Noren creates much of the fulgurous activity by pixillation. By creating these incendiary allusionsusingpixillation, Noren suggests once again that film has a privileged ontological status that results from its special relation to light energy whose vibratory energies constitute the physical realm. Thus The Lighted Field can claim that any physical object can serve as an active subject within a film. Objects are, after all, simply bodies of light, and the lighted field of the film is embodied light. The body of the world becomes the body of light. And light itself is the agent of knowledge—that knowledge that intimately possesses us. This identification of the material world with light, this view that matter has its being in light, it should be noted, is fundamentally anti-Gnostic, for the Gnostics propounded a dualistic conception of the world according to which matter and light were antithetic principles. Noren does away with the dualism so central to Gnosticism (in this respect his work is consistent with Christian cosmology), but his identification of the redemptory power with light is profoundly Gnostic. The final film in The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, Imaginary Light (1995), compresses many of the themes we traced in CharmedParticles and The LightedField into an even more austerely minimal form. Imaginary Light makes the pixillation photography and the high-contrast film of TheLighted Field central; the film can be described as a time-lapse study of Noren's house and garden. Noren himself wryly describes the film as his "backyard Buddha-impersonation, watching 'it' flow."354 As wry as this...
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