Charmed Particles

Andrew Noren’s The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse film series has an autobiographical dimension and is both a testimony to his private life and a tribute to love. Part four, Charmed Particles, is one of the best examples of the abstract, transforming qualities of black and white film. It explores textures and forms, combining high-contrast photography, detail shots and pixilation to create visual music of a delicate yet powerful kinesis that reveals the simple beauty of the domestic and the phantasmal nature of appearances. A luminous world in which light becomes real and illusion, flesh. - CCCB programme.

“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?’” - Andrew Noren.

"In Noren's alchemy of light and living, it is the light which has become 'real' and the flesh illusory. In his luminous universe, reminiscent of Plato's cave, light is the essence, life an illusory play of shadows" - Lindley Hanlon, Film Culture.

Author: 

Year: 

1978

Series name: 

4

Country: 

United States
Technical data

Original format: 

16mm

Speed: 

24FPS

Aspect ratio: 

1.37:1

Colour: 

B&W

Sound: 

Silent

Length: 

1 hour and 18 minutes

Image Gallery: 

Charmed Particles (Andrew Noren, 1978)
Charmed Particles (Andrew Noren, 1978)

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