For all of its intoxicated virtuosity, or maybe because of it, Andrew Noren’s The Lighted Field, 1987, strikes the eye as a latter-day “early” film. Its surface energies are sparked from a retrenchment in cinematic self-consciousness; it has the novelty of a quasi-primal proposition about film’s transforming capabilities and reflexiveness. Since transformation is Noren’s theme, to watch him fire up those capabilities and mobilize them is to be transfixed by a magic-lantern display of recorded light and shadow outstripping solid matter in a rapture of shared deliquescence.

The Lighted Field is a