Amateur filmmakers entered New York’s avant-garde through day jobs and cheap equipment

Evidence

Noren, twenty-six, had inherited Barbara Rubin’s mantle as an apostle of the eros effect. Born in Sante Fe, he grew up in California’s Inland Empire and after a stint in the Army and a bit of college, moved to New York, where, working as an editor at ABC-TV, he acquired a 16-millimeter Bolex camera and began making movies. The first was a thirty-seven-minute narrative, Change of Heart, about an unhappy, frequently naked young couple. It was “made in 1965 when I was twenty-two, just in from the country and with a big picture of Jean-Luc Godard hanging over my bed,” according to notes Noren wrote for his September 1966 screening at the Tek. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1407

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the book’s core thesis that material conditions (day-job funding, affordable 16mm cameras) made the avant-garde possible — directly usable against shelf claims that culture stagnates for cultural rather than economic reasons.