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A Tribute to John Cage

A Tribute to John Cage is Paik's homage to avant-garde composer John Cage. A major figure in contemporary art and music, Cage was one of the primary influences on Paik's work, as well as his friend and frequent collaborator. In this multifaceted portrait, Paik creates a pastiche of Cage's performances and anecdotes, interviews with friends and colleagues, and examples of Paik's participatory music and television works that parallel Cage's strategies and concerns. The methodology and philosophies that inform Cage's radical musical aesthetic — chance, randomness, the democratization of sounds — are evident as he performs such seminal pieces as 4'33" (of complete silence) in Harvard Square, or throws the I Ching to determine performance sites. Among the collage of elements included in this work are segments from Paik's Zen for TV; Paik and Charlotte Moorman in early performances, including the TV Bra; and anecdotes from composer Alvin Lucier.

A Tribute to John Cage

6.0 1976
Document

Two disembodied male colleagues direct Lynda Benglis, who sits between a monitor and a camera lens loudly exclaiming her vision for the video we’re watching. Playing with the idea of originality and how the reproduction of images troubles fine art categories, Benglis affixes a double portrait of herself to the monitor screen and draws moustaches on both likenesses. Document ends with Benglis writing the video’s title and “copyright, Dec. 1972” directly on the monitor underneath the photograph, validating this video accomplishment as an original artwork.

Document

NR 1972
DDR-Magazin 1978/12

Rostock - GDR county on the Baltic. This county covering the northern part of the GDR is the welcoming destination of many people: holidaymakers, tourists, people on business trips and seamen. Sometimes there is an equal number of local residents and visitors. The film reports on the development of this formerly backward region to an advanced agrarian and industrial county. It reports on the way of life and achievements of the people and gives the viewer an impression of the county's scenic beauties.

DDR-Magazin 1978/12

NR 1978
Fortune Favours Łęczna

Łęczna is a town in eastern Poland in the lubelskie voivodship. Unfortunately, it is infamous for a legend of a former settlement that collapsed and was covered by the ground. The reason for that was the fact that the place had been inhabited by quarrelsome, envious, and malicious people. The modern legend predicts another catastrophe in 2000. In the 1970s, miners came to the town and tried to adapt to it. The unpleasant division between the old and the new inhabitants, between agricultural and industrial Łęczna, was felt by the newcomers.

Fortune Favours Łęczna

NR 1978
Old Georgian Hymns

Working with the Georgian polyphonic ensemble Rustavi and composer Anzor Erkomaishvili to resurrect the countryside’s derelict monasteries, Chkhaidze films eroded structures and faded biblical paintings caressed by sunlight, evoking the ambivalence of a besieged culture despite Georgia’s extant link to antiquity. Building on themes from his earlier work, Kolkhida—where Chkhaidze assigns the famed national myth of Jason’s quest to find the Golden Fleece in Colchis a negligible value in proportion to the land’s permanence—Chkhaidze here examines and historicizes Georgia’s identity as one of the earliest adopters of Christianity.

Old Georgian Hymns

NR 1970
Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons

In 1971 Thierry Zéno creates a fascinating portrait of artist Georges Moinet in the form of a 16 mm medium-length film. A schizophrenic who lives in a psychiatric hospital near Namur, Moinet paints. After being mute for 24 years he chooses this cinematic encounter to explain his artist approach, revealing what lies behind his personal cosmogony. But this long logorrhoea proves disturbing and fails to provide possible clues to understanding his work, gradually becoming a form of music that blends in with the sounds and distant, invisible hubbub of the hospital. With Alessandro Ussai behind the camera and Roger Cambier responsible for the sound, Zéno gets up close to Moinet to better capture him in all his demiurgical excessiveness, his existence on the fringes but also his humanity, deconstructing in a series of very tight shots the man and his canvasses.

Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons

NR 1971
El campo para el hombre

"El campo para el hombre" was a politically militant documentary about the small holdings of land in the north of Spain and the large estates in the south of the country. This film portrays the exploitation and misery of the Spanish peasants, but also their class-consciousness and their will to fight for their rights and freedom. The film was shot in the late years of Franco's dictatorship, so it was made in secrecy (the directors were connected to the Spanish Communist Party).

El campo para el hombre

7.5 1975
The Ax Fight

This ethnographic film records a conflict that took place on February 28, 1971, in the Yanomami village of Mishimishimabowei-teri during the fieldwork of Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon. Constructed in four parts, the film first presents the complete unedited footage of the fight as it was witnessed by the filmmakers, followed by slow-motion analysis, kinship diagrams, and a final edited version. Through this structure, the film documents both the social dynamics of the conflict and the process by which ethnographic knowledge is produced from filmed events.

The Ax Fight

6.0 1975
Kampfmai 1929

On May 1, 1929, violent clashes broke out in Berlin between the police and communist demonstrators, an event that became known as “Bloody May.” Numerous demonstrators and bystanders lost their lives in the violence. The communist film cartel "Weltfilm" GmbH documented the events in the short film "May 1: International Workers' Day," which was released under the title "Blutmai 1929." Neither the director nor the cinematographers are known. The footage shot at that time was also used shortly thereafter in the Soviet newsreel "Soyuzkino-Journal, No. 33/1929" with new intertitles. In 1970, the State Film Archive of the GDR created the compilation "Kampfmai 1929" from parts of the two films and attributed the montage to Phil Jutzi.

Kampfmai 1929

NR 1970
Greta Garbo

Produced in Italy in 1974, Anna Baldazzi’s Greta Garbo is a 30-minute color short that embarks on a singular quest: a journey through the streets of New York in search of the legendary screen icon. Far from a traditional documentary, the film serves as a personal exploration of the filmmaker’s own relationship with the city, navigated through a lens of irony and farce. Baldazzi engages in a playful, dialectical game with the concept of stardom; her stated objective is to "destroy the myth" of the diva, yet she achieves a striking paradox. By maintaining the total absence of Greta Garbo for the entire duration of the film, the legend is not erased, but rather powerfully re-established through its own void.

Greta Garbo

NR 1974