Movies: John Cage

A dream-like narrative in which a woman (Deren), is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, a quest for personal identity, encountering other people and other versions of herself....

The history of cinematic sound, told by legendary sound designers and visionary filmmakers....

When Howard Brookner lost his life to AIDS in 1989, the 35-year-old director had completed two feature documentaries and was in post-production on his narrative debut, Bloodhounds of Broadway. Twenty-five years later, his nephew, Aaron, sets out on a...

The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would aris...

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve p...

During this critical decade in American life, artists built on the styles of the 1950s. An explosion of artistic energy produced Pop Art, Minimalism, color-field painting, and hard-edged abstraction. Sculptors and painters on both coasts explored new...

A compilation of avant-garde artwork and talent of the mid to late 20th century hosted by Ryuichi Sakamoto....

An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created...

2012 documentary on John Cage celebrating his 100th birthday in the form of a re-edit of partially unused film material shot for the film 'Time is Music’ in 1987. Includes interviews and recordings of performances with the influential zen composer....

"Symphony of the Invisible" is a reflection on creation and how through art, poetry and images you can break the limits that have been imposed on language and life itself....

More than 20 contemporary North American poets recite, sing, and perform their work. Early in the film, Charles Bukowski talks about the energy of poets and of a poem. These poets are the children of Walt Whitman and of Charles Olson, incantatory and...

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and ...

A brief overview and focus on composers Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, John Cage, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter and their contemporaries....

In February 2013, the New World Symphony presented Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Centennial Celebration, a spectacular three-day festival dedicated to the music and ideas of John Cage. As part of the festival, NWS hosted a new video installat...

“Westbeth” was Cunningham’s first video collaboration with Charles Atlas, and the first video project to be made at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio on the eleventh floor of Westbeth....

This film includes important examples of the Robert Rauschenberg's diverse and extraordinary accomplishments, tracing his development from his student years and his earliest experiments to a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Ne...

John Cage’s original concept of Ocean, in 1991, was for a dance to be performed in a circular space, with the audience surrounding the dancers, and the musicians (112 of them) surrounding the audience. The last performance was in the Rainbow Quarry i...

This 56-minute documentary on America's most controversial and unique composer manages to cover a great many aspects of Cage's work and thought. His love for mushrooms, his Zen beliefs and use of the I Ching, and basic bio details are all explained i...

This is the debut documentary made by Alexis Krasilovsky, author of "Women Behind The Camera" (Praeger, 1997). Shot on 16mm in 1971, the film covers much of the New York avant-garde of the time....

The choreographer Merce Cunningham working with the musician John Cage and the painter Robert Rauschenberg....