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 intelligently and dynamically. Black Mountain, Buckminster Fuller, Rauschenberg, Duchamp are mentioned. Yoko Ono, John Rockwell, Laurie Anderson, Richard Kostelanetz make appearances. Fascinating performance sequences include Margaret Leng-Tan performing on prepared piano, Merce Cunningham and company, and performances of Credo In Us, Water Music, and Third Construction. Demystifies the man who made music from silence, from all sounds, from life.
Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage's enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk's more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music.
A sonic innovator or an expert on chance? This documentary by Oscar-winning director Allan Miller and Emmy-winner Paul Smaczny pays tribute to the most fascinating American avant-garde composer. Shot in America, Germany and Japan, 'Journeys in Sound' premieres rare archival footage and features associates of John Cage and contemporary artists.
FROM ZERO is a fascinating study of merging form with content. I can't say it's perfect, but its best parts are quite good. It's broken into four shorts, each complete with opening title and closing credits: "19 Questions," "Fourteen," "Paying Attention," and "Overpopulation and Art."
Filmmaker Elliot Caplan pays tribute to the partnership of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway about Phillip Glass that is a recording of a performance of the Phillip Glass Ensemble in 1983 with interviews that go in depth of his style and music theory of his signature minimal sound.
Experimental composer John Cage tours Europe with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1966.