The revenge of the dead Indians

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Movie
German title The revenge of the dead Indians
Original title The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage
Country of production USA , Germany
original language English , German , French
Publishing year 1993
length 130 minutes
Rod
Director Henning Lohner
script Henning Lohner,
Holger Hof
production Henning Lohner,
Peter Lohner
music John Cage
camera Van Carlson
cut Sven Fleck

Revenge of the Dead Indians is a cinematic portrait of the musician John Cage by director Henning Lohner . The work is considered a homage to Cage and is also referred to as a "film essay" and "composed film".

In addition to conversations with Cage himself and interviews with friends, companions and colleagues of the composer, the focus will be on concert excerpts and associative image sequences that are inspired by Cage's texts, music and philosophy. The film is structured according to Cage's compositional methods and translates these musical processes into the medium of film.

Content and form

The Revenge of the Dead Indians is an homage to John Cage, one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century, in terms of both content and cinematic approach and structure. The film cannot be clearly categorized as either a documentary or a feature film . Rather, it is a combination of "found" videos and a "sound landscape". The work is also referred to as a " film essay ".

The form of the cinematic representation is based on the philosophy and compositional work of Cage himself. Lohner portrays Cage according to the musical principle that every image, every statement and every scene both function within the linear course and can also stand on their own. Lohner's goal was to recognize Cage's creative spirit, works and influence. Attention is paid to “forgotten” landscapes and spaces that are “on the edge of the popular and tourist” and that are overlooked and ignored in everyday life.

In terms of content, The Revenge of the Dead Indians deals with the big issues that occupied Cage: chance and chaos, his Buddhist worldview, not wanting to manipulate the world, art as an imitation of nature, as well as the identity of music and sounds and noises. On the one hand, excerpts from Cage's concerts and musical performances are shown. In addition, you can see short, sometimes only seconds-long nature, landscape and city images that were taken all over the world and are sometimes underlaid with music, sounds or noises. Together they form “a large, well-composed image collage” that is inspired by Cage's texts.

In addition, conversations with Cage himself are shown repeatedly during the film. Musicians, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists also appear in interviews, as do French street vendors and market workers who love the street noise and noise. A total of 42 interviewees can be seen, including prominent personalities such as Heiner Müller , John Zorn , Giorgio Strehler , Iannis Xenakis , Frank Zappa , Yoko Ono , William Forsythe , Alison Knowles , Yehudi Menuhin , Richard Serra , Merce Cunningham , Ellsworth Kelly , Dennis Hopper and Noam Chomsky , who talk about their encounters with Cage, the impression his music made on them, and its significance for their own work. In doing so, they comment on phenomena that preoccupied Cage, such as chance, chaos, anarchy, noise, silence, and lack of purpose.

The film ends with a performance of Cage's piece 4'33 ″ , recorded in 1990 in Invalidenstrasse in Berlin, coincidentally on the day the old border crossing between East and West Berlin was demolished.

title

The title The Revenge of the Dead Indians goes back to a quote from Heiner Müller , who says in the film that John Cage is "the revenge of the exterminated native Americans on European music":

“The only history that the US has is the Civil War or the War of Independence. [...] And the other is the dead Indians. And the story is actually the dead Indians because it is so completely repressed and subconscious. And it has always been the case that culture comes from the vanquished, not from the victors. And the vanquished, including the dead vanquished, somehow rise into the culture of the winner and determine or vary the culture of the winner. "

And further: "Culture comes from the oppressed, from the marginalized, and is therefore pushed into the unconscious, and from there it rebels - and that is the Indian element in Cage."

History and production

During a concert stay in Berlin in August 1990, John Cage gave Henning Lohner, when he was working for the " aspekte " editorial team at ZDF, a personal interview about his life, his ideas and his current work. Lohner then worked with Cage during his last years, including on Cage's only film One 11 in 1991. During this time and while filming One 11 , Lohner shot more interviews and additional footage with Cage. Lohner finally used these recordings for Revenge of the Dead Indians .

Concert recordings that can be seen in the film were made live during the "Musicircus" tribute at the Symphony Space in New York on November 1, 1992 and at the John Cage Music Festival of the Academy of Fine Arts in East Berlin on August 1 Recorded in 1990. Lohner and cameraman Van Carlson also shot in the deserts of New Mexico, in the Napa Valley in California, in the European landscapes of France, Italy and Germany, as well as in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Milan, Paris, San Francisco, Osaka , Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

Was funded Revenge of the Dead Indians by a total of 45 short and long television documentaries, the Lohner in this period for the ZDF and the just-created channels Arte turned:

“Every band of raw material went into the fund for the dead Indians . We used leftovers and almost subversive use of existing production and broadcasting structures (which we had ultimately also served with 45 films) - and recorded everything that was surplus, the rubbish, the absurd - the typical television rubbish, just - from which this film was then made could emerge from the magnetic tape ashes and the rubble of a forgotten television landscape. "

After Cage died at the end of 1992, Arte editor Christoph Jörg and producer Peter Lohner enabled further funding through a slot as part of a John Cage themed evening.

The film was made from over 250 hours of raw material and 200 hours of "found noises". The visual and auditory material was edited with more than 1200 cuts before the final film length of 130 minutes was reached. The shortest scene has a duration of exactly one single image, the longest shot lasts four minutes and 33 seconds.

In an elaborate assembly process, Lohner and his editor Sven Fleck created a “practically completely determined cut score, in the hope that the non-accidental results in a particularly strong effect.” The viewer should interpret what was recorded “infinitely differently “, And so chance should come back into the film“ through viewing ”. The selection principle for the images and texts in the film was a musical composition pattern. For this purpose, catalogs were created which lexically pointed to similarities in the image content, for example "clouds", "clouds with city" or "city with cars". The text passages of the film were divided into thematic chapters, for example “Chaos”, “Chance”, “Love”, “Music” and “Everyday Life”, filtered through several selection processes and finally assembled into a three-act structure.

reception

In the daily newspaper , the critic Birgit Glombitza wrote enthusiastically that Lohner's 130-minute homage leads “in unobtrusive image-sound didactics to the compositional principles of the man to whom modern music owes the symbiosis of harmony and chaos. Lohner has collected street and landscape images and presents them as if on a peep-show stage. "Glombitza described the film as a" symphony of coincidences ":

“With quick cuts, Lohner combines details into funny sub-compositions that should please the almost constantly smiling John Cage. Fat splashes in a pan, chicken legs are artistically turned back and forth. In the background, George Bush declares war on Saddam Hussein on the television screen. A cow's head is smashed in staccato, the brain splashes into a plastic bowl. The hissing of the frying fat, the hum of the silence and repeated talk. [...] Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, Dennis Hopper, William Forsythe, metrologists, computer scientists, brain researchers, cheese sellers and florists - they all function as choir voices that unite shortly before the end of the film to form a rhythmic collage of Babylonian confusion. "

The magazine Klassik.com called The Revenge of the Dead Indians "fascinating" and an "artistically demanding, towards the end somewhat exhausting, but always inspiring portrait of John Cage and his outstanding importance for the music and art of the 20th century":

“Lohner's film is not just a documentary about Cage. He creates a kind of art film in which he adheres to certain rules [...]. The film draws attention to the images, the sounds, the music. [...] In doing so, Lohner does not show statement by statement, but divides what someone says into sometimes small parts, so that tension can arise not only between their statements, but also within the statements of a speaker. In everything, Cage is portrayed as a peaceful, humble, generous, humorous and spiritual artist and an outstanding initiator for music and art. "

In the music magazine Rondo , the critic Guido Fischer wrote that the production was not a "cage documentation in the classical sense":

“With the help of a rapid flood of images that alternate with moments of savored standstill, a field of tension arises between hectic, civilizational disorder and the uncut natural beauty, which is reflected in the excerpts of Cage's musical work. And how Cage promoted the emancipation of sounds from the original source "silence" is captured in the last four minutes and 33 seconds of the film. "

The Transmedia described the film in their program as "a terrific documentary, strictly through-composed"

“Excerpts from concerts are shown [...] and adequately illustrated - by a wonderfully guided camera. In addition, references of Cage's music to meteorology, chaos research and other sciences are illustrated - a fascinatingly assembled artistic documentation. "

The online blog For All Events called Die Rache der Toten Indianer an “excellent documentary introduction to the music and ideas of John Cage.” The online magazine Berliner Filmfestivals wrote, “With the help of short interviews […] Lohner creates a multi-layered portrait Müller, smoking a cigar, philosophizing about American wetlands and cutting small sequences of modern everyday sounds in between. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Henning Lohner. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b John Cage: The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage (DVD) - jpc. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  3. ↑ The Revenge of the Dead Indians. In: Filmdienst . Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Two thousand and one. Film lexicon FILMS from AZ - The revenge of the dead Indians. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Electronic Arts Intermix: The Revenge of the Dead Indians, John Cage. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g klassik.com: Current CD review, DVD review, CD review, DVD review. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  7. ↑ a b c d John Cage - The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage. In: moderecords.com. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  8. ^ A b John Cage - The Revenge Of The Dead Indians - In Memoriam John Cage. In: rondomagazin.de. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Lohner Carlson raw material portraits and landscapes I on artnet. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  10. ↑ a b Music-Film-Marathon - Program: April 22nd, 2012. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Film starts: The revenge of the dead Indians. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  12. ↑ a b JOHN CAGE CENTENNIAL TRIBUTE - STREAMING MUSEUM. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  13. ↑ a b c d e f g h Henning Lohner: "The Revenge of the Dead Indians" - On the question of documentation as an art form. In: bandwidth - media between art and politics. Andreas Broeckmann, Rudolf Frieling, 2004, accessed March 6, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Henning Lohner | The revenge of the dead Indians | 1993. In: ZKM. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  15. ↑ a b The revenge of the dead Indians. In: Experimental - Videotopias - City in Motion. Media archive ZHDK, accessed on March 6, 2019 .
  16. ↑ John Cage's One11: The Making Of, Now In English - greg.org. Retrieved March 7, 2019 (American English).
  17. ↑ a b Birgit Glombitza: One more bang . In: The daily newspaper: taz . February 21, 1994, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 26 ( taz.de [accessed on March 7, 2019]).
  18. ↑ The Revenge of the Dead Indians | transmediale. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Michael Ferguson reviews: The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam, John Cage (1993). Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Carolin Weidner: Review of the II. Music-Film-Marathon. In: berliner filmfestivals.de. April 29, 2012, Retrieved March 7, 2019 .