A Global Video Documentary Project – As Real as Today’s Headlines – Cosmopolis: 49 Waltzes for the World – by Roberta Friedman

Last November, I participated in an exhibition celebrating the 2012 centenary of the birth of American experimental composer John Cage. “Things Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage” was organized by independent curator Jade Dellinger, who told me that the title of the show was inspired by a line from a letter he once received from the late, great composer referencing the work of Marcel Duchamp, in which Cage noted: “I am not interested in the names of movements but rather in seeing and making things not seen before.”

This powerful notion aptly applies to my most recent collaborative work, a series of sound/videoscape installations called Cosmopolis: 49 Waltzes for the World documenting cities in transition around the world.  My collaborator Daniel Loewenthal, and I have shot in Beijing, Graz and Cairo, and we have targeted the key cities of Istanbul, Havana and Los Angeles as next on our list.

Cosmopolis was inspired by Cage’s graphic music score 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs and his expanded definition of “music” to include the sounds that surround us at all times, encouraging the listener to become aware of the “music” of a city and to listen to the environmental sounds of various locations.   Through chance means, 49 triangles were superimposed on the map of New York City’s five boroughs, and the listener was instructed to go to the apex of each angle and, simply … to listen.

Cage’s music publisher, the legendary Don Gillespie of Peters Press, asked me to work with him and his colleague, Gene Caprioglio, to create a visual realization of Cage’s unique work by videotaping the happenings at each of these corners.   As a native New Yorker myself, I was amazed – we shot over four seasons – listening to the sound of shoveling snow in Staten Island, and the bounce of a basketball and boys shouting in Queens.  We overheard a couple arguing over their groceries in Brooklyn, and will never forget the look and sound of 42^nd Street lined with X- Rated movie theatres.  It was an eye-opening (and ear-opening) experience for all three of us.

49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs was successfully presented as part of the Cage retrospective show ROLYWHOLYOVER A CIRCUS and was shown at random times in the Media Space of the SoHo Guggenheim Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other venues.  It was released on DVD by Mode Records in December 2008 and is now available in music stores as well as on Amazon.com.

Encouraged by the widespread critical response to this piece, a brainstorming session with LA artist Barry Markowitz, and taking Cage’s suggestion that his work could be “performed” in other cities, I invited Dan Loewenthal to come with me to repeat and expand the process in Beijing, sister city to New York.  We chose Beijing in July 2007, at the time it was undergoing rapid and irreversible changes in preparation for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.  (The fact that my brother was the Minister of Commerce at the American Embassy in Beijing  and spoke fluent Chinese didn’t hurt.) 49 Waltzes for the Gated City premiered at the Montclair Art Museum in April 2010. The installation was sponsored in part by a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Graz, Austria, has been the “sister city” to Montclair for sixty years. In order to commemorate the anniversary of our cross-cultural exchange, I selected Graz as the next 49 Waltzes location.  Funded in part by a grant from Global Education Center of Montclair State University, where I teach, and in-kind support from the city of Graz, Dan and I meticulously followed Cage’s random site selection instructions for 49 Watzes for Graz but added a documentary component: interviews with residents, i.e., the mayor, a mother, a librarian, a teacher, some college students, and an architect; these anecdotal sketches underscore the city’s uniqueness.  The commentaries on life in Graz come up randomly, as surprises for the viewer.

In the fall of 2006, Dan got a job on the production of an Arabic language television series in Cairo.  He was originally slated for a six-week stint but the job expanded to eight months. He returned with a deep appreciation for the people and culture of Cairo, dozens of beautiful photos and video of a city in the throes of change.  I was reluctant to include Cairo in our series, where I felt it would be unsafe to visit, let alone shoot video on the streets.  As an American, I had deep concerns about Arab terrorism. Dan argued for pursuing the project, saying that the eyes of the world were on Cairo as the most populated and arguably the most influential city in the Arab-speaking world.  Its streets echo Pharoanic, colonial and royal histories and it is a place of inherent contradictions, a clash of styles and centuries — friendly and suspicious, careless and reticent, tending forward and held back.

We plan to include a deeper and broader documentary component to this piece in progress. After all, Cairo is another sister city to New York City — and thus was born 49 Waltzes for Al-Qahira

Having shot in New York, Beijing, and Graz, we now found ourselves becoming obsessed with Cairo’s narrative of streets and avenues as living, breathing musical entities filled with tranquility, traffic, trains, polyglot arguments, laughter and prayer calls.  Because locations were selected randomly, we shot in places no tourist dared to go or would have wanted to.  We incorporated things not often or ever seen, or heard, before.  We captured urban environments slated for oblivion by urbanization.

Along the way, we have become disturbingly aware of the homogenization of worldwide cities, and the acceleration of the loss of meaningful architecture and urban sites and landmarks.  We hope to continue to address these issues by creating a visual as well as musical portrait of the city of Cairo, an art piece with a documentary element that offers a window into neighborhoods that only its locals know, revealing unnoticed and overlooked corners. 

At its heart, the comprehensive goal of Cosmopolis is to promote an intimate understanding of people and places, bridging the gap between the movement toward a monolithic global culture and a nagging historical antagonism between countries and their cultures.

I have always admired the work of John Cage.

Although these waltz pieces set out to strictly follow Cage’s instructions and be purely sound works,  with a visual reference, they evolved into something more.  I  don’t think Cage would have minded.

— Roberta Friedman has had a wide and varied media career, with work spanning a vast assortment of film and video productions shown extensively in the United States and Europe. Her projects have ranged from the commercial, such as her work for George Lucas on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, to the esoteric, with experimental work – such as her interactive video in collaboration with Grahame Weinbren, The Erl King, acquired by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection.  As an independent filmmaker, she has produced and directed many short films, receiving grant funding (including NYSCA, NEA, a BFI Filmmaking Grant, Australian Film Commission grant) and winning awards at various festivals (including Athens International Festival, Sinking Creek Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, and FILMEX).  She had a two-evening retrospective of her work in December 2009 at the Millennium Film Workshop; Kandinsky: A Close Look, a film she produced with Weinbren, was shown weekly from September 2009 through January 2010 as part of the artist’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Her film, Bertha’s Children, was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.  Her experimental films are housed in the collection of the Australian National Film Library and have been selected to be preserved and housed by the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.