{"id":186,"date":"2012-03-11T09:34:37","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T14:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/creativeresearch\/?p=186"},"modified":"2018-10-25T15:32:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-25T19:32:32","slug":"a-global-video-documentary-project-as-real-as-todays-headlines-cosmopolis-by-roberta-friedman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2012\/03\/11\/a-global-video-documentary-project-as-real-as-todays-headlines-cosmopolis-by-roberta-friedman\/","title":{"rendered":"A Global Video Documentary Project – As Real as Today\u2019s Headlines \u2013 Cosmopolis: 49 Waltzes for the World \u2013 by Roberta Friedman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last November, I participated in an exhibition celebrating the 2012 centenary of the birth of American experimental composer John Cage<\/a>. \u201cThings Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage\u201d<\/a> was organized by independent curator Jade Dellinger<\/a>, 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<\/a>, in which Cage noted: \u201cI am not interested in the names of movements but rather in seeing and making things not seen before.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This powerful notion aptly applies to my most recent collaborative work, a series of sound\/videoscape installations called Cosmopolis: 49 Waltzes for the World<\/strong>\u00a0documenting cities in transition around the world.\u00a0 My collaborator Daniel Loewenthal<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Cosmopolis<\/strong> was inspired by Cage\u2019s graphic music score 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs <\/em><\/strong>and his expanded definition of “music” to include the sounds that surround us at all times, encouraging the listener to become aware of the \u201cmusic\u201d of a city and to listen to the environmental sounds of various locations.\u00a0\u00a0 Through chance means, 49 triangles were superimposed on the map of New York City\u2019s five boroughs, and the listener was instructed to go to the apex of each angle and, simply \u2026 to listen.<\/p>\n

Cage\u2019s music publisher, the legendary Don Gillespie of Peters Press, <\/a>asked me to work with him and his colleague, Gene Caprioglio<\/a>, to create a visual realization of Cage\u2019s unique work by videotaping the happenings at each of these corners.\u00a0\u00a0 As a native New Yorker myself, I was amazed \u2013 we shot over four seasons \u2013 listening to the sound of shoveling snow in Staten Island, and the bounce of a basketball and boys shouting in Queens.\u00a0 We overheard a couple arguing over their groceries in Brooklyn, and will never forget the look and sound of 42nd<\/sup> Street lined with X- Rated movie theatres.\u00a0 It was an eye-opening (and ear-opening) experience for all three of us.<\/p>\n

49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>was successfully presented as part of the Cage retrospective show ROLYWHOLYOVER A CIRCUS<\/a> and was shown at random times in the Media Space of the SoHo Guggenheim Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other venues. \u00a0It was released on DVD by Mode Records in December 2008 and is now available in music stores as well as on Amazon.com.<\/a><\/p>\n

Encouraged by the widespread critical response to this piece, a brainstorming session with LA artist Barry Markowitz<\/a>,\u00a0and taking Cage\u2019s suggestion that his work could be \u201cperformed\u201d in other cities, I invited Dan Loewenthal to come with me to repeat and expand the process in Beijing, sister city to New York.\u00a0 We chose Beijing in July 2007, at the time it was undergoing rapid and irreversible changes in preparation for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.\u00a0 (The fact that my brother was the Minister of Commerce at the American Embassy in Beijing\u00a0 and spoke fluent Chinese didn\u2019t hurt.) 49 Waltzes for the Gated City<\/strong><\/em> <\/a>premiered at the Montclair Art Museum in April 2010. The installation <\/a>was sponsored in part by a grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Graz, Austria, has been the \u201csister city\u201d to Montclair for sixty years. In order to commemorate the anniversary of our cross-cultural exchange, I selected Graz as the next 49 Waltzes<\/strong><\/em> location.\u00a0 Funded in part by a grant from Global Education Center of Montclair State University<\/a>, where I teach, and in-kind support from the city of Graz, Dan and I meticulously followed Cage\u2019s random site selection instructions for 49 Watzes for Graz <\/a><\/em><\/strong>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\u2019s uniqueness.\u00a0 The commentaries on life in Graz come up randomly, as surprises for the viewer.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 2006, Dan got a job on the production of an Arabic language television series in Cairo.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0I was reluctant to include Cairo in our series, where I felt it would be unsafe to visit, let alone shoot video on the streets.\u00a0 As an American, I\u00a0had 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We plan to include a deeper and broader documentary component to this piece in progress.\u00a0After all, Cairo is another sister city to New York City\u00a0— and thus was born 49 Waltzes for Al-Qahira<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Having shot in New York, Beijing, and Graz, we now found ourselves becoming obsessed with Cairo\u2019s narrative of streets and avenues as living, breathing musical entities filled with tranquility, traffic, trains, polyglot arguments, laughter and prayer calls.\u00a0 Because locations were selected randomly, we shot in places no tourist dared to go or would have wanted to.\u00a0 We incorporated things not often or ever seen, or heard, before.\u00a0 We captured urban environments slated for oblivion by urbanization.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

At its heart, the comprehensive\u00a0goal of Cosmopolis <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

I have always admired the work of John Cage.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Although these waltz pieces set out to strictly follow Cage’s instructions and be purely sound works, \u00a0with a visual reference, they\u00a0evolved into something more. \u00a0I\u00a0 don’t think\u00a0Cage would have minded.<\/p>\n

— Roberta Friedman<\/a><\/strong> has had a wide and varied media career, with work spanning a\u00a0vast 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<\/em> and The Empire Strikes Back<\/em>, to the esoteric, with experimental work \u2013 such as her interactive video in collaboration with Grahame Weinbren, The Erl King<\/a><\/em>, acquired by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 She had a two-evening retrospective of her work in December 2009 at the Millennium Film Workshop<\/a>; Kandinsky: A Close Look<\/a><\/em>, a film she produced with\u00a0Weinbren, was shown weekly from September 2009 through January 2010 as part of the artist\u2019s major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Her film, Bertha’s Children<\/em>, was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last November, I participated in an exhibition celebrating the 2012 centenary of the birth of American experimental composer John Cage. \u201cThings Not Seen Before: A Tribute to John Cage\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-research-center-guest-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":878,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}