‘Cage/Cunningham’ By Alan M. Kriegsman Washington Post Staff Writer October 26, 1992

Director: Elliot Caplan Not rated Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

"Cage/Cunningham," which had its world premiere in Paris a year ago, was directed, edited and photographed by Elliot Caplan, who worked on the project with its dual subjects for the better part of a decade, becoming a sort of silent third partner in the "three C's," so to speak. The run at the Biograph turns out to have an unintended timely and elegiac aspect: The film was given a couple of free showings last July at the National Gallery while Cage was still alive; it comes to us now in commercial exhibition just two months after his sudden death of a stroke at 79.

One of the things that make the film remarkable is that although the ingredients are familiar from other documentaries -- still photos, archival and recent footage of rehearsal and performance, interviews with both artists, informal shots of their working and living, and comments from such others in their orbit as painters Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, video artist Nam June Paik and composer-critic Virgil Thomson -- the tapestry that Caplan has woven from these threads is not like any you've seen before.

The film follows no recipe and has no steering mechanisms -- its form seems to have emerged not from any preset approach on the part of the filmmaker but from the personalities and attitudes of Cage and Cunningham. The camera never usurps the limelight from its material by saying, "Look what virtuoso moviemaking this is." There's no voice-over narration, and after a viewing you might not be able to pass a quiz about the mere facts of its subjects' careers. But you'll know these two in an unusually intimate way, as both artists and individuals.

In other words -- as the film itself makes clear in the course of its unfolding -- Caplan successfully adapts the open-ended, noncoercive, multidimensional aesthetics of Cage's music and Cunningham's choreography to his cinematic telling of their stories. The consequence is that the film, through wholly unobtrusive means and the fluidity of its images, becomes not just a beguiling, sensitive portrait of Cage, Cunningham and their creations, but a worthy complement to them within its own medium.

Much of the impression the film leaves comes from "small" moments lovingly captured -- Cage watering his plants or cooking, Cunningham recalling a time Cage got a traffic ticket driving their Volkswagen tour bus, shots of cracked paint on an old radiator in the New York studio they shared for a lifetime. Slipped in here and there are artistic pronouncements, casually uttered: Cage allowing as how he prefers sound to music; Cunningham in matter-of-fact wonder over his revolutionary discovery about stage space that "all directions became possible to think of as the front."

Much more, however, comes not by way of talking, but doing. There's a haunting sequence in which Cage, in a theater pit, painstakingly brushes twigs across a board to get the sound just so, and several in which Cunningham, alone in a huge gym or studio, communes with his body in a similarly rapt, devotional manner. For dance enthusiasts, there are any number of priceless glimpses of Cunningham and his dancers in the midst of performance or rehearsal. Some of these, culled from home movies or fragmentary videos, are agonizingly brief, but along the way one sees dancing of extraordinary urgency and refinement not only by Cunningham himself but also by such memorable company members as Karole Armitage, Remy Charlip, Douglas Dunn, Sandra Neels, Steve Paxton, Gus Solomons Jr. and Valda Setterfield, among many others.

There are wonderful seasonings too, from others who have known and worked closely with the pair; e.g., Robert Rauschenberg ("It was the most excruciating collaboration, but it was the most exciting and most real because nobody knew what anybody else was doing until it was too late"); Rudolf Nureyev ("When one's body is young, dance looks pretty, but when one's body is wise, dance looks beautiful"); and former French minister of culture Michel Guy, on Cunningham's dances ("At the beginning I thought it was avant-garde and now I know it's pure classicism; except when you see 'Roaratorio,' you see that it's both avant-garde and creativity and real modernity and also classicism.")

For me the most magical moments are toward the end. In one, after a short, mesmerizing scene with dance critic Edwin Denby, whose description is best left as a surprise, we suddenly see Cage and Cunningham in a bare corridor somewhere, seated on opposite sides of a table surrounded by open briefcases and littered papers, both silent, pens in hand, poring intently over the sheets before them. For a second or two, Cunningham's face turns toward the camera -- he's looking directly at it but you know he's seeing nothing but what was in his head before he turned.

In another, at the close, we see -- in obviously old black-and-white footage -- Cunningham and three of his superb dancers (Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber and Barbara Dilley) in an absolutely transcendent passage from his 1964 "Septet," to music by Cage's spiritual forebear, Erik Satie. It's not only an immensely striking work in itself, but a vastly reverberant set of images that simultaneously evokes George Balanchine's "Apollo" and Frederick Ashton's "Monotones" -- paradigmatic examples of the neoclassicism that Cunningham came to embody in his entirely different fashion. The film ends just after this, with a brief close-up of raindrops falling on the pane of the duo's apartment. It might have seemed trite in another context, but here, at just the right few instants' duration, in the wake of the "Septet" excerpt, it's unutterably poignant.

Cage/Cunningham, at the Biograph, is unrated.

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