Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nam June Paik, Steven Yeun (narrator)
Intro:
… an invigorating and suitably delirious look at a key proto-cyberpunk art figure …
When making documentaries about the weirder sides of the art world, there is always a fear that things will turn out too normal. That the deviations of the subject will have to be reshaped to fit the standards of the medium. But then there are those that go in the opposite direction, where what is to be expected from an artist documentary (archive footage, contemporaneous and new interviews, exhibitions of their art, etc.) is contorted into a tribute that reflects the way the artist approaches art. Nam June Paik: Moon Is The Oldest TV is one such doco.
The South Korean-born, American-based Paik is described as being able to speak twenty languages, albeit none of them fluently. This film about him follows suit, presenting a multilingual collage of footage and talking heads that will likely leave monolingual audiences equally in the dark. But then, literal comprehension isn’t really the point here. It’s more of a direct cultural download, similar to the cine-synaesthesia of Moonage Daydream, where the audience are forced out of a passive observer stance into a more active one, pushing through the collective “Paikish” so that they can listen to the underlying truth: Technology can free us of language barriers.
Influenced by his memories of Japan-occupied South Korea, Paik identified television as the new dialless radio; the latest one-way control system by which the oppressors could continue to shape language to their own ends, and in turn, shape human thought. Taking inspiration from artists like the godfather of noise music John Cage (whose use of indeterminacy can be seen as the ultimate decentralisation of sound art), he took this mass-produced product, ripped its guts out, and found his own way to feed the noise back into the system – giving the technological rats swimming in the ocean of information a much-needed lifeboat.
Through his connections to people like Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as the Fluxus collective, which included Yoko Ono amongst its membership, the film frames Paik as your favourite weirdo’s favourite weirdo. His approach to art and analogue technology, has had an incredible amount of ripple effect in the collective unconsciousness. He basically embodied the same ethos that let Jafar Panahi flip the bird to the Ayatollah’s two-decade media ban, or Steven Soderbergh and Sean Baker to shoot films on consumer-grade smartphones. Hell, there’s a straight line that can be drawn from his 1984 broadcast Good Morning Mr Orwell, an artistic rebuttal to the oft-repeated tech-aided dystopian hypothesis, and a hacker in a Max Headroom mask interrupting a Doctor Who broadcast to show himself being spanked with a fly-swatter just three years later.
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is an invigorating and suitably delirious look at a key proto-cyberpunk art figure, wielding enough of his artistic sensibilities to properly convey their worth while maintaining his pixelated sense of humour to stop it from being too ‘artsy’. For every depiction of mass media’s role in propagating war, there’s a scene of collaborator Charlotte Moorman exclaiming “Oh no, this is very serious”, as she wears motorised propellor nipple pasties while playing the cello. It’s a film that asks a fair bit of its audience, not least being their cultural literacy, but it’s a deep dive into the frequencies that viewers won’t be forgetting in a hurry. If none of this makes sense to you, it may already be too late.
