Prologue

“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it /
and that is / poetry / as I need it.”
- John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”



Music and I have met a few times, but we remain strangers at best. And though we have even worked together, we remain indifferent to each other, not comfortable with each other, not understanding one another, not communicating. The chemistry is just not there.

Now, we are being forced to work on a film together.

On earlier films, I would bypass the problem by ignoring Music altogether. This time though, it seemed impossible. How could I possibly make a music video without Music? Is there such a thing as a piece of music without Music?

And then I remembered John Cage’s 4’ 33”.

4’ 33” is John Cage’s famous (or notorious) “silent” piece. The performer comes on stage, picks up his instrument and proceeds to do nothing with it for the next 4 minutes and 33 seconds. At the end of which, he puts down the instrument and leaves.

But 4’ 33” is not a silent piece. The music consists of all the sounds present at that time in that space, including the sounds made by the listeners themselves.

It’s not Music, the stranger I have never really got to know.

But then I have nothing to do with Music, and I am doing it.

























"Performing 4'33" by John Cage",
silver gelatin print. (c) John Neff, 2002.
From an exhibition at Suitable Gallery, Chicago.

The sound-track

A screening of John Cage’s 4’ 33” will be arranged in the Main Theatre as part of the regular screening schedule before the main feature of the day, and will be announced as such. At the scheduled time, the lights will go out and the projector will come on. But no film will be running in the projector. At the end of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the projector will go off and the next film on the programme will come on. This is, in a way, a cinematic performance of 4’ 33”.

Microphones will be placed all around the Main Theatre to pick up as many sounds as possible. They will be placed in vantage positions to pick up all the sounds that can be predicted to occur – the sound of the projector, sounds from the audience, sounds coming from outside, etc. The sounds will be recorded on different tracks and then mixed together to reproduce as faithfully as possible the complex sound in the theatre at that point in time.

A score sheet from Alphonse Allais' Funeral March, for the last rites of a deaf man, consisting of 24 measures of entirely blank music manuscript. A remarkable precedence to 4' 33"

The image-track

Consider this piece of Dada junk-poetry:



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Jeanine, the friend of Jeanine and earns frequent flier miles with philosopher toward blithe spirit. Furthermore, cashier toward apartment building beams with

joy, and skyscraper related to bur debutante from hand. If toward dust bunny teach insurance agent from cloud formation, then defined by impresario gets

stinking drunk. defined by scooby snack wakes up, and minivan related to graduated cylinder daydreams; however, scooby snack related to a big fan of. But they

eed to remember how lazily buzzard from daydreams. But they need to remember how accidentally cab driver beyond hesitates.

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It looks like a piece of poetry. And we read it the way we are taught to read a piece of poetry, and try to find meaning in the words strung together. But actually that’s what they are – just words strung together, chosen at random and strung together.

Thanks to the nature of the cut, cinema too is read in a similar fashion. Two shots juxtaposed together give rise to a third meaning. Imagine then two completely unrelated shots, chosen at random, juxtaposed together. The viewer will try to make some meaning out of the juxtaposition. Juxtapose another unrelated shot to it. The viewer will still try to make something out of it. Continue the process ad infinitum. The viewer may get confused about what the film-maker wants to say, but he/she will still believe that the film-maker wants to say something. Ignoring the obvious, which is that the film-maker wants to say nothing.

But I would like the viewer to know that I’m saying nothing. I would like to communicate that I do not want to communicate. And I would like to do it at that point in time when the viewer has almost switched off from the film, not able to make meaning out of it. And from then on, he can enjoy the rest of the images for what they are – just images strung together.

However, a garbled construction like the poem above is difficult in film, because the nearest equivalent a shot has in written and spoken language is the sentence. And therefore, each shot is in a sense complete in itself and doesn’t really need another to complete it, unless both of them are used as tools to develop an idea or a narrative. Hence, the danger is that the image-track might be seen as a “montage”, a collection of independent ideas, right from the beginning. Which is why I see an important role for the cut here. It shouldn’t be static, just joining the two shots together, but linking them dynamically to suggest a continuity, an idea, a narrative where there isn’t any.

I would like viewers to attempt to make meaning of the film only through the cut. Therefore other devices that suggest continuity like a single character or location or a style of shot-taking are out of consideration. The challenge is therefore to shoot dissimilar ideas, and while editing find similarities that enable them to be linked together.

























4' 33" - A tribute to John Cage

The images

What I have therefore decided to do is shoot a lot of images. Some planned, some unplanned. In a variety of settings, in studio and on location. Using all the constructions of film grammar possible – camera movements, camera speeds, camera effects – sometimes conforming to them, sometimes distorting them, sometimes reinventing them. Here are a few examples, just an indicative list:



• A calendar hanging on a wall in one corner of the frame blowing in the breeze due to a pedestal fan running in another corner.

• A static camera in a lift. At every floor the doors open revealing a different scene.

• A full circular track with the camera constantly panning to point in the same direction. The subject remains static, and so moves from one edge of the frame to another, from the foreground to the background.

• Swish pans to nothing in particular.

• An orange being peeled by orange finger-nails against an orange background.

• A view of a tree, bottom-up.

• An extreme wide angle shot of a man smoking a cigarette. The cigarette butt and the head occupy the same amount of screen space.

• A section of space just above a TT table. A TT ball keeps going in and out of frame.

• A ceiling fan starting from rest, gradually building up speed and finally becoming a blur.

• A beetle on its back waving its legs frantically.

• Extreme close-up: the texture of a cinema screen.

• Mid close-up: a man doing a headstand.

• A drop of water sliding down a wall.

• A TV against the background of a colour bar.

• The spools of a cassette rotating.

• A dressing table in a bedroom. In the mirror, the camera photographing itself.

• Urinal stalls. A man takes a leak in one of them.

• Extreme close-up: an eye darting here and there.

• A road-roller coming towards camera and filling up the frame.

• A cat and a computer mouse.

• A clothesline with random objects hung from it – a carbon paper, a doll, a toothpaste tube, a rope, a racket, a leaf.

• A fully dressed woman holding up black rectangular boards at strategic parts.

• A view inside an open mouth.

• Two people on different levels of a staircase. Each shows the part the other is missing at every step.

• A cigarette in an ashtray turning into ash right till the end.



What however remains is that crucial shot – the shot where I’m saying I’m saying nothing. Saying it as an image is an option, but I have a feeling that it will get lost in the whole sequence of incomprehensible images. Therefore the best way out is to say it obviously as text – the quote from Cage itself. Now the question arises, when? Somewhere in the middle or right at the end? The ideal point would be at the moment when the viewer is at his most confused. But that would vary from individual to individual. The end, on the other hand, has the advantage of summation, the ability of drawing a collective Ah! from the audience. Right now, I’m inclined towards the end, but that’s a decision I’ll take at the editing table.

White Painting. Seven panels, 72" x 36" each, 72" x 252" overall.
(c) Robert Rauschenberg, 1951