Program notes
John Cage filmed by Frank Scheffer in a documentary which sums up 10 years of collaboration.
From 1982 to 1992 Frank Scheffer worked with John Cage on many different occasions, which resulted in a unique archive of audio-visual material. The material of this Cage-archive consists of interviews, musical performances and images of different locations related to his life and work – Filmed on 16mm and transferred to Digi-Beta.
In all of Scheffer's works related to John Cage he uses the old Chinese method of chance operations based on the I Ching – as often used by John Cage himself in his compositions. For this new documentary he decided for another approach: instead of using these chance operations he edited the film in the usual way that is based on choice. "I wanted the documentary to be informative and appealing to a bigger audience," said Scheffer.
Photo: © Geek Zwetsloot