I recognise the name, but that's about it and I do like a good documentary, so I'm looking forward to this - although I'm expecting to be thoroughly confused by it all.
Well, what we have here is a pretty straightforward telling of a pretty unstraightforward life. Nam June was born in South Korea to a wealthy family and he trained as a classical pianist and found himself in Berlin to continue his studies. At which point, he fell in with an experimental art collective and his life took a bit of a left turn from that point onwards, with him ending up in New York doing a very bizarre selection of things, often with very little money to support himself.
The film is full of very earnest arty types who seem very close to parody these days, but I imagine were pretty shocking in Berlin in the late 50s and New York in the 60s. We have John Cage playing a manual typewriter accompanied by Karlheinz Stockhausen with some weird electronic keyboard, Charlotte Moorman submerging herself in an oil drum full of water before playing the cello whilst sitting on Nam June, Charlotte again getting arrested for playing the cello naked - I could go on and on.
Like all these things it's easy to scoff and say "anyone could do that" but I find the thought processes involved interesting, even if I find the outcome ridiculous - although that certainly (for me) wasn't always the case here. There are some interesting "before their time" concepts about personalised TV channels with a global reach and the "electronic superhighway" - his video art also felt way ahead of its time, but I can't claim enough knowledge on the subject to speak confidently on the matter! There's also a fascinating short section showing the influence that Global Groove, his 1973 video work had on various pop videos - they were very influenced indeed. He seemed like a nice guy and he certainly had some fascinating ideas (and some mad ones) and it was quite interesting to learn more about both him and them.
What it didn't make for though, was a great film. It's a perfectly passable film, but it's nearly all archive footage run through some video editing software to play it simultaneously, move it all around the screen or obscure it in an arty fashion. It also had weird sound mixing whereby voices are set to a much lower volume than the accompanying noises - luckily I had access to subtitles, otherwise I think I'd have really struggled to find a bearable volume for it.
As I said, most of the film is archive footage but Steven Yeun does pop up as the narrator - his fourth appearance in some capacity here (and I've got another one on the go at the minute). They also manage to catch up with quite a few of his contemporaries, all of whom have nothing but nice words to say about the man so it doesn't exact make for much controversy!
All in all, I enjoyed this but don't really see what warrants it for inclusion in the list of the best films of 2023 - it was a perfectly serviceable film about an interesting character who it's probably fair to say isn't massively going to chime with the mainstream. If you have any interest in the art scene and aren't massively au fait with Nam June then I think it's worth a watch and it's available to rent in all the usual locations - but otherwise you're probably perfectly fine without this in your lives.
Well, what we have here is a pretty straightforward telling of a pretty unstraightforward life. Nam June was born in South Korea to a wealthy family and he trained as a classical pianist and found himself in Berlin to continue his studies. At which point, he fell in with an experimental art collective and his life took a bit of a left turn from that point onwards, with him ending up in New York doing a very bizarre selection of things, often with very little money to support himself.
The film is full of very earnest arty types who seem very close to parody these days, but I imagine were pretty shocking in Berlin in the late 50s and New York in the 60s. We have John Cage playing a manual typewriter accompanied by Karlheinz Stockhausen with some weird electronic keyboard, Charlotte Moorman submerging herself in an oil drum full of water before playing the cello whilst sitting on Nam June, Charlotte again getting arrested for playing the cello naked - I could go on and on.
Like all these things it's easy to scoff and say "anyone could do that" but I find the thought processes involved interesting, even if I find the outcome ridiculous - although that certainly (for me) wasn't always the case here. There are some interesting "before their time" concepts about personalised TV channels with a global reach and the "electronic superhighway" - his video art also felt way ahead of its time, but I can't claim enough knowledge on the subject to speak confidently on the matter! There's also a fascinating short section showing the influence that Global Groove, his 1973 video work had on various pop videos - they were very influenced indeed. He seemed like a nice guy and he certainly had some fascinating ideas (and some mad ones) and it was quite interesting to learn more about both him and them.
What it didn't make for though, was a great film. It's a perfectly passable film, but it's nearly all archive footage run through some video editing software to play it simultaneously, move it all around the screen or obscure it in an arty fashion. It also had weird sound mixing whereby voices are set to a much lower volume than the accompanying noises - luckily I had access to subtitles, otherwise I think I'd have really struggled to find a bearable volume for it.
As I said, most of the film is archive footage but Steven Yeun does pop up as the narrator - his fourth appearance in some capacity here (and I've got another one on the go at the minute). They also manage to catch up with quite a few of his contemporaries, all of whom have nothing but nice words to say about the man so it doesn't exact make for much controversy!
All in all, I enjoyed this but don't really see what warrants it for inclusion in the list of the best films of 2023 - it was a perfectly serviceable film about an interesting character who it's probably fair to say isn't massively going to chime with the mainstream. If you have any interest in the art scene and aren't massively au fait with Nam June then I think it's worth a watch and it's available to rent in all the usual locations - but otherwise you're probably perfectly fine without this in your lives.