Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

"Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV" is a documentary about the journey of Nam June Paik, famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as artistic canvas and prophesied both fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that interconnected metaverse. Throughout, the film was pretty informative and interesting to observe.

Nam June Paik is a very experimental artist and the documentary does a good job on examine his art, personality and the impact he has created with his work. The presentation visuals are pretty good, the sound designs was good and the editing choices were fitting as if the style was done from Paik himself. Most of the participants and narration dialogue were pretty interesting and helps to add context to the character.

The film does get a little too long as if some information felt repeated by the end but the overall learning about Paik is quite interesting. Overall, a good documentary.

Rating: B.

This film is seductive like all American Masters profiles. Their films are interesting and initially satisfying, but they leave an aftertaste of being suspiciously mild-very selective in what information they include (nothing troubling or disappointing about the subject) and thus emotionally manipulative. I wish they would allow more grit-to edit Fluxus artists as if they were a cuddly, harmonious crew is just weird. Ignoring Paik's wife Kubota was also bizarro. Nonetheless, Nam June Paik is such a fantastic subject that it's well worth watching this one just to see all the footage. They included a lot of video of him speaking, and he had an incredible way of speaking big thoughts succinctly and often humorously. A too shallow movie about an artist of real depth.

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.

I don't need Steve Yuen's dulcet tones to elucidate the genius that was Nam June Paik. I don't really see how the latter had an impact on the former. This is just a tool to make a somewhat mercurial subject more digestible for the masses, which is quite reductive honestly speaking. There was barely any exposition to really get at the heart of what made NJP so great. This is the kind of introductory course that spends 2hrs didactically telling us about his brilliance but skirts the chance to deeply explore the origins of that brilliance, and I suppose that is the strength of relying purely on archives. Moreover, the documentary telegraphs everything by following the conventions of chronological narration. Beginning with his early life in war-torn Korea, to his restless irreverent youth, to his maximal, big-scale mid-life period, to his very sad decline. I understand that for an audience who knows nothing about NJP, chronology is an easy form of exposition, however, this barely scratches the surface of his radicalism and complete rejection of art world greed. Unfortunately, decades after his death, his art has been desecrated into some form of commodity, which is the last thing he would have wanted. This is of no fault of the filmmaker, but rather the disgusting nature of art world auction houses and foundations.

What is mostly omitted from this narrative is Kubota's participation in the work they did together (her image appears briefly only when Fluxus is mentioned in the NY timeline and later by interview, but the interview is edited in an odd way), and her own radicalism to the medium of video. Too often when we speak about a radical male artist, there seems to be erasure of the woman who stood by that artist and made work that was equally irreverent. To be fair, Shigeko jokes in her own words, "I was a groupie. They say Koreans are marathon runners, but I was fast too," however, her contributions are largely cut down here. In 2023, I was hoping that we wouldn't have to deal with this double standard. I suppose this is not any fault on the filmmaker per se, but perhaps the estate. At least not all of his female collaborators were erased since we do get a healthy amount of Charlotte Moorman. But oddly enough there is no mention of his highly influential period in Tokyo (circa 1961-1964), not to mention his early education at Tokyo University (1953) which he clearly threw out the window. The only mention of Nam June in Japan is his return to Japan later on when he contacted Shuya Abe and asked him to help build the first video synthesizer. All in all, it is watchable, but underwhelming.