sight / seeing
An experimental documentary
Inspired by, and with music and words by John Cage
The best place to learn seeing is a place where there's nothing to see.
How boring
is a wall
A place where there is nothing to see - the fact that the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum in Rome could be one of these places is the first surprise that sight/seeing has in store.
The second is how little you can get bored by looking at a floor plate for a minute. Because that's exactly what this experimental documentary film forces you to do: look. At walls and pillars, up to the clouds, at random street scenes without a specific focus, and at exactly that: floors. All within a radius of 300 metres of the most photographed sights in Western Europe.
Without commentary, carried by John Cage's composition ASLSP/Organ2, structured at best by location references and quotations from John Cage, which open the mind even more while watching.
Radical deceleration
The Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri wrote that the least interesting thing about tourist locations is what everyone is photographing. Still, more and more people are travelling to more and more places to take more and more of the same pictures. Not to experience the place, but to post a photographic trophy of their digitally fuelled herd instinct.
In this sense, sight/seeing is not only to be understood as a cinematic experiment and an exercise in radical deceleration in the spirit of John Cage, but also as cultural criticism.
We've unlearned to be where we are: be it in the moment, at a place, with someone, with ourselves or even with the feeling of being bored.
Made by chance
However, the true radicality of sight/seeing lies in the way it was made. It is also inspired by John Cage: the entire 72 minutes of the film were shot by chance. Each shot is the result of a sequence of identical random operations, turning the camera away from the most photographed landmarks between London and Rome, focussing for one minute on completley random motifs. From walls. To pavements. To street scenes.
Composed masterfully into one single soundscape of scraps of conversation, street noises, raindrops, footsteps, and John Cage's piece Organ2/ASLSP.
Anyone who expects sight/seeing to be the least exciting film in the world should think of Cage's quote: ‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight.
Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’
Or, as one of the very rare pre-view guests paraphrased the experience: "Wow!"
Trailer
Book, Camera,
Production
Lorenz Ritter
Sounddesign
David Merkl
Edit
Sören Hoven
Colourgrading,
Postproduction
Jens Harms
Shot in Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London and Berlin in 2023/2024
Running time 75 mins
Organ 2 / ASLSP used with kind permission by C.F. Peters Gmbh & Co. KG.
Soundtrack by Christoph Bossert & Hans-Ola Ericsson
available from Organum Classics
John Cage quotes used with kind permission by Wesleyan University Press