A celebration of a famed choreographer

Criticism requires a broad range of literacy in a staggering variety of fields. Few critics cross enough lines to claim anything resembling super-literacy. I certainly don't. And most film critics seem to confine their cross-referential range to novels, television, popular culture, maybe theater and music, and, heaven help us, comic books. Of course, I'm referring only to the critics I know or those I read.

I begin this way in talking about Cunningham, a documentary about choreographer Merce Cunningham because I need to confess a woeful lack of knowledge about dance, modern or otherwise. Although Cunningham, who died at the age of 90 in 2009, was widely acknowledged as a choreographic genius, he is not in my pantheon of cultural icons. Blame my ignorance or cut me some slack because no one can be well-versed in everything.

So what do I have to say about Cunningham, a documentary about this acclaimed choreographer, his dances and his status in the art world? Take a look at the photograph displayed above this review. Dancers are poised against a background designed by painter Robert Rauschenberg. The photograph captures a moment from Cunningman's Summerspace and suggests an imagination rich in color, movement and dramatic suggestion. The picture makes you eager to see the moment that follows.

I've only seen Cunningham in 2D, but I was grateful to director Alla Kovgan for not making a straight-ahead documentary. (A 3D version has been shown in some markets, but is not available in Denver.)

Instead, Kovgan mixes archival material, snippets of interviews (including with Cunningham) and most important, portions of filmed segments from past companies juxtaposed with the work of contemporary dancers. The dances -- although seen only in pieces -- cover the years 1942 through 1972.

Cunningham evidently did not believe that people should dance to music but that movement should be its own art. Some of the movements, almost contortions, seem to require muscles tuned to impossible levels of endurance.

At the same time that Cunningham championed the purity of dance, much of his work was done in collaboration with cutting-edge contemporary visual artists and musicians, Andy Warhol and John Cage, to cite two examples. Importantly, Cunningham was at the epicenter of an especially fertile American art moment, a time when the walls separating one art from another were beginning to crack.

The contemporary versions of Cunningham's dances spread over a variety of settings: a Manhattan rooftop, a subway tunnel, a forest. One can only imagine the difficulties encountered by the movie's gifted director of photography, Mko Malkhasyan.

If you're well versed in Cunningham's work, I probably have nothing to tell you except that Cunningham displays as much visual imagination as the choreographer brought to dance. If you're less-informed about Cunningham, this documentary would make a good place to start catching up.

Looking for some peace and quiet

In Pursuit of Silence reminds us that silence really is golden.

If ever there were a time for a documentary such as The Pursuit of Silence, it's now. Director, editor and co-cinematographer Patrick Shen has made a movie that reminds us of the necessity to find some peace and quiet -- and also that the two are intimately connected. We all know a lot about the opposite condition in a time when Kim Jung-un screams at Trump and Trump yells back at Kim, when TV news often consists of antagonists shouting at one another, when sporting events are filled with wall-to-wall noise having little to do with the games, when volume in movie theaters can be cranked to ear-splitting levels, and when the ubiquitous rings of cell phones are likely to jar the senses at any moment. When you watch The Pursuit of Silence, which informs us of the high decibel counts with which most of us live, you may find yourself longing to find a silent space. Even our national parks and forests aren't entirely immune to noise from passing cars or from planes passing overhead. Shen keys on composer John Cage as an early and important artistic proponent of silence, citing Cage's 4'33, a totally silent piece that he debuted in 1952. If you can't get away from the din of the city, you'll find a bit of respite in some of Shen's beautiful imagery, glimpses of Alaska's Denali National Park, for example. A tea ceremony in Kyoto made me wonder whether every world leader shouldn't be required to engage in such a ritual before giving a speech. Shen interviews experts on the impact of noise on human well-being and leaves us with a quote we'd all do well to inscribe on our doorposts: "Silence returns us to what is real." To use a popular phrase in a new context, "Maybe it's time we all got real." The above image, by the way, is one of the calm, meditative sights that Shen uses to put us back in touch with the silence many of us spend excessive amounts of time trying to avoid.