Directed by Alla Kovgan
Featuring Carolyn Brown, John Cage and Ashley Chen
Running time: 1 hour and 33 minutes

by Deborah Krieger

In my time as someone who writes about movies, I’ve watched a fair few documentaries (or at least more than I would have ever seen in theaters), and written about them for this site. For the most part, I’ve approached documentary films as first an opportunity to learn about the subject matter, and secondly as art objects in their own right. If I learned something new, then great!—and then, onto whether I thought that new thing was presented creatively. So of all the documentary films I’ve reviewed, Alla Kovgan’s Cunningham best exhibits the inherent tension between these two objectives of documentary filmmaking. It’s essentially a showcase of several of the late, great modern dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham’s most famous compositions, presented in evocative new settings and calibrated for 3-D viewing.