Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV — pinbright new documentary about the trailblazing artist

The future is a lonely place. Just ask Nam June Paik, the South Korean jester-savant who, in the act of inventing video art, also foresaw the internet from the primitive mid-20th century. Directed by Amanda Kim, pinbright new documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV is a deft piece of multitasking that also explains why his powers of prophecy could go under-appreciated. Even friends admit to being baffled when phoned at 2am to be told: “We’re in a boat in the ocean and we don’t know where the shore is!”

At the most basic level, the film is a niche concern: the biography of a key figure in the postwar avant-garde. Arriving in 1950s Europe having trained as a concert pianist, Paik fell in with composer John Cage, whose fame did not spare him the younger man’s prankishness. (Years later, a meeting with Bill Clinton saw one man’s trousers fall to their ankles.) But while Cage and co altered and prepared pianos to subvert tradition, Paik soon took issue with the future as well. Amid the space age, he was at once seer and sceptic.

And here the movie takes on other dimensions. By the ’60s, mankind eyed a Moon landing. In response, Paik built wilfully silly robots of wire and foam rubber. However epic our progress, he suggested, we were still the same ludicrous old humans.

The film is too graceful to spell out what Paik, who died in 2006, might make of our current slavish relationship with technology. For her first feature, Kim whips up a zippy, playful mood her subject would probably have enjoyed. But she can do gravity too: teasing out the wider history that linked artist, art and things to come.

The child who grew up in occupied Seoul with a callous industrialist father became the adult applying magnets to the all-seeing authority of TV sets, distorting and reshaping the images. For much of his life, Asia was othered and patronised by the west; Paik gazed up at satellites and saw a more equitable future, culturally at least. (Again, Kim lets us join the dots ourselves to modern Seoul as global content hub.)

Back on Earth, recognition comes slowly for trailblazing artists. Remuneration slower yet. Still, the world at least caught up with Paik in time for the Guggenheim and the rest to host later displays of endlessly multiplying screens. If audiences were unsure of the meaning with smartphones still years away, it all became clear eventually. And that cryptic 2am warning of lost bearings? Viewers of this excellent film will come to understand that too.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from May 19