Short Film
4:33 minutes
2020

Trailer for Caged by Richard Humann

Filmed during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Richard Humann’s Caged explores the experience of confinement through the duration and silence of John Cage’s landmark composition 4′33″. The film runs exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds, adopting the length of Cage’s work as its conceptual framework. During a period when movement, social contact, and everyday routines had been abruptly restricted, Humann uses this precise span of time to consider what it means to be physically confined and to experience the world in a state of enforced stillness.

The title carries a double meaning. During the pandemic, Humann spent months confined to his weekend home in Woodstock, New York. Caged refers both to this restriction and to John Cage, whose work challenged conventional ideas about music and silence. The connection is more than a play on words. Cage removed intentional musical performance, directing attention toward the sounds that remain; Humann draws on this framework during a period when the ordinary sounds and activities of public life had diminished or disappeared.

In 4′33″, silence is not an absolute absence of sound. It is the absence of deliberately performed music, which allows ambient sounds—the incidental noises of a room and its surroundings—to become perceptible. Humann’s reference makes silence tangible through duration. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds is long enough for the viewer to become conscious of time passing, to notice the expectation that something should happen, and to confront the space created when that expectation remains unfulfilled. Silence becomes not simply an acoustic condition, but an experience of waiting, attention, and suspended activity.

The work’s relationship to Cage is also rooted in place. On August 29, 1952, Cage premiered 4′33″ at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, within walking distance of Humann’s home. This proximity connects the history of experimental music to the artist’s immediate surroundings. Woodstock becomes both the site of personal confinement and the location of a landmark challenge to the definition of music. The same landscape that once hosted Cage’s radical exploration of silence now frames Humann’s reflection on isolation during a global crisis.

In Caged, the exact duration of Cage’s composition becomes a measure through which to contemplate the much longer experience of lockdown. The contrast between four minutes and thirty-three seconds and months of confinement underscores the difference between silence as an artistic proposition and stillness as a lived condition. By connecting these experiences through time, place, and reference, Humann turns silence into something concrete: a duration to inhabit, an expectation left unresolved, and a reminder of the human activity whose absence made the early pandemic so disorienting.

Richard Humann video still from short film Caged — Richard Humann • *Caged* (video still) • Short film • 2020

Directed by: Richard Humann
Edited by: George LaGrange
Production Assistant: Susan Darmiento
Photo credits: Richard Humann Studio

Caged

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