Steve Gibons: A Violinist's Wanderlust

Artwork: Marc Chagall's 'The Fiddler'

Introduction

This piece consists of forays into a number of topics, all of which coalesce around the experience of the violinist Steve Gibons–his collaborations, travels, pedagogy, and stylistic sedimentation. More specifically, it is a tribute to one of his albums Beat Nomad, a treasured companion of mine. The album immediately intrigued me because it has a number of familiar elements–styles that Steve has studied and emulated rigorously–and they all ebb seamlessly into one another. That is, I could enjoy a familiar Gershwin tune, which would then–in the same song or the next–yield to a danceable Romanian wedding classic; or Steve’s solo Turko-Arab modulation would yield to a bright Gypsy Jazz ensemble effort. My familiarity with Jazz is partial and largely self-initiated, whereas some of the other elements emerge from my early enculturation, having grown up with Klezmer, Arab art music, and the certain Wallachian subset of Romanian music featured throughout the tracks–though I grew up playing exclusively Western classical music. In this project, I undertake the modest task of deepening the knowledge with which I approach this beloved recording, while allowing readers to do so, too. 

I met Steve a few years ago in his hometown of Chicago. He is an old family acquaintance, having befriended my father over twenty years ago in a peace-oriented music tour that featured Jewish, Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian musicians. In our interview, Gibons aptly referred to it as a ‘“Shalom-Salaam” kind of thing,’ which he appears to believe didn’t–as opposed to did–work. The topic of Middle Eastern music will only be discussed to the extent that it relates to the music of Jews and Roma in Eastern Europe. This will be my primary focus, meaning that Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli will be sidelined to Dave Tarras and Nicolae Neacșu, and Steve’s years in France will be sidelined to his visits in Romania. 

The Gypsy-Klezmer Conflation: Circumnavigating the World Music Trap

Steve is by no means the only musician to capitalize on a synergetic Gypsy-Klezmer synthesis. It has been a fruitful, prominent, and economically triumphant actor in the World Music scene since the emergence of the “Gypsy Craze” in the 1990s and simultaneous deepening of the Klezmer Revival. In an article about this juxtapositional cliché among World Music ensembles, Carol Silverman disapprovingly describes the popular strategic conflation of music from these two quintessential European Others: Jews, who are largely ‘absent,’ but ‘historically over-present’ others, and Roma, a currently ‘too present Others’ whose histories are poorly documented and disseminated. In other words, the European conscience that Silverman refers to–a cosmopolitan, liberal, primarily Western European one–conceptualizes Jews and Roma as underrepresented in the present and past, respectively, while having a looming, magnified presence in the inverse temporal category. 

The juxtaposition of two marginalized minority groups is by no means impertinent; the problem lies in the smearing of regional gradations, and in consecrating certain stylistic flourishes as authentic to the detriment of others (e.g. vacuously labeling Balkans music as synonymous with a brass-heavy subset of Romani music, hence allowing a vibrant region to be subsumed into a narrowly circumscribed, widely commodifiable product)(Silverman 2004). 

Silverman’s astute criticisms are all the more reason to delve into the histories and microhistories that texture this intriguing hybrid music, in order that we may attain the sort of panoramic insight that a particularist like Steve brings. As you will see, there are certain connections between genres stratified by vague and bounded ethnic/national categories, but they can be understood in light of more complex–if less popular, lucrative, and/or parochial–ones. Although Steve technically belongs to the Gypsy-Klezmer cohort, understanding his musical sensibilities cannot be reduced to this binary, haphazard conflation. Due to the scope of this paper, I will not elucidate the full breadth of the variegated musical landscape to which he belongs; we will merely take a few intriguing and idiosyncratic peaks. 

The Musical Castes of Eastern Europe: The Klezmorim

To begin with, I’ll introduce klezmer and lăutărească music–how they deviated, diverged, emerged, and receded, before finally re-emerging. Klezmer is a Yiddish version of the Hebrew כלי זמר (translit. kli zemer), meaning instrument of song. Klezmer means a klezmer musician; the plural is klezmorim, the -im being the masculine plural suffix in Hebrew. The feminine klezmorot isn’t used simply because the artform emerged within patriarchal, gender-segregated communities. Hence, klezmorim were historically male. Alternately, Ashkenazaic folk musicians are sometimes referred to as klezmers. The earliest documentation of klezmorim in Eastern Europe dates back to the 16th century, permeating most areas in the region with a sizable Jewish population by the 18th century (Rubin 2015).

Klezmer briefly flourished in the Soviet Union through the State Ensemble of Jewish Folk Musicians of the Ukrainian SSR, but growing resentment towards the Jewish separationist impulse, which culminated in the purges of late-Stalinism, in which the father of klezmerologists Moshe Beregovski was implicated, quickly caused it to dissolve (Slobin 1998). A more eccentric attempt to address the Jewish separatist impulse is illustrated by the attempt at establishing an autonomous Yiddish-speaking Jewish province in Birobidzhan, a region bordering the easternmost part of China, which is immortalized by Emmanuil Kazakevich’s eponymous song (Gessen 2016; Eisenberg 2016). Practitioners stranded in Nazi-occupied lands mostly perished during the Holocaust. The klezmer tradition mostly persisted in American immigrant enclaves during the early 20th century, finding new impetus through the Yiddish theater, cinema, and radio. But the more dominant musical impulse among American Jews was not national, rather, thoroughly assimilationist. Steve was at the brunt of this rapid assimilation–his maternal and paternal grandparents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern-day Romania and Ukraine whose children were properly Americanized such that during Steve’s childhood, his parents’ culture was already “fully derivative.” The rejuvenation of klezmer occurred during the 1970s and 80s when the immigrant klezmorim were relics of a moribund past, and a milieu of mostly American Jewish musicians and musicologists from Steve’s generation took it upon themselves to revitalize and recast the tradition. In the intervening years, Jewish music was essentially absent in North America. One of the pioneers of the Klezmer revival and a member of The Klezmatics Frank London nicely articulates this liminal period: 

The musical aesthetics of middle class American reform Judaism in America in the 60s–well, ‘musical aesthetics’ is probably an oxymoron. I don’t think it existed. And so the idea that Jewish music was something that one would want to play, listen to, be involved in, do, was not even something that I rejected, but it didn’t even exist as a concept (Anjou 2010).

The Musical Castes of Eastern Europe: The Lăutari

In Romanian, lăutar denotes fiddle, but the plural lăutari primarily refers to a class of Romani musicians. By the end of the 18th century, following a series of citybound Romani migrations, lăutari ensembles were highly and widely regarded. The first violin teacher of the great Romanian composer George Enescu was a lăutar musician; some of Enescu’s pieces allude to the lăutari repertoire (Piotrowska 2013). Like klezmorim, they are traditionally male. In the 16th century, they performed as domestic slaves for the nobility (Beissinger 2005). One became a lăutar in a hereditary manner; the same can be said for the klezmer–both were functionally occupational caste designations (and the lăutari largely remain so today!)(Costache 2021). Another significant resemblance to klezmorim is that lăutari music is primarily wedding music. Weddings in their communities were traditionally long, lavish, and musical through and through. 

There is also a Middle Eastern connection; the Ahava Raba (‘great love’ in Hebrew) and Hedjaz-Kar modes of the Ashkenazi Jews and Roma, respectively, are in fact transplants of the Turko-Arab Maqam Hijaz (Hijaz mode), which is often used in the Muslim call to prayer (Strom 2002). The purported distinguishers of Romani and Klezmer music for the most part did not emerge in isolation; if one looks closely at these traditions, a vibrant, convoluted dialectic reveals itself. The klezmorim and lăutari musicians alike borrowed heavily from regional folk music. Moreover, in places such as Bessarabia, the Jewish and Roma musicians often collaborated and would sometimes play in one another’s ensembles. Jews played in tarafs (lăutari bands) and Roma in kapelyes (klezmer bands)(Strom 2023). The cimbalom (an instrument I address later in this article) exemplifies the musical entanglements of the region; though associated most of its history with klezmorim, it was initially used in Hungarian church services, and later migrated to the lăutari taraf ensemble by way of klezmorim (Feldman 2016). 

Romani and Jewish musicians were also widely lauded as virtuosic musicians and deft conveyors of pathos. They were thus called forth to fit musical niches while being excluded to a large extent from others (Feldman; Piotrowska 2022). Both were also known for improvisatory, rubatic, heterophonic, and melismatic flourishes (Strom, 112). Yiddish, being a language with great character, has evocative terms for some of the histrionic musical qualities–for example, glitshn (connoting glissando) means slipperiness, while krekhtsn describes the “moaning, achy long notes that gave klezmer music its distinctive sound (Strom, 129)...” Another highlight of klezmer jargon is tshok, a laughing sound (Netsky 2002). The globalization of lăutar music will be broached later.

The Primacy of Ear Music: Orality and its Deviations

Music is made up of sequences, and as such, eliding or forgetting one part of its progression does not allow the sound one is hearing at the moment to be integrated within a larger context. Therefore, it is crucial to have a capacious mode of attuning one’s senses to music, so that it may be experienced more fully. Auditory stimulus is registered for longer than iconic stimulus due to the former’s ephemera and latter’s relative stability. That is, sounds are emitted, then registered and integrated with the proximate sounds, whereas objects of sight remain relatively consistent and can therefore easily be unregistered and then re-registered. All of this is to say, to gaze at a transcript is markedly different from listening to a piece insofar as the act of listening is more cerebral, more threadbare, more reliant on memory; the sounds must be internalized rather than periodically registered. 

Gibons’ champions an embodied way of knowing music, one that approaches music through the labyrinthine approach of sound rather than its reliable writ (i.e. sheet music). Music by oral transmission is diachronically more volatile than its scriptural counterpart, but its very virtue lies in flux. It's an entropic, shapeshifting, dynamic beauty. Take literature, if the original manuscript of 1,001 Nights were extant, all later reconfigurations would be reduced to fan fiction, thus jettisoned from the literary canon. The irony of juxtaposing the aforementioned timeless “Others” – who we have, of course, seen to be similar in many ways – once again presents itself: Jews are identified with scripture, holy tablets, filmic writing, modernist novels, genizas, the printing press (Jewish exiles from modern-day Spain, in fact, brought the printing press to the Ottoman empire), and so on; the Romani essence, meanwhile, is proclaimed to be spontaneous, phenomenological, ahistorical, and extra-civilizational. The former are the “people of the book,” the latter amorphous, uncodified, unwritten. But just like Silverman’s eloquently articulated irony of temporal absences and presences, I am simply describing a popular conception rooted in a partial reality; klezmer existed for centuries in oral form–even by the 19th century, when many of the Klezmer musicians were musically literate, its orality refused to be superseded. Yet today, one often finds klezmer musicians reading musical notation. 

This arc – with one node at orality strung to another at dictation – is not uncommon. William A. Graham, for example, notes in his landmark book on scriptures that most sacred texts were transmitted orally until being written down quite recently (Graham 1987).  Also, as Benedict Anderson notes in his oft-cited study of nationalism, 16th century print-capitalism in Western Europe created an economic incentive to write and disseminate texts in vernacular languages, foreclosing a long period during which Latin was the language of literacy–all other languages in the region were oral, thus regionally/dialectically fragmented (Anderson 1983). In fact, some languages – the Romani language  included – were oral for much of the twentieth century before being prescribed script(s). 

Steve Gibons:

The Gypsy musicians have evolved like everybody… It’s just that, the way Gypsies learn to play music–you know the Suzuki method? They actually were doing the Suzuki method before [Shinichi] Suzuki. The Suzuki method is similar to the way Gypsies learn because they get a violin before they can even hold a violin, or the cimbalom, and then they’re just around it all the time and learn it like they learn a language.

We teach music in the opposite order that it should be taught in: we teach people first how to read–not so much on the violin, but certainly on the band instruments, the first thing you do on the first day with your clarinet is you read music, and you look at the numbers and you press the button with the number, and that is just completely divorced from music.

Steve underwent his aural musical enculturation at a much later age than the typical Suzuki adherent, which–like learning a language–makes fluency more difficult while being possible nonetheless. His early music education was spent under the tutelage of sheet music (and a notation-wielding instructor). At 21, though he wished to play Jazz, he “didn’t really have the head for it.” He played Western classical and American singer-songwriter music, and at 24 stopped playing altogether while touring as an actor in a theatre troupe. After the tour, he returned to music and went to study violin with a Chicago symphony player, Joe Golan, who played Jazz. For a year, he took lessons with Golan while playing with the training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony. At the end of the orchestra/conservatory season, he visited a musician friend in Paris and offered to join him for a couple of months, but was de facto there for five years! 

Steve’s acquisition of ethnic music came through listening to recordings and relentlessly imitating. In his capacity as teacher, Steve also imparts this aural practice to his students. As an analog to this methodology, he mentions Béla Bartók’s recording practices–with his horse and Edison phonograph, creating music directly from the audio rather than through the filter of transcription. “When the technology arrived where you could record, the great musician Bela Bartok used that technology,” he says. After all, “all music is essentially ear music.”

The Cimbalom

In addition to Steve’s emotive violinic voice, Beat Nomad is suffused with the late Nicolae Feraru’s torrential cimbalom playing. The cimbalom–a large hammered dulcimer from Eastern Europe that’s featured prominently in Klezmer and Lăutari music–has a wholly unique timbre that never ceases to move me deeply. Though traditionally an instrument of accompaniment, Feraru is occasionally centered in the album, most notably in Saraiman, a rather faithful but inimitable interpretation of Romica Puceanu’s song (Puceanu is a Lăutar singer whose music was popularized by the legendary Romanian record label Electrecord records). Though originating in sixteenth-century Hungary, where it was used in church services, the cimbalom came to be largely associated with Jewish klezmorim during the 18th century (Feldman, 105-7).

During the latter half of the 18th century and 19th century, the cimbalom was largely confined to the Pale of Settlements, with few gentile musicians playing the instrument; the early evidence of cimbalom-playing lies in late 18th century paintings, chronicles, and murals depicting Jewish cimbalists (Gifford 2001). Interestingly, another anecdote testifying to this effect is the rather common Ashkenazic surnames Zimbler, Cymbler, and Zimbalist. Throughout the 19th century, the cimbalom became nearly forgotten, such that by the time of Moshe Beregovski’s pioneering fieldwork with klezmorim, most musicians interviewed had no memories of encountering a klezmer cimbolist (Gifford, 119-20). In the late 19th century, the cimbalom became popular amongst peasants in Belarus and southeastern Poland, such that today cimbalom is designated the official Belarusian national instrument. In early twentieth century Belarus, there was a golden age of ensembles, including many cimbalom ones. In the late 19th century Romanian (from the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia) lăutars gradually began adopting the cimbalom from the klezmorim they played with (Gifford, 125). 

Global Clejani: Taraf de Haïdouks and Steve in Romania

In the early 1980s, the ethnomusicologist Speranța Rădulescu conducted a series of field recordings and research in a village adjacent to Bucharest, a place with an abundance of musicians and a dearth of toilets. As in most communist countries, folk musicians were rather well-off. The bureaucracy rewarded remarkable musicians, engineers, chess players, etc. with job stability and certain privileges. Musicians, for example, were afforded gigs, even provided rides (cars were a novelty during this period). However, the Clejani musicians procured no such rewards; they remained entirely peripheral. Even after the Rădulescu effect came to fruition, their global popularity famously didn’t extend to Romania itself (Pulay 2008). 

Rădulescu’s contributions were noticed in 1989 by two Belgian music promoters who travelled to Romania during the last months of the Ceaușescu regime. The village proved difficult to find in spite of its proximity to the Romanian capital and not least because of its omission from any widely available maps. This story was later employed in the marketing of these musicians, used in service of the reductionist claim that it was “its own thing,” a subaltern siloe incommensurable with greater Romania–conveniently ignoring the fact that music is in the Romanian language and stylistically localizable in the Wallachian region (Beissinger 2001). The reconceptualization of these musicians was heralded by the formation of Taraf de Haïdouks (Band of Outlaws). Gergő Pulay writes, ‘“As opposed to the rather neutral name used before by [Lauren] Aubert and Rădulescu – “Musicians from Clejani“ (Lăutar de Clejani) – the name Taraf de Haïdouks was apparently more convincing with regard to the audiences of world music because of its references to the Robin Hood-like “honorable outlaws.” (Pulay).’ 

The film that further popularized Taraf and consecrated the “Gypsy Craze” in the World Music scene is Latcho Drom (“Safe Journey”), which traces music in the Romani diaspora from North India to Spain. They were also featured in The Man Who Cried, a kitsch Hollywood movie–of the Romeo and Juliet creed–in which Johnny Depp plays a handsome, street savvy Gypsy in a tragic romantic entanglement with a radiant, blonde cabaret singer. It’s also a movie that takes itself very seriously, which one can very well tell by the title. In the first Taraf performance of Latcho Drom, the then head violinist is accompanied by a cimbalom player. The piece begins with a single horsehair tied to his violin, producing a shrill but wholly lyrical sound. Its title is Balada Conducătorului (“Ballad of a Dictator”).

The opening scene of Harun Farock and Andrei Ujică’s documentary Videograms of a Revolution features a young woman in a state of injury and agitation. She faces the camera of a journalist, who informs her that she is being filmed in her infirm condition. To my initial surprise, this excites her–she becomes visibly ecstatic as she begins an impassioned monologue about the hope that the then ongoing mass protests, retroactively referred to as the Romanian Revolution, are arousing in her. A grocery store clerk from the Western Romanian city of Timișoara, her store was pillaged by the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s troops. She thanks the orthopedic department that took her in, the surgeon who operated on her and removed the two bullets absorbed from the authorities, and the protesters dispersed throughout sovereign Romania’s streets. It has the same melancholic quality of rebirth and convalescence as Balada Conducătorului. In Latcho Drom, the incomparable Nicolae Neacșu sings the ballad to a young child whose life presumably began in the moments after the tyrant’s prolonged reign. I am also compelled to mention the staggering footage featured in Videograms of a Revolution of Ceaușescu’s last address to a mass assemblage of citizens. Throughout the speech, which is meant to assert his power in light of an evidently crumbling Iron Curtain, the crowd becomes increasingly raucous and insolent. He is shown distressed and incredulous, halting his speech to inquire after the sight before him. 

Before Steve’s second trip to Romania, he contacted Taraf by way of a mutual Romanian acquaintance and asked to meet them. They said he was welcome to stay at their house, but since they were leaving the next day for a tour, he should meet them at the airport. 

Steve Gibons:

Everyone drove a Dacia, there were these old Soviet cars, and Romania had their own: the Dacia; they all looked the same. These guys pull up to the terminal–the leader of the band is sitting in the backseat, his son is driving, and son’s friend in the passenger seat. And, the musician opens the backdoor of the car, he’s really tall; it takes him like a minute where he’s getting out of the car. And then, there’s another car pulling out with a musician; he also had a driver. So I discovered that everyone at that time who thought they were somebody had a driver, even though the car they were driving was an old piece of junk, with smoke billowing in the back and stuff. ”

He returned with a son of the then leader of Taraf “Culai” (Nicolae Neacșu). Culai was a true lăutar, who–like many in Clejani–was a descendant of the Wallachian court musicians. To supplement his meager earnings from music, he sold contraband cigarettes and labored as a farmer (Cartwright 2002).

The Klezmer Revival: A Diasporic Tale

The early klezmer revivalists were largely American Ashkenazi Jews born in the 1950s who had not grown up with klezmer. Bluegrass mandolinist Andy Statman alongside musician, linguist, and ethnomusicologist Walter Zev Feldman, studied with aging klezmer Dave Tarras, an immigrant from the Pale who belonged to a lineage of klezmorim. Other great young musicians apprenticed under old masters. The klezmer zeitgeist spread to Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Germany, where gentiles, too, saw klezmer as an exciting, forsaken dimension of their heritage and became prominent consumers and interpreters of the genre (Waligórska 2013; Rubin 2015). In the late 1980s, bands like Brave New World and The Klezmatics incorporated various other influences to forge a new and cosmopolitan klezmer. The Klezmatics won a grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album, establishing a global status perhaps analogous to Taraf. 

The ethnic yiddishkayt culture emerging against Jewish American assimilation occured during the backdrop of the civil rights movement, a time in which Jews had migrated from racialized Others to the auspices of the mainstream; Mark Slobin, among others, considers this sort of pivot into ethnocultural rootedness to be a result of their changing status vis-à-vis Black Americans (Slobin 2002). A volume Slobin edited on American Klezmer is prefaced with the following epitaph: “One definition for roots in the Oxford English Dictionary is surprisingly apt for klezmer: “the permanent underground stock of a plant from which the stems or leaves are periodically produced.” Culture, too, has its permanent underground stock. Today’s American klezmer music grows out of linguistic, social, and musical stock originally transplanted from Europe.” I have provided a compact preview of this stock and a few of its most notable plants. Conversing with Steve and subsequently digressing from and through the content of our interview was a thoroughly enjoyable process. I allowed myself to pursue certain granular details and microhistories rather than vaguely parsing the ingredients of Beat Nomad. My curiosity has only intensified, and ideally, yours has too.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Bessinger, Margaret. “Political Transitions and Cultural Adaptation: Romanian Roma (Gypsy) Musicians in the Post-Communist Era,” in Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, ed. Donna A. Buchanan (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 97–127.

Cartwright, Garth. “Nicolae Neacșu.” The Guardian, September 16, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/sep/16/guardianobituaries.arts.

Costache, Ioanida. “‘From Father to Son’: The Occupational Inheritance of Lăutari Musicians.” Romani Studies 31, no. 2 (2021): 117–144. https://doi.org/10.3828/rs.2021.7.

Feldman, Walter Z. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Gessen, Masha. “Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region.” New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2016.

Gifford, Paul M. The Hammered Dulcimer : A History. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2001.

Graham, William A. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Piotrowska, Anna G. “From the History of the Lăutari in Romania.” In Gypsy Music in European Culture: From the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries, 135–152. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

Pulay, Gergő. “Clejani Gypsies on the Global Market: Taraf de Haïdouks and the Label of Racism in the World Music Discourse.” Martor (Bucuresti), no. 13 (2008): 131–40.

Rubin, Joel. “Klezmer Music: An American Ethnic Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music, edited by Joshua S. Walden, 154–174. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Silverman, Carol. “Gypsy-Klezmer Dialectics.” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2004): 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1162/1054204041667952.

Slobin, Mark, ed. American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Includes Hankus Netsky, “The Evolution of Klezmer Music in the United States.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Strom, Yale. Barely Enough Bread: The Klezmer Connection Between Jewish and Gypsy Musicians. Excerpt from a conference presentation. Accessed through JewishGen. https://www.jewishgen.org/bessarabia/files/conferences/2022/sessions/TheKlezmerConnectionBetweenJewishandGypsyMusicians.pdf

Strom, Yale. The Book of Klezmer: The History of Jewish Music from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth. New York: Schirmer Books, 2002.

Suzuki, Shinichi. Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education. Translated by Waltraud Suzuki. Miami: Summy-Birchard, 1983.

Waligórska, Magdalena. Klezmer's Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Tracks

Eisenberg, Jewlia. “Birobidzhan.” Track 3 on Café Jew Zoo. Performed by Charming Hostess. Tzadik Records, 2004. CD.

Films

Anjou, Erik Greenberg. The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground. Documentary. New York: Seventh Art Releasing, 2010. Streamed via Kanopy.

Gatlif, Tony. Latcho Drom. France: Les Films du Paradoxe, 1993.

Potter, Sally. The Man Who Cried. United Kingdom/France: Pathé, 2000.

Farocki, Harun; Ujică, Andrei. Videograms of a Revolution. Directed by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică. Germany: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, 1992.