In honour of the Beijing Olympics, posting one of my favourite music videos of Spike Jonze, Electrobank for the Chemical Brothers, starring Sophia Coppola.
Am wondering why more music videos don’t use this milieu, it feels like an area ripe as a visual playground. Jonze sets the bar high as ever, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to make a mark here. Nearest I’ve seen in this territory recently is Roel Wouters with zZz is playing: Grip, which is a live trampoline shoot.
An extraordinary piece of Le cinéma du look, with the author remixing his own text radically? Evaluate in September 2008 when this is due for release…
“Michel Houllebecq’s 2006 novel La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island) has appeared on the Internet. La Possibilité d’une île is an acerbic piece of dystopian science fiction about a famous French comedian who comes into contact with a free love UFO cult called the Elohimites. The group, who are very obviously based on Claude Vorilhon’s Raelian movement, uses its significant resources to develop human cloning technologies in order to propagate a race of cult clones.”
This feels like signature Lost in Space work by Rob Rae. Beautiful austere monochrome precision tracing the lines of human cartography.
Fading Object from Motioncult on Vimeo.
A perverse and almost deliberately naive list in equal measures of Michel Gondry’s Top 25 classic music video picks. It is almost nonsensically random, even though it gives decent credit to first-gen pioneers like Pope, etc - can only think this was deliberately for the EW audience.
Michel Gondry picks 25 classic music videos:
Continue reading ‘A peek into Michel Gondry’s perversity’
I was asked to write this piece to accompany the MuVi programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival music video programme and awards this year. It was a great follow up to being on the jury in 2007, and an opportunity to think of the current big narrative and aesthetic trends in the area.
Dynamic flux is the natural state for the music video artform. The TV station with the three-letter acronym that once dominated pop promo culture has been emphatically sidelined to the offline broadcast past, rendered obsolete in an online age where the embed is king. Without a dominating presence channeling us prescribed, sanctioned (and often sanitised) artist clips, it is harder in the music video world to discern any major overriding theme.
We’re still going through a transitional phase to a full connection with online video’s possibilities. Music video is having a muted moment. There are no great dominating presences, no great white hopes. The visual blockbusters are few and far between. Motion graphics are not hot. Stop motion feels so last year [1]. CG is out, and slo-mo is in [2]. So does this mean things have finally frayed at the seams? Not at all. Is there anything to get animated about? Of course. A brief flash of neon, and a splash of CMYK may be all we get at the moment in terms of visual trends, but the creative threads directors in the field are currently exploring are still an enticing proposition.
Continue reading ‘Conceptually yours: music video directions in 2008′
I first experienced a live dot matrix symphony back in the Nineties at a Sonar festival, Barcelona. It’s nice to see James Houston has revisited this concept and ramped it up on both a auditory and visual level to create another pop promo which validates the conclusion of the essay I wrote for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival on the currently pervading influence of video art on music video.
Elements in video used so effectively to create a binary performance:
Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX
& vintage Oscilloscope for additional visual pleasure
Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.
[Via CRBlog]
David Lynch’s 55 second short filmed with an original Lumiere camera. 40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, no synchronized sound was permitted, and no more than three takes. David Lynch: Lumière et compagnie [Via BoingBoing]
Note: Links to be restored — WP under hacking attack!!
Kanye West’s latest visual hijinks: unapproved video remixes of arthouse favourites as instant quality music videos for Graduation. Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, and mainly footage from the BUF produced future city images of the melancholic sci-fier are utilised.
GRADUATION ALBUM LISTENING EXPERIENCE PT. 6 - FLASHING LIGHTS from kwest on Vimeo.
Vista 8 is the winner of the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Other finalists of this sub-one minute in-camera mobile phone video recordings also show a provocative analogue/digital purity.
As someone who’s experimented with mobile phone footage for years (the frozen ROAM project - pushing new aesthetics for the mobile screen/locative video) - this is definitely the most affecting and effective use of the medium I’ve seen. The ability to create Chris Marker-esque video collages exposing small personal mysteries has fascinating narrative implications.
I thought it might be Hiyao Miyazaki-esque in its ambitious reach for the fantastical, but after all the hype Bjork’s latest videoclip, the epic 9-month in the making Wanderlust, washes over you as ineffectually as the river that she travels along within it.
Maybe viewing it in high definition 3D might be a revelation, but Encyclopedia Pictura unfortunately don’t reach the heights of either beauty or rawness that are signature elements of the Icelandic artists greatest promo’s. There is no denying the artistry in the piece, and I’m sure plenty of fans will buy the Wanderlust DVD on release, but track and visuals never soar together. Bjork’s videos push boundaries — but in this case I feel it is going in the opposite direction to the leading edge.
Video embedded below to make up your own mind, but after the jump compare it to the video for Declare Independence — ok, that video is by Gondry whom it is difficult to fault — but MG shows he’s still the one most in tune with Bjork’s creative flow.
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