Michel Gondry's astonishing work
If you like music videos, or contemporary filmmaking - hell, if you have an eye and a third of a brain, you should watch The Work of Director Michel Gondry. Besides directing the brilliant Human Nature (yet another must-see), he did quite a few extremely impressive and innovative music videos. I stumbled upon the afore-mentioned DVD last night, and was just astonished. I knew some of these videos, actually some of them are among my favorites, but didn't know they were his; and I discovered a few other brilliant ones.
Let's namedrop a few:
Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be and Star Guitar
Daft Punk - Around The World
Bjork - Hyperballad
White Stripes - The one with the lego, and The Hardest Button To Button
Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World
Cibo Matto - Don't remember the name
Foo Fighters - Everlong
The videos are all innovative, employ a rich cinematic language (as in the Chemicals and the lego White Stripes), show a tremendous love and understanding of both music in general (Star Guitar and Daft Punk) and the specific song, and are at times extremely touching (Bjork and Cibo Matto). And only his creativity surpasses his accuracy, of which the best examples are Kylie and Cibo Matto.
An intriguing angle I found in some of the videos are their logical and musical (or rather, musico-logical) structure (I was cued by the brilliant book Godel, Escher, Bach). In Cibo Matto, a split screen shows two women, when one of them is filmed backwards, and they are doing similar things - when the "forward" woman walks down the stairs to leave her house, the "backward" woman climbs the stairs to return to her house; but since she is screened backward, it looks as if she is also descending. At the middle of the video, they more or less switch parts. This structure is similar to that of a musical crab canon, in which there are two musical parts, each of which is a reversal of the other. It takes a musical genius in the level of Bach to compose a crab canon that is harmonic; I guess you have to be a master of film to produce a meaningful "crab video".
In a similar manner, Come Into My World is an example of canon by intervals, but don't let me bore with the details.
Let's namedrop a few:
Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be and Star Guitar
Daft Punk - Around The World
Bjork - Hyperballad
White Stripes - The one with the lego, and The Hardest Button To Button
Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World
Cibo Matto - Don't remember the name
Foo Fighters - Everlong
The videos are all innovative, employ a rich cinematic language (as in the Chemicals and the lego White Stripes), show a tremendous love and understanding of both music in general (Star Guitar and Daft Punk) and the specific song, and are at times extremely touching (Bjork and Cibo Matto). And only his creativity surpasses his accuracy, of which the best examples are Kylie and Cibo Matto.
An intriguing angle I found in some of the videos are their logical and musical (or rather, musico-logical) structure (I was cued by the brilliant book Godel, Escher, Bach). In Cibo Matto, a split screen shows two women, when one of them is filmed backwards, and they are doing similar things - when the "forward" woman walks down the stairs to leave her house, the "backward" woman climbs the stairs to return to her house; but since she is screened backward, it looks as if she is also descending. At the middle of the video, they more or less switch parts. This structure is similar to that of a musical crab canon, in which there are two musical parts, each of which is a reversal of the other. It takes a musical genius in the level of Bach to compose a crab canon that is harmonic; I guess you have to be a master of film to produce a meaningful "crab video".
In a similar manner, Come Into My World is an example of canon by intervals, but don't let me bore with the details.