Clever boy #2
The Work of Director Michel Gondry
I was already a fan even before Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but seeing this collection of film clips on one DVD confirms just how clever this boy is. I haven't watched the entire disc yet but I've seen enough.
Film clips is such a fascinating medium for expression in popular culture. With a film clip, a director has approximately four minutes to not only convince us that we should buy this music but also, to varying extents, what we should wear, what we should feel, how we should relate to people (not necessarily in a good way, obviously, if you were to believe the directors of certain American *Urban* film clips, women should basically be wearing skimpy bikinis and be playthings for men that wear alot of jewelry). And, as with popular music, there's alot of crap but there's also alot of gems too.
This disc is full of gems.
Out of the three directors in this series, Gondry is easily the cleverest. How else do you describe someone that can apply principles of advanced particle physics to Kylie? There is alot of repetition in his work, both in the content of the clips and across his portfolio. Lots of different kinds of repetition. He employs recursion; witness Bjork in Bachelorette performing her life story where she's on stage performing her life story on stage performing her life story... (potentially ad infinitum except that pop film clips have very real finite limits!).
Circles in space AND time? Daft Punk's Around The World, through it's repetitive beat and it's title, begs to be looped back on itself, resulting in a classic clip that harks back to the works of Busby Berkeley. Or what about Cibo Matto's Sugar Water, every time I watch it I get something new out of it; the two girls get up out of bed and travel around two "time loops" (???) in opposite directions, colliding, and sending themselves back to bed. I'm sure Einstein didn't think about this happening! And in true entangled particle-antiparticle fashion, the girls are completely in sync with each other, even when apart; they wake up, do stuff to the window, pour stuff on themselves, dress/undress all in the same sequence and even cats walk past them at the same *time* (I'm being quite careless about my use of the word time here... sorry about that!)
Or what about having the visual completely complementing the musical structure of the song, like in Bjork's Joga where the camera pans across the striking Icelandic "emotional" landscape in perfect time with the music. There are some very romantic ideas here: the geology of Iceland being alive and with it's own pulse emanating from its core, but living in the heart of Bjork. In The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, this idea is taken to the extreme, where the viewer is placed on a train that passes a landscape where the features pass by in perfect time with the music (sorry if I gave the game away; when I first saw this clip it wasn't until halfway through when I realised what was going on).
But, of course, being a big Kylie fan, I absolutely love Come Into My World. All Kylie does is walk around in the streets but Gondry puts her in some strange space-time loop whereby she meets her earlier self when she reaches the begining of the loop. Time folds back on itself so that occurrences happen with events from the past and soon the street is cluttered with people and multiple instances of their past selves. It's even interesting to simply pick a character other than Kylie and watch what happens to them in the course of the song. The cleverest thing about doing this for a pop film clip is that it exactly mirrors the structure of a typical pop song: repetitive yet progressively building. And the genius is that, all the while, during this whole space-time exercise, Gondry has Kylie being, well, KYLIE! She is utterly radiant, there just happens to be lots of her. I went from thinking this was a passable single to being one of my favourite Kylie tracks thanks to the film clip.
I also love Massive Attack's Protection (a triumph of set design?), The Chemical Brothers' Let Forever Be and the Foo Fighters' Everlong.
Very clever boy.
