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May 24, 2009

ON MUSIC VIDEOS

I've never really understood Bjork. I hear she was a big star on whatever planet she comes from. But besides the novelty of watching a space alien sing unintelligible music and play symbolic martyrs in mostly unwatchable anti-American polemics by perplexingly and pretentiously brilliant directors, I've never owned a Bjork album, and I have no desire to. My interest in Iceland extends only Sigur Ros and the original Mega Man villain "Ice Man" (who retired to Iceland in the elaborately constructed fan fiction of my imagination). Vanilla Ice, the most ridiculous person to become popular in the last twenty years, is not from Iceland, but from (probably) a Los Angeles suburb. And I do like Ice, but not when it melts.

That said, thanks to Ben Roberts, I do own the Michel Gondry video collection. Bjork was the perfect playpiece for Gondry and his kooky brand of the surreal three to five minute theater. Gondry has been described as a "precocious visionary" - and those terms are often yoked with "occasionally annoying," which he is. This Onion article probably describes it best.

Michel Gondry Entertained For Days By New Cardboard Box

Most of Gondry's Bjork videos involve ponds, gorillas, children, or Iceland and, of course, Bjork - yammering about God-knows-what and often playing with a leaf. So all these backhanded compliments lead up to the following statement: I think that Bjork and Gondry are responsible for the greatest music video ever made.

I have always been fascinated with the music video - its limitations and potential tend to even each other out in the worst cases, and it is often to taken over by the gaudy excesses that characterizes trash culture. Occasionally, they can be thrilling; more often they are memorable only because for their campy jazzed-up overdrive. There are few aesthetics for music videos, so each generally morphs around the persona of its central figure. Which is Justin Timberlake's videos have (like him) no personality and too much professionalism, but Britney Spears and Madonna (who have personality in excess) is often the product of riveting, excessively strange productions. These videos make icons of their stars, either flamboyant (like Spears) or distant (like Kurt Cobain); occasionally, as with the White Stripes, they portray a persona that does not likely exist.

But Gondry's video for BACHELORETTE, not often brought up in either his catalogue or Bjork's, is the kind of spell-binding visual product that suggests the potential I described earlier - within five minutes and thirty-seven seconds (long for a video, I'll give you that), Gondry asks questions about the nature of love, storytelling, celebrity, pop culture, and the real/artificial divide that have troubled everyone for the last one-hundred years. Whether they exist or whether we can only make them up in our own artificial re-creations, and what happens to them when no one cares about them any more. And he does it by imitating so many different film-styles (Marker's LA JETEE comes to mind, but so Jacques Tati, comic books, filmstrips, and Charlie Chaplin). This video shows the influence that would later reveal itself in Gondry's excellent SCIENCE OF SLEEP - where dreams and reality are indistinguishable by those who refuse to differentiate between them. Yet those dreams are always reconstructions of something else, and the lunatic vision always keeps us guessing what they really mean. In Gondry's version, seen below, everything turns into plants.

So, without being too critical of the Onion's hilariously accurate take, I'm amazed by what Gondry can do with a cardboard box . . . or in this case an Icelandic singer. See for yourself

There's a pretty good possibility that this video won't be available long. If not, just google Bjork and Bachelorette.... Also, this video stars the underrated Toby Huss as the publisher - an actor who was been very funny on episodes of SEINFELD, NEWSRADIO, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, and THE ADVENTURES OF PETE AND PETE - I wrote about him here

What are your favorite videos ever?

Posted by Andytown at 11:43 AM | Comments (2)