Every Friday on KPFT Houston 90.1, which is part of the Pacifica network, Objectif Magazine produces a weekly radio show: Radio Objectif. The program is a smorgasbord of arts and culture features, interviews, original works etc. and as such its sensibility is a reflection of our print magazine and part of our general mandate to bumrush all media. One of our recent programs which was part of a national Pacifica broadcast viewed the plight of Palestine through the lens of its artists, a perspective which doesn't immediately come to mind when one thinks of Palestine, especially in these days of the ubiquitous "War on Terror." The interview is bookended by poetry readings courtesy of Fady Joudah, a gifted poet who has also produced some beautiful translations of the work of Mamhoud Darwish. It is our belief that the humanistic perspective of the arts transcends the reductive abstractions of ideology and enables one to view the complexites and conflicts of human experience in a manner that partakes of nuance and hopefully engenders empathy for our common human condition. And without further ado we present . . .
Music videos have the potential to be the purest filmic medium of the symbolic as they are essentially music set to the pulse of imagery or imagery set to the pulse of music - a description which also intimates our sense of the poetic. This poetic sense is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Michel Gondry, in whose hands a four-minute video is transformed into a crucible of wonder. Gondry has employed the medium to hone a hand-crafted, childlike visual sensibility in which intellectual rigour is applied to playfulness in a manner reminiscent of the Oulipo writers. He is a master of the cinematic sleight of hand and his clip for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" is certainly one of the most beguiling videos he or anyone else has ever made. As he explains in the second clip below, it is constructed as a "visual palindrome" in which Cibo Mattto's Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda enact a fateful encounter that plays out across the mirroring panels of a diptych. The narrative of the video loops upon itself mobius strip like in its meditation of crossed destinies. And yet it is almost effortless in its synthesis of depth and levity. In a move typical of Gondry the title of the song is evoked through a tongue-in-cheek split-screen rebus: Miho showers herself in sugar while Yuka opposite showers with water, hence "Sugar Water."
Were still alive, man! Yeah, we know this blog has been dead as a door nail for quite some time, but the magazine is finally beginning to gain some traction once again and so dear reader (at least we hope we still have some readers out there) we've finally gotten round to reactivating our blog. Henceforth, we shall be posting without rhyme or reason whatever bric-a-brac strikes our fancy (though we suppose that is something of a reason). And on that note here's a video classic from the zany mind of Michel Gondry, 1994's "Lucas with the Lid off," and an article about the video written by Al Weisel that appeared in Rolling Stone at the time (we ain't above a little pilfering every now and then). In it Gondry explains some of the workings behind this rubix cube of a video. It still boggles our minds to think that the whole thing is comprised of one shot!
Oh yeah, we dig the music too.
The typical MTV video is a barrage of quick cuts and off-kilter camera angles designed to disorient channel surfers with itchy zapper fingers into lingering a little longer. The video for Lucas' "Lucas With the Lid Off," directed by Michel Gondry (Björk's "Human Behaviour"), takes a different tack. It has plenty of striking images and strange angles but not a single cut.
"I wanted to play with the idea of editing physically," says Gondry, 31. "Instead of shooting a room from several angles, we built several rooms and moved the camera." In one continuous shot that lasts the duration of the four minute video, we see the backs of sets, lighting stands and even crew members milling about In front of each tableau are numbered wooden frames that mark the "real" frames of the video, the shots that would be cut together if it were edited. "The idea was to see all the rubbish around the set and in between see the good angle," Gondry explains.
Shot with a Steadycam in black and white on a Paris set, the video for the 23-year-old rapper is a disorienting roller-coaster ride where the viewer is never sure which way is up. A staircase seems normal at one moment, then the camera turns, and we see it's really horizontal. Legs that seem to be lying on a bed horizontally turn out to be hanging vertically off a 90-degree bend.
Because there are no cuts and Lucas pops up throughout the video, he had to run from set to set, staying one step ahead of the hyperventilating cameraman. One mistake would mean starting all over again from the beginning. At one point, Lucas crashed into a bed frame and cut his knee but finished the take, wiping blood away as he ran. It took 18 takes in a full day of shooting to get one that had no mistakes. "It was basically an exercise in stamina," Lucas says.
Like the song, an infectious (albeit somewhat precious) mix of modern rap and ragga with jazz samples, the video includes modern elements, and projected in the background are snippets from what seem like jazz-era films, which were actually shot by Gondry in London and sped up to make them look old. The recurrent image of a piano being toted about is an hommage to Fats Waller, who used to travel around to friends' apartments and play at rent parties.
"My dad knew Benny Goodman, and there are samples of him in the song," says Lucas, whose father, an American of Russian-Jewish extraction, founded Pottery Barn and wrote lyrics for such Tin Pan Alley hits as the Mills Brothers' "You Never Miss the Water (Till the Well Runs Dry)." Lucas, who was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, but now lives in London, grew up in Europe and New York and says his music "reflects all the different cultures I grew up with."
Gondry started out by making videos for the band he drummed for in art school, Oui Oui. "We had some friends who liked us but not that much," he says. He grew up in a small town outside Paris, where the first film he ever saw was Stowaway in the Sky by Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon). Lamorisse pioneered the use of helicopter shots and actually died when his helicopter crashed during a shoot. Gondry also pushes state-of-the-art technology to the limit, though not quite to the point of dying for his art. "I think this was probably the most difficult video I have ever done," he says. "In fact, it was really a nightmare.
