comme un chat noir au fond d’un sac (2006, 18.4MB, 4:47 min)
A beautiful excerpt from Stephane Elmadjian’s feature film found
on composer Daniel Wohl’s website.
Starting off a bit intense it winds itself down and into some breathtaking stuff.
Category Archives: music video
Paul Rodriguez – the Mean Reds
Mean Reds (2007, 11.6MB, 1:48 min)
Artist & filmmaker Paul Rodriguez made this rather good
(I particularly like the collage plus the loopy/scratchy business
towards the very end where he collages/edits the sound too)
music video in 2007.
He said:
‘I was planning on shooting my friends for a
documentary. Magically the Mean Reds were also
playing, so I decided to shoot them as well.
Months went by with me sitting on this footage.
Then I found my self printing out frames,
and doing collage on individual frames.’
Two from David Fincher
The Motels – Shame (1985, 18.7MB, 3:59)
Rick Springfield – Celebrate Youth (1985, 25.6MB, 3:58)
Before directing features like Se7en, Zodiac, and Fight Club,
badass David Fincher made some awesomely 80s music videos.
He continues to make solid music videos for more
contemporary acts, favoring the short form to the
Hollywood machine. These lyrically poor videos
serve as proof that you too can film talking billboards,
windy alleys full of teens, use the color-pass effect,
and still go on to direct such hits as Alien 3.
Dan Canyon
Quilts Never Sleep (short version) (2007, 20.9MB, 3:07 min)
Two very different but attractive & telling pieces from Dan Canyon.
The first was part of a show of – you guessed it – quilts in London in 2006,
about which read more here.
The second could’ve been made for dvblog, well, at least for me, as I’m a fool
for all things turntablist, & features the splendidly monickered Mickey Morphingaz.
ASCII Rock – Yoshi Sodeoka
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (2003, 20 MB, 4:14 min.)
Unchained by Van Halen (2003, 18 MB, 3:21 min.)
Ascii Rock by Yoshi Sodeoka is a brilliant example of the genre of ASCII art, which creates still images and videos entirely out of alphabetic and numeric characters (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a common format for text files in computers and on the Internet that represents alphabetic and numeric characters as binary numbers)
Cohen, Tarantino, Goffman
Dance Me To The End Of Love (clip, 1994, 0.5MB, 31 sec.)
Dance Me To The End Of Love (1995, 34.1MB, 6:07 min.)
Leonard Cohen’s work has always walked a fine line
between kitsch & poetry.
Don’t get me wrong – the kitsch is like a dash of chilli,
gives the whole thing added piquancy & depth.
Check out these two videos for ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’.
The first, the short clip, is the official video.
Now look at the second.
OK- first things first -just who is that playing the bridegroom?
Then, consider if this whole unofficial one ( by Aaron Goffman)
prolix & kitschy in some respects as it undoubtedly is,
doesn’t somehow do more justice to Cohen’s world !’
Philippe Decouflé – Le P’tit Bal
Le P’tit Bal (1994, 14MB, 3:48 min)
Total joy.
Video: Philippe Decouflé
Song: Le P’tit Bal Perdu byAndré Bourvil
Gilbert & George -The Singing Sculpture
The Singing Sculpture (1992, 830k, 41 sec.)
“Singing Sculpture documents one of Gilbert & George’s most famous “living sculpture” pieces.
Covered in multicolored bronze paint, the artists sing and interchange parts of the English
music hall standard “Underneath the Arches.” Through their stylized performance,
Gilbert & George deliberately blur the lines between life and art, reality and contrivance.
This ambiguity does not rely on a transformation from living to sculptural form. On the contrary,
they have merged the two in order to obliterate, rather than emphasize, the distinctions between life and art.” – Walker Art Center
from Video Data Bank
Scritti Politti – pop sublimity
The Word Girl (1985, 7.62MB, 3:14 min)
Oh Patti (1988, 20.3MB, 4:14 min)
Two of the most perfect pop songs ever made, the first from
1985’s Cupid & Psyche & the second from 1988’s Provision
(& which features a trumpet solo from Miles Davis of staggering
economy & otherworldly beauty).
Pet Sounds excepted, pop music just doesn’t come better.
The vids aren’t just an adjunct – of course they have historical
interest (that weird decade!), but there’s something fragile
& haunting & mysterious there which survives the occasional impossible
to overlook moment of naffness.
Wonderful.
Aī-Hz – My Miwoo
My Miwoo [Tai Chi Weekend Control] (2007, 24.6MB, 50 secs)
Aī-Hz, real name Michael Renassia,
is a French visual performer living and working in Tokyo.
His site contains possibly my favourite biographical nugget ever:
‘He is using compositing software in a diverted way, and real-time mixing
instruments with the aim to create a noisy/pop universe…’
Now, who could possibly object to that?
This piece is rather lovely – the thing that totally makes it for me
is the epiphanic moment at the end when the music/animation stops &
the person appears ..there’s a haunting sense of time suspended..
So, for me, 10/10 for visuals.
I am pretty bored ,though, with the by-the-yard avant-dance music
that accompanies so much work of this kind..it’s not bad
or anything, just pedestrian…