Salute Your Shorts: The Music Videos of Michel Gondry

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

In its short history as a quasi-medium, music videos have produced a fair amount of directors-to-watch, from Anton Corbijn to David Fincher, but rarely has it been a place for artists to grow into maturity. For the most part, when a video director has moved onto bigger (not necessarily better) new things the videos point to their later interests but don’t really follow them. This is only natural, considering that you can’t tell what kind of storyteller someone will be from a quick-editing piece meant to be digested in a dialogue-less, three-minute chunk with Aerosmith screaming in the background. It is still kind of annoying, though.

The exceptions that make the rule difficult to deny are the music videos by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and, to maybe a lesser extent, Nathanial Hörnblowér, i.e. Adam Yauch. While this was known for years to the few music video aficionados who actually paid attention to who directed what during the late 90s (directors were rarely credited before then), when Jonze, Gondry and Chris Cunningham released their Directors Label series in 2003 it became abundantly obvious that these videos didn’t reflect the bands’ visions so much as the directors’ own. It was an argument for videos to be regarded as artistically valid as short films. Directors Label came out with four more releases in 2005 before quietly dying, but the lasting effect of these releases has been some well-deserved reconsideration of what music videos can be. 

Almost all of these collections felt like singular visions, but put within this context Jonze’s and Gondry’s offerings blew the others out of the water. On the one hand you had Jonze, the postmodern prankster who ripped apart the conception of what videos could be while simultaneously creating new tropes that have been copied ever since. Strangely more nebulous, though, were Gondry’s videos, which both showed the truth of his reputation for lo-fi aesthetics and handmade mise-en-scene, but also featured a fascinating love for computer animation and technology. After all, though he builds props out of unpainted cardboard, he’s still the person who pioneered the technology behind Bullettime.
 
With the Directors Label apparently gone for good, Gondry has released a second collection of his videos on DVD, which offers a fuller picture of what he’s been up to. Perhaps the most obvious expression of the stereotype of Gondry’s music videos, and films in general, is his 2004 effort for Steriogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man.” Stop-motion and oversized props heavily abound, with the stop-motion oddly reminiscent of his earliest videos from Oui Oui back in the 80s. Though it's pretty neat, at this point the video isn't much of a surprise and becomes a letdown not for its lack of craft or vision but because we've basically seen it before. The compilation goes much deeper though, even if this is the vision of Gondry that will always remain his public image. 

Michel Gondry 2: More Videos Before & After DVD 1 is admittedly weaker than its first volume. This is due in part to Gondry's repetition of his own ideas, such as his video for Paul McCartney’s “Dance Tonight” which seems like a retread of “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” and also because he seems more committed to offering a full version of what’s out there than in editing out misfires like Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good.” It’s possible he’s just not a great critic of his own work, but because the videos are so short its still interesting to check out the experiments that didn’t quite come together. 



Whatever flaws it may have, though, the disc does contain two almost unquestionable masterpieces—though Radiohead, or at least Thom Yorke, does seem to disagree with me on that. The dark, autobiographical video for “Knives Out” tells the story of his girlfriend being treated for leukemia. Gondry spoke about the video to REBEL magazine (via Director File), saying, “It's terrifying, I watched over my girlfriend in hospital for weeks and weeks. All that medication, I have always had a thing about that. I speak a lot about it because it was a failure, not health-wise but from an emotional point of view. We split up. Why? We had separated once before her illness. I was so sad, I said to myself that I couldn't do anything. She always spoke to me of marriage, so I went to see her and offered her an engagement ring. The next day she had leukemia. She must have already had it—the problem is that we got back together for all the wrong reasons. She came back to me because she was ill. We stayed three more years together.”

Yorke reportedly hated the video, despite acting in and approving its storyboard, due to how personal it was rather than reflective of the song. But this is why it’s so much more powerful than the literal reading that fans initially gave the video. It’s also been accused of having a somewhat cartoonish flavor for obvious reasons, given its exaggerated set and props. Really, though, it’s an example of expressive mise-en-scene in a way the old German Expressionists would admire yet never would have dreamed about. As usual, Gondry plays with time here, shooting the film at a slower speed so as to give it a jumpy ethereal feeling, but this plays into its expressiveness. Its one take drives in a sort of urgency, an inability to look away from what’s going onscreen as the viewer is trapped within this small, dark room of horrors. The song “Knives Out” ends up on the one hand mere mood music for the video, with its chorus line particularly chilling, but this doesn’t detract from how affecting the piece is. Even if many of its images and symbols remain elusive, the compounding result of this is to create an emotional heavyweight despite the short time and with an incredible amount of density.


On the exact flip side of the emotional spectrum is the superficially similar video for the White Stripes’ “The Denial Twist.” Both videos take place entirely in a long shot—but if this is used primarily for urgency and a sense of searching before, for “The Denial Twist” it’s largely for jokes and a sense of “how’d he do that?” Circularity and recursion have always been a big theme with Gondry, and this video may still lose out to Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World” for sheer impressiveness, but here it’s taken to the breaking point and timed out perfectly.  Gondry’s love for one-take videos aligns him oddly with pre-music video directors, and it’s a tool he uses to great effect here. In a sense the video is pretty insubstantial (what’s really there except for a series of jokes about time and space?) but the level of craft is fun to watch time and time again. It’s really about celebrating the fun that can be had on film when the traditional rules of time and space are thrown out the window.

One of the videos that isn't a success but is still worth seeing is "Snowbound," a largely animated video Gondry made for Donald Fagen. Its version of a authoritarian dystopia with heads for some reason driving vehicles, with an impressively developed world for its short time. The blend of 1984 and a futuristic winter wonderland is pretty impressive—except that Fagen's song is about the most cheerful, almost disgustingly saccharine thing ever written.  It's an atypical misfire where Gondry didn't quite read the song right, but taken on its own the vide is a pretty good silent film.

There's also something to the extremely simple video for Leafbirds "It Can All Be Taken Away." As the song's lyrics discuss the many ways that what we hold dear can disappear, a figure moves down an infinite number of stairs while slowly losing his limbs. In contrast with this animated foreground, behind are a series of live-action shots from cities. The cumulative effect of this with the music is almost a perfect adaptation of the song, but there's not much more to it than that. In a compilation that stretches the length of Gondry's formidable imagination, it still stands out as far and away the weirdest thing on the disc and seems alien, probably because it's so far removed from what it seems like a music video should be. 



Two other particularly great videos in the compilation are Bjork’s “Declare Independence” and Gary Jules’ “Mad World.” Bjork’s video is similar to a lot of what Gondry had been doing with her for years, which is attempting to find ways of representing her music through different metaphors. The videos for “Joga” and Hyperballad” are recalled here, as well as Gondry’s work on Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar.” The brilliant turn here is combining that portion of the video that uses of yarn for music (with an opening shot that’s an homage to Jonze’s “Undone (The Sweater Song)" with the metaphor of the loudspeaker and her blindly obedient audience—declaring independence in the stodgiest, most mechanical way possible and with this remaining completely dependent. There isn’t all that much to it, but it’s a great execution of a simple concept.
 


Similarly, “Mad World” is at heart little more than “children” acting out simple pictures on the pavement below a school with Gary Jules looking down. But the achingly sad soundtrack combined with the poignant dance below ends up oddly affecting, with sad feelings of lost childhood. At its essence, this is the sort of thing that makes Gondry so admired—not just that it’s a simple idea well-executed but because it takes something we thought we already knew about him, in this case the do-it-yourself aesthetics, and still does something completely unexpected with them.