Florence + The Machine Combined Music Videos New and Old Into a 47-Minute Short Film Called The Odyssey

This is exactly the type of thing we’d expect from a band known for taking artistic leaps. Evidently, the series of music videos Florence + The Machine released last year in support of their album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, including this one for “St. Jude,” were part of a larger framework all along—a 47-minute short film called The Odyssey. Directed by Vincent Haycock, it’s composed of the band’s existing music videos from the album spliced together with connecting scenes, ending with a new video set to “Third Eye.”

Florence Welch released an excited statement about the project:

This is the finale of a very personal project that came from a conversation me and Vince had in the Chateau Marmont about a year and a half ago while I was writing How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. I was talking to him about the record and the car crash of a relationship break up I was going through. The highs and the lows of love and performance, how out of control I felt, the purgatory of heartbreak, and how I was trying to change and trying to be free. And we decided we would re-tell this story in full.

Haycock added the following:

The Odyssey, like the epic poem by Homer, is a journey. It’s Florence’s personal journey to find herself again after the emotional storm of a heartbreak. Like the layers of Dante’s purgatory, each song or chapter represents a battle that Florence traversed and physical landscape that embodied each song or story. Its a metaphorical journey about escaping your demons, confronting yourself and returning to the original Florence, the dancer, the performer, the lover.

Sounds pretty much par for the course for F+TM, which is to say that it’s a tour-de-force of all-encompassing art. Check out The Odyssey in full here. You can also read our June feature about why How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful was so amazing here.