While looking for some music in my library to listen to, I was reminded about the similarities between Chemical Brothers’ songs “Let Forever Be” and “Setting Sun” with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” (seriously, check them out!) and I was reminded of the video for “Let Forever Be.”
A really fun, wild, unsettling video, and when it first came out is when I first became aware of the director Michel Gondry. Then found out he made the video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World.”
And then, when I saw the video for Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” I just knew that also had to be his, and it was:
No matter how many times I watch that video, it still makes me cry.
(And later discovered he made some of my favorite White Stripes videos.)
Michel Gondry is among my favorite directors, using surrealism and what I call “creative reality,” to make images that are at once fanciful but oddly disturbing. The roughness to them, the apparent slap-dash and playful imperfections mixed with repetitiveness visual loops and improper geometry and proportions, invoke a dreamlike quality that, like surrealism is meant to do, bypasses the consciousness and ego and communicates right with the subconscious, id (and perhaps our sense/memory of Lacan’s “the Real”).
I knew he had directed the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” when I went to see it, so I was excited to experience it (despite Jim Carrey). And, of course, that film was perfect for Gondry, and it is still one of my favorite films (despite not having watched it again in far too long).
He was supposed to direct a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, my favorite of PKD’s work. If anything would be perfect for Gondry, it should be a film about the dreamlike deterioration of reality with uncertainty and discomfort with what is real, what is illusion. Sadly, something happened and it’s no longer to be.
Just wanted to share these thoughts. Maybe next I’ll discuss one of my other favorite directors, Spike Jonze! (Interesting… so many of my favorite directors, who work with striking and emotionally affecting imagery, like these two, and David Fincher, come from the world of music video directing.)
