a raw sound with a pristine look, and other unlikely mixtures



08.28.05

mark romanek has directed numerous award-winning videos, as well as the feature film "one hour photo." palm pictures will release a dvd collection of his videos on sept. 13 on the directors label series. mr. romanek spoke last week with joel topcik about some recent music videos.

nine inch nails, 'only'
from the album "with teeth" directed by david fincher

david fincher made this as a labor of love; he and 25 to 30 people worked on it for three months. the computer animation is truly groundbreaking; the animators wrote new graphics code especially for the video. it opens with a contemporary office tableau - a desk with a laptop computer, a lamp, coffee in a white cup and saucer, a newton's cradle with its swinging ball bearings and one of those pinscreen sculpture toys, which comes to life in the form of trent reznor. the computer-generated imagery is absolutely photorealistic. the music, however, is as raw as the environment is pristine, which makes for a compelling contrast.

aphex twin, 'rubber johnny'
directed by chris cunningham

a stressed-out, techno fever dream, which chris cunningham shot, edited, appears in - he even made the prosthetics he's wearing. warp films released it in june on dvd, but you can find it on several web sites. chris plays a mutant child with a grotesquely bulbous head who is confined to a wheelchair and kept in a dark room. he filmed himself with a nightscope, which makes his irises glow and gives the scene an eerie grayish tint. the electronic music by richard d. james, who performs as aphex twin, breaks in intermittently, sending chris into a frenzy of rhythmic hand movements as he careers around the frame in the wheelchair. it is really disturbing.

beck, 'e-pro'
from the album "guero" directed by shynola

this is the only video on the list that has been nominated for a video music award. it drops you into a very specific, hermetically designed universe, which i think is a defining feature of a good video. it follows beck through a series of dark virtual dream worlds in which everything but beck is animated - a blend of 21st-century imagery with more organic analog techniques that give it a retro look reminiscent of old atari video games. it is very trippy.

iron and wine, 'naked as we came'
from the album "our endless numbered days" directed by sam beam

sam beam, who records as iron and wine, is an example of someone who can speak in the medium of music as well as filmmaking. he has taught cinematography at a community college in florida. this is a single take of a camera tracking laterally, across a lavishly set-up picnic table in golden late-afternoon sunlight. it passes by a fishbowl with goldfish floating dead in the water before moving onto the watermelon and fried chicken and other dishes, finally coming to the end of the table. as it journeys back across the table, you see that all the food has been eaten - the watermelon rind and the chicken bones are strewn about. and when the camera reaches the goldfish bowl, we see that the fish are alive. it suggests something about time and regeneration that is hard to articulate, and it perfectly resonates with the song without directly commenting on the lyrics.

the chalets, 'feel the machine'
directed by d.a.d.d.y.

this is a great execution of a humble concept. the band, an irish pop quintet, is shown performing in a virtual world made to look like an apple computer desktop with all the icons superimposed. the cursor moves around doing various tasks - clicking on the band members to change their clothes, dragging instruments into the trash-can icon when they're done. it made me think, "why didn't i think of that?"

the sun, 'romantic death'
directed by the sun and alex nam

here is a video that will never be shown on mtv. the sun, a pop quintet from ohio, and alex nam, a friend of the band, came up with the idea after visiting beautifulagony.com, a web site where people submit amateur video of themselves seemingly masturbating: all are portrait-sized shots, head and shoulders, of people lying on their backs. the video is a montage of clips from the site. it could never work as a commercial vehicle; it is more of a viral phenomenon on the internet. it has a very organic narrative structure, with an arc of arousal, climax and its denouement; and that turns out to be a great analogue to the arc that a pop song follows.

bright eyes, 'easy/lucky/free'
from the album "digital ash in a digital urn" directed by lily thorne and lauri faggioni

this is a one-shot single take of conor oberst. he approaches the camera and begins to free-associate doodles - fragments of lyrics, pictographs - with a fat, black magic marker on a plexiglas surface that fills the entire frame. the trick, though, is that they must have flipped the image of the writing, so we see it correctly, not backwards. it reminds me of henri-georges clouzot's documentary "the mystery of picasso," in which the artist is filmed painting on glass, as well as d. a. pennebaker's film of bob dylan's "subterranean homesick blues," with the bits of lyrics written on cue cards.

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