Michel Gondry

When I started thinking about music videos my attention was directed toward Michel Gondry. He has some parallels to Pipilotti Rist. He was also in a band which he made videos for. I decided to search Youtube for some of his work and found this hypnotic video for the Chemical Brothers Star Guitar. I can't stop watching it....



I pulled this info from a director's website on Gondry.

...his works are marked with a child-like explorative eye. Like old-school hip-hop Gondry's works are his playground. He tells stories about people and their lives while questioning our definitions of reality. His characters are honest and human and his worlds playfully reflect the interaction between the worlds we live in: nature, society, and the mind.

The turning point in his career was Björk. As the story goes, the Icelandic woman saw a few of his videos, including his sixth video for his band Oui Oui, La Ville, and gave him a call. After some exchanging of ideas, they created her unforgettable solo debut, Human Behaviour.



That was 1993. Between then and now he has overall redefined the entire music video genre, save hip-hop and country videos. As each of his videos and ads (most of which he doesn't own, most produced through Partizan) is released, you see him rearranging old techniques into new patterns, finding new ways to tell stories with film, and having fun with his work.

Gondry has made many videos with Bjork. Here are a few:

Bachelorette (1997)



This video is beautiful and complex. The story starts to become a story within a story, then a story within a story and so on. It repeats itself over and over until the book goes back into the ground.


This is a video about a contraption that Gondry rigged inspired by a spinning paint machine from the seventies.



Hyperballad (1996)



I love the layers in this video. Gondry is blurring dreams with reality as he seems to do with a lot of his work. The Science of Sleep as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. is a full length version of these ideas.


Army of Me (1995)





The Science of Sleep Trailer




Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Trailers






Now Gondry has moved from film and video into the gallery setting. Recently there has been a show in New York featuring work made by Gondry that is mostly inspired by past love affairs as well as his new movie "The Science of Sleep". The show is entitled "The Science of Sleep: An Exhibition of Sculpture and Creepy Pathological Little Gifts". It is intended to be a companion to the movie itself. The sets from the movie, including an elaborate, enormous cave that dominates one of the film’s several dream sequences, are replicated at the gallery space. An upstairs area, bathed in pink light, showcases the bra and other items under the working title “Coeur Michel.”

“These are all about an ex-girlfriend,” he said, as he took several curious-looking items from the box and placed them, one by one, on an oval conference table. “I made all these when she left me, two years ago.”

Gondry held up a bra with exaggeratedly uneven cups. “I made this because her breasts were two different sizes,” he said. He displayed a necklace constructed out of the tips of his fingernails. “She complained about my long nails,” he said, “so I added some chain and made them into jewelry.” There were pages taken from a French book and an English book that he had overlapped so that the resulting text spelled out his former girlfriend’s name. He had modified a Nike sneaker by inserting into it a doll that held in its hand a key to the apartment that he and his girlfriend once shared. He picked up a cartoonlike illustration that he had made of another girlfriend heading out the door of their apartment; he had mounted the image on a tree-shaped piece of cardboard that had been cut out of a composition notebook. “I still use the notebook with the tree part missing,” he said, as he stared rather forlornly at the remnants of his love. “It always reminds me of her.”

(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17gondry.html?
ex=1316145600&en=f532eeaa8352d658&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

This is a link to the New York Times article on Gondry, The Science of Sleep as well as the exhibition.

The Deitch Gallery where the show was held has a website that has a full installation view of the work.



Gondry is very interesting because a lot of his work is autobiographical eventhough he has created it for someone else. An example of this is the video that he made for the Radiohead song "Knives Out" which acts out the demise of a relationship Gondry was in at the time of the video.

Knives Out (2001)



You can't forget the childlike but complex videos that he has created (and the theme seems to eminate in his other works) Probably the best example of this is the video for Fell In Love With a Girl by the White Stripes.

Fell In Love With A Girl (2002)



Maybe the best way to describe Gondry's work is constructed reality or maybe even a new genre of Magical Realism.