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Of the three retrospective DVDs released by Palm Pictures' Directors Label, this second volume, devoted to all things Chris Cunningham, is by far the slimmest. Unlike Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the other directors spotlighted so far by the series, Cunningham didn't emerge as a creative talent until the mid-to-late nineties, and even then his working habits were far less frenzied than some of his more commercially minded peers. Whereas Jonze and Gondry turned into talents-for-hire among the who's whos of our pop cultural elite, Cunningham has chosen his clients with more discrimination, keeping close to a staple of Warp Records artists with whom he shares an aesthetic, and only branching out when a combination of his own enthusiasm and the proper music-style match gives him reason to (the only exception so far, Madonna's "Frozen", he left with a renewed commitment to personal vision over commercial allure).
As a result of this deliberate career trajectory, Cunningham's body of work is so far infused with a kind of clear-headed and specific focus that eludes the prolific, years-long brainstorming sessions that characterize other directors' legacies. The eight videos and six other pieces (commercials, installations) included here aren't just traceably similar in style and structure -- they're open-ended variations on the same obsessive theme. From the opening moments of Cunningham's first attempt at video-making, for Autechre's inhumanly industrial "Second Bad Vilbel", we see the central image, bathed in a sterile but somehow comforting blue-white glow, that haunts the rest of his videos -- a malformed body, in this case an abstract hunk of machinery, with appendages that push, pull, rotate, destroy and impregnate. In "Second Bad Vilbel", the crouching body/machine stands isolated behind a wall of malevolent TV static and bursts of visual distortion that come and go in time with the music; when the song unspools its frenetic tempo and turns into scrap-heap funk, the machine starts to move, extending its unrecognizable appendages -- a spider-like arm here, an abstract penis or thorax or pelvic something that repeatedly pushes toward screen there -- for some unfathomable function that seems to be justified simply by the perverse complexity of its orchestrated movements. According to the DVD's included booklet, in which Cunningham gives a brief background of each of his videos, Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown weren't exactly pleased with the results; I can imagine them recoiling from this bluntly physical representation of their non-representational music, but on its own, it's a thematically rich start -- one that proves its director had plenty to go on.
In Cunningham's most infamous videos, the pair of twisted "branding" efforts he directed for the Aphex Twin, he expands on his fascination with how anatomy limits, defines and fucks up human experience by adding gender to the equation. In "Come to Daddy", a bunch of androgynous, skirt-wearing, Mini-Me Aphex Twins, controlled by the distorted image of another snarling Aphex Twin on a broken TV screen lying in a pile of garbage, terrorize an urban wasteland as much as their little bodies will let them -- smashing shit up, pushing each other around and throwing rocks at anyone who happens to come their way. While these pudgy little hellions are more than horror movie clichés -- their eyes don't turn red and their creepiness resides wholly in the fact that they're kids with Richard James's head on them -- their televisual master is another story entirely. In a Cronenbergian moment, the TV screen that holds him becomes a placenta, and he is literally born again -- a sunken, disproportionately tall and long-faced figure that lets out an earth-shattering scream. The video's final scene shows this creature cradling his Aphex Twin daughters, and a general point seems to be made: that in a world as manufactured as this one, gender starts to flip its own lid.
The "Windowlicker" video -- you know, the one banned by MTV and responsible for wet-dream-cum-nightmares in teenage boys' heads everywhere -- takes this mix-and-match approach to gender and anatomy to its logical conclusion and becomes a funny-as-hell, breathtakingly subversive parody of MTV video culture along the way. Two pathetic playas try to score some chicks, only to be outdone by the sizzling Richard D. James (who else?) with his never-ending limo, very hairy chest and Gene Kelly-meets-Prince dance moves. He macks it with his newfound hoes and ends up in a big, Busbee Berkley-inspired dance routine with them, but by now they've taken on some odd characteristics -- lots of facial hair, crooked and rotten teeth, and James's smirking profile. The image of these hotties wagging their asses while they leer at the screen is the perfect antidote for anyone who's been anesthetized by our culture's constantly on-air, anatomical meat-market.
"Windowlicker" reveals Cunningham's dark and raucous sense of humor, which is also almost entirely responsible for his take on Squarepusher's "Come on My Selector", a convoluted, cartoonish story of a mentally challenged little girl's revenge on her captors, and Leftfield's "Africa Shox" (featuring Africa Bambaataa), which consists entirely of a voodoo priest running around an unnamed city while losing body parts. Cunningham's studies of anatomy can also be weirdly beautiful, as on this DVD's two highlights -- videos for Portishead's "Only You" and Björk's "All Is Full of Love". The former features three characters -- a boy, a man and Beth Gibbons -- shot underwater but pictured above it, in a noirish alleyway. Simple movements, like the boy's suspended frontflips or Gibbons' swaying hair, turn into mesmerizing gestures of body love. "All Is Full of Love" might just be Cunningham's masterpiece, and is certainly the fulfillment of this collection's body-bound message. Two Björks, cast as complex animatronic creatures, kiss and melt in each other's arms, obscured by their industrial, pragmatic and cold complexions, even as they find love against all metaphorical odds.
If there's one message on this DVD, it's that our own bodies -- their odd and banal movements, their physical limitations, their nearly grotesque implications -- can either work against us and mutate into something unexpected or turn into simple expressions of our own mortality. By focusing on this idea, Chris Cunningham has developed a specialized arsenal of visual and metaphorical tools that cut where others gloss over. Here's hoping he sticks with the surgery.
-- Matt Pierce
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