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While you may not know him by name, despite having read that name on dozens of video credits since 1994, you probably remember the first time you saw one of Michel Gondry's videos. Maybe it was the primal urgency of Björk's "Human Behavior", which unnerved me far more than any video with a man in a bear suit had the right to. Maybe it was the distorted perspective of the apartment building in Massive Attack's unsettling "Protection", which was never as calming as it should have been. In my case, I first stumbled across Michel Gondry in Louisville, Kentucky, near New Year's Eve of 1994.
Being a night owl, I'd commandeered the TV in "my" half of the hotel suite I was sharing with my dad so I could watch MTV until the wee hours of morning. Somewhere around 3:00 a.m., I saw the video for Lucas's "Lucas with the Lid Off", a black and white steadicam experiment that entranced and confused the hell out of me. How could Lucas be in two places at once? How much of it was "live" and how much was pre-recorded footage that the actors were interfacing with? And what direction was that staircase the piano movers
were on supposed to be going in, anyway? I knew there had to be a simple answer for my questions, so I studied the video each time they showed it that weekend. Some of it made sense, and some of it eluded me. Though I'd only have a chance to see that video a handful of times during its run -- Gondry had the misfortune of creating a mini-masterpiece for a one-hit wonder -- it's been emblazoned in my mind ever since.
In the meantime, Michel Gondry went on to perfect the art of the impossible.
Gondry has nearly twenty music videos to his name in the past decade, from Beck to Björk and The White Stripes to The Rolling Stones, and you've probably spent more time than you'd like to admit trying to figure out "how he did that". Now, with the advent of this DVD retrospective -- including 27 music videos, numerous short films, commercials and animation studies, and a two-part documentary called "I've Been 12 Forever" -- you can put your DVD player's pause and slow-mo features to good use as you try to dissect his sleight of hand.
Dreams have been a driving force in Gondry's work, a fact he verifies in the documentary. We find ourselves transfixed by the simplistic, by handmade sets and props, by disjointed narratives that don't make any logical sense, and yet they couldn't be more true because they make us feel something. As a boy, he was troubled by recurring nightmares, so it makes perfect sense that he would grow into a man who utilizes remarkably structured, controlled techniques to recreate the imprecise, the abstract and the primal. What's most amazing is just how well it works.
For example:
A blinking red toy, dropped along a rainy sidewalk. It's picked up, hurry, footsteps catching up -- stairs, then we're inside a building. All worm's-eye view, we haven't seen a person yet until -- oh, we're in an elevator. A father and daughter, laughing and playing, but... something's off. There's always something "off" in a Michel Gondry video. (Did I mention we're on a steadicam yet?) You can't be sure but... now they're off the elevator, walking down the hall. Now there's the girl from Everything But the Girl, unlocking her apartment door, but now... why is everyone standing against the back wall of their apartment? And the camera swoops over room after room, in no hurry, just peering in. It doesn't take long to realize we're looking down on everyone, that their back wall is really our floor, and we're both amused and mildly uneasy -- similar to the way I felt every time I saw Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" -- until the man playing with toy cars in his window notices us and glares,
disapprovingly, and suddenly we feel guilty for looking in on him, and before we can even blame the camera for taking us on this journey, we're back in the elevator with the dad. Except now he's bundling his overcoat around him and he's melancholy, and his daughter's not with him -- we just saw her with her mom in their flat, playing with her blinking red toy -- and now we're out the front door again and... yes, the rain, and then... oh. A car seat. And the father drives away. Ah. "Protection". Now I get it.
And that's the experience of watching a Michel Gondry video.
Or at least it was, during his early years. Lately he's evolved from a storytelling phase to a camera fuckery phase, as evidenced by his more recent collaborations with The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers and Kylie Minogue. Here, he's traded in the dream-logic of Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" (which brilliantly bisects the screen in a forwards-backwards tale of a traffic accident) and Björk's fable-gone-wrong "Bachelorette" (for my money, one of the most elaborately conceived videos in the collection,
despite a less-than-satisfying payoff) for the thrills found in building Jack and Meg White from Legos and bluescreening Kylie Minogue ad infinitum. He's also given to topping himself within the course of the same video, as though simply devising a difficult idea and proving he could pull it off isn't enough; now, he wants to show us just how over-the-top he can get. This leads to results both gratifying (the post-production fever dream of The Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be") and grating ("oh, look, four Kylie Minogues..."), but always there are questions (like, "How many peppermint drum sets can the White Stripes afford?").
While I'm impressed by Gondry's later work, it's his skills as a storyteller that seem to evoke a stronger emotional response from me. As interesting as the 3-D mapping effect is on the Stones' "Like a Rolling Stone", it's nothing compared to the childhood fantasy of Björk's "Army of Me", in which she drives a fire-breathing armored car, visits a gorilla dentist and detonates a bomb in a museum in order to wake her lover, reverse-Sleeping Beauty style (hello, pre-9/11 use of bomb-as-romantic-aid).
During the documentary, Gondry relates the acute paranoia he felt as he was walking to fax Björk the storyboard sketches for the video -- as though someone might stab him in the back and he'd never make it to the fax machine. It's this kind of detail that makes the unsettling imagery and off-kilter narratives in his videos seem even more natural. Dave Grohl's monster hand in the fever dream of "Everlong" is a sensation Gondry says he experiences regularly, as though he has a tiny hand inside his own larger
hand an he cannot work it properly. This is the mind of a man capable of envisioning a Busby Berkeley musical number involving B-boy zombies, aliens, skeletons and Martian women for Daft Punk's deceptively sharp "Around the World". It's the same mind that wondered what four men with a box full of magic rocks might get themselves up to in the stop-motion animated "La Ville" over a decade ago, when Gondry was the drummer for the avant-punk band Oui Oui. What he'll think of next is anyone's guess.
Like a magician, Michel Gondry uses tools so basic and commonplace that it almost seems unfair just how well he's able to trick and transfix us with them. Now we have the opportunity to analyze each frame of the DVD if we so choose, the better to unravel his illusions. And, somewhat reassuringly, I found that even though I was finally able to wrap my head around "Lucas with the Lid Off" ten years later, it did nothing to diminish my appreciation for what Gondry was able to accomplish. The video still works, it still fascinates, and it still impresses me. But that image of Lucas being stalked by the guy with the giant spoon, having his tin-can head opened and the contents scooped out while his legs wiggled? That image will stick with me forever. And that, in the end, is the lingering magic of Michel Gondry.
-- Justin Kownacki
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