Music Video Auteurs: the Directors Label Dvds
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i Music Video Auteurs: The Directors Label DVDs and the Music Videos of Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. by Tristan Fidler Bachelor of Arts (With First Class Honours), UWA ’04. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies. 2008 ii MUSIC VIDEO AUTEURS ABSTRACT Music video is an intriguing genre of television due to the fact that music drives the images and ideas found in numerous and varied examples of the form. Pre-recorded pieces of pop music are visually written upon in a palimpsest manner, resulting in an immediate and entertaining synchronisation of sound and vision. Ever since the popularity of MTV in the early 1980s, music video has been a persistent fixture in academic discussion, most notably in the work of writers like E. Ann Kaplan, Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. What has been of major interest to such cultural scholars is the fact that music video was designed as a promotional tool in their inception, supporting album sales and increasing the stardom of the featured recording artists. Authorship in music video studies has been traditionally kept to the representation of music stars, how they incorporate post-modern references and touch upon wider cultural themes (the Marilyn Monroe pastiche for the Madonna video, Material Girl (1985) for instance). What has not been greatly discussed is the contribution of music video directors, and the reason for that is the target audience for music videos are teenagers, who respond more to the presence of the singer or the band than the unknown figure of the director, a view that is also adhered to by music television channels like MTV. It was with a new generation of music video directors who appeared during the 1990s that music video began to receive a certain amount of prestige that it had not enjoyed before. Directors such as Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek, Floria Sigismondi, and Chris Cunningham had grown up with music videos on MTV and iii proceeded to push the promotional parameters of the genre, employing attention-grabbing concepts and engaging narratives within the scope of the featured music. They were no longer simply known within the industry, but were discussed in magazine profiles, television interviews and website profiles, particularly if they made the successful transition to feature film-making, such as Spike Jonze had achieved with Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002). In 2003, Palm Pictures released the Directors Label series, which sought to celebrate the artistry of music videos by highlighting the work of individual directors. The first three volumes selected the most-discussed video directors of recent years: The Work of Director Spike Jonze, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham, and The Work of Director Michel Gondry. Palm Pictures gave each director control over the content of their DVD: from deciding which of their videos to include in their author-approved disc to supplementing their collected videos with interviews, commentaries and documentaries, extra-textual features available in the DVD medium. In essence, each director in the Directors Label series is both author and star of their DVD text. The selection of individuals deemed worthy of a Directors Label DVD presupposes a hierarchy amongst directors of music videos, from those who stand out creatively and those who remain unmentioned. It is here where auteurism and music video intersects within the figure of the music video director. In film studies, auteur theory positions the director as the source of meaning and interest within a film text, privileging him or her with authorial status. While not really a theory per se, and more a method of critically reading a film, auteurism has been continually debated for the simple fact that film is a collaborative effort and that it does not necessarily equate with the predominantly individual pursuits of art and literature. Like cinema, music video is also a collaborative effort involving a basic crew of cinematographer, technicians and actors, but saddled with the overriding economic focus iv on the music and the musical artist. Individual artistry can be harder to determine in a music video text, particularly with the dependence on another artist’s work – the song text – determining the structure, tone and look of a video. What will be defined in this thesis is the concept of music video auteurs, which will be analysed in two interrelated areas of study. First, the existence of the auteurist phenomenon in the Directors Label series will be discussed, with reference to the extra-textual tools of DVD technology, which are used to increase the profile of the chosen music video directors. This will be the subject of Chapter One: Auteur Theory and Music Video Directors where the history and permutations of auteur theory will be summarised, followed by an examination of directors in the music video genre. Chapter Two: Auteur Machines: DVD Technology and The Directors Label will deconstruct the supplementary features of the Directors Label DVDs in regards to how they represent the director as an auteur. With Cunningham, Gondry and Jonze established as music video auteurs, the thesis will proceed to the second area of study, analysing their music videos as significant works in their own right. Chapter Three: Chris Cunningham, Chapter Four: Michel Gondry and Chapter Five: Spike Jonze will focus on their respective subjects through the majority of each director’s music videos, referencing their collection and re-contextualisation within the DVD medium of the Directors Label series. Each director will be defined by singular aesthetic concerns and stylistic tendencies unique to them, whilst displaying themes common to all of them: including the union of body and space to music; the collaborative by-product of working with distinctive musical stars; and the use of popular culture to comment upon the world through a virtual reconstruction of it. What will be argued in this thesis is how music video is validated as an art-form, not simply through individual music videos that impress with v their ideas and ingenuity, but through their reception as authored texts. The promotion of music video directors as music video auteurs through DVD technology provides a new and important contribution to cultural studies, particularly within the fields of music video studies, auteur theory and the burgeoning work undertaken on the DVD medium. vi MUSIC VIDEO AUTEURS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Ian Saunders, for his time, patience and input into the overseeing of my thesis. He has continually made sure that I have been on target, focused on my work, and that I am writing at a PhD level. I only had two meetings with my back-up supervisor, Gail Jones, over the course of four years, but they were challenging and very important in shaping the initial focus of my research. I have much love and gratitude to the staff working in the Faculty of English, Communication and Cultural Studies, particularly those who were supportive and helpful towards my topic, particularly Judith Johnston, Daniel Brown, and most importantly, Tony Hughes d’Aeth whose insightful comments, enthusiastic discussion and keen guidance during the revision of the thesis were greatly beneficial. I would also like to thank those who provided valuable assistance during my writing: Tristan Kewe, for providing the English translation of the French song by Jean-Francois Cohen, La Tour de Pise; Aimee Lamatoa, for her dedicated and detailed proof-reading of the thesis at its final stages, which I am very grateful for; Seymour Davidson, for his technical assistance with the Directors Label DVDs; and finally, Danica Van De Velde, for her constant advice, encouragement and belief in me over the course of my PhD research and writing. I am also grateful to those in the English Postgraduate Community who haunt the grounds of UWA: it was beneficial to know that I wasn’t alone in such a task and could talk to others facing similar issues and problems. Much love to the friends who talked vii music videos with me and also to my family who aided me throughout the lengthy writing process by simply being there for me. I am also indebted to Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus for their Inscriptions academic conference, which I attended in 2005 and presented a paper that became part of the chapter on Chris Cunningham. The paper, “The Imaginary Body in Chris Cunningham’s Music Videos: Portishead’s Only You and Leftfield’s Afrika Shox,” was also published in Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, 2007). I would like to thank Rodney Sharkey who organised the Inscriptions conference and John Wall who edited the published book that collected together various papers from the very same conference. Lastly, I would like to thank the three directors who are the subject of this thesis – Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Without them I would not have bothered. viii MUSIC VIDEO AUTEURS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1.: Still from Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy (1995) 133. 1.2.: Still from Leftfield’s Afrika Shox (1998) 155. 1.3.: Still from Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker (1998) 169. 1.4.: Still from Björk’s All is Full of Love (1998) 189. 2.1.: Still from The White Stripes’ Fell in Love with a Girl (2002) 207. 2.2.: Still from The Chemical Brothers’ Let Forever Be (1997) 217. 2.3.: Still from Jean Francois Cohen’s La Tour De Pise (1993) 232. 2.4.: Still from Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World (2002) 243. 2.5.: Still from The White Stripes’ The Hardest Button To Button (2003) 246.