Television Director Research Articles

Not Another Article on the Author! God and Auteurs in Moving Image Analysis

Many scholars in popular music and film studies accept the limitations of current film theories of authorship in relation to music video. This article moves the debate forward through a case study of the work of acclaimed music video director, Jamie Thraves. It focuses on three examples of his work: Jake Bugg’s ‘Two Fingers’ (2012), Coldplay’s ‘The Scientist’ (2002), and Radiohead’s ‘Just’ (1995). Evidence of Thraves’s close collaboration with the musicians in the scripting, shooting, and editing of each of these videos is used to investigate authorship in both domains of music and film production. The central argument of the analysis is about the conflicting expectations of power and control participants hold in the production process. These are based on a collision between historically distinct production cultures and intellectual property regimes. The article contributes to ongoing debates in the UK about moral rights, value, labour, and intellectual property in moving image production and argues that a paradigm shift for analysing creative production in music video is long overdue.

LET'S GO TO FRENZY

This co-authored study draws on my early involvement with television pop as a consumer and my later career, first as a musician and then a music video director and producer. I draw on my professional experience particularly in Section II, in my discussion of three specific music video productions. While my contributions to this study are not therefore 'objective', on either count, the chapter attempts as accurate a survey of the field as possible. All references to actual production experiences here are mine alone (Bruce Sheridan).

Music Video’s Performing Bodies: Floria Sigismondi as Gestural Animator and Puppeteer

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World (2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression.

Designing, producing and exemplifying videos to support reflection and metacognition for in-service teachers training

In this paper we document a six-phase video production process designed to support teachers’ continuous professional development in three disciplinary areas: scientific, linguistic-literary and foreign languages areas. This production has been carried out within the NOP1 - National Operational Programme funded by European structural funds and conducted by INDIRE between 2007 and 2014.The originality of this work lies in the co-research action performed by the team involved (researchers, teachers, instructional designers, video director, etc.) aimed at capturing meaningful professional practices enacted by teachers in their classes for the achievement of a given educational goal. The documented and exemplified production process can, not only function as a guide for the production of educational videos, but is also strongly characterized by its reflective and meta-reflective functions for Teacher Professional Development or TPD. Several examples of videos are described and referenced in the paper.

The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting

While textual analysis provides a useful tool for examining archive screen performances, purely immanent readings often ignore the contextualising factors which help shape them; this article therefore sets out to examine the various determinants of television acting and how they have changed between the live, multi-camera studio era and the present day. The various factors considered include: the time period allocated to produce a television drama, and how it is utilised; production process and technology; the role of the television director; and actor experience and training. Taken together, these determinants offer the potential for a fuller understanding of television acting.

Beyond Gangsta: Hip-Hop, Skate Culture and Web Culture in the Music of Tyler, the Creator

This article came from the homonymous PhD proposal submitted and accepted by Music School of University College Cork (UCC, Ireland) to be started in September 2015 under the guidance of Dr. J. Griffith Rollefson. It aims to point out and discuss the articulations made by rapper, producer, actor and video director Tyler Okonma, known by the stage name Tyler, the Creator, to shift, but also maintain, some frames of gangsta rap discourse. Noticed by his rape fantasies lyrics and ultraviolent shouts, most present in his two first albums, Tyler has been acclaimed for his notable musical talent but criticized for its misogynist themes. Despite this outrageous aspect of its music, his confessional and often self-depreciating lyrics have been a novelty for constant self-pride and powerful hip-hop lyrics. Moreover, it works as a compensation for his aggressiveness since it could be seen as a demonstration of fragility rather than sexual domination. The way he uses hip-hop mentality, skate culture nihilism and Web 2.0 platforms to promote his art has made him one of the most prominent hip-hop artists from 21st century. Based on related authors on hip-hop topics like gangsta, misogyny, media and racial stereotypes this article discuss the ways in which Tyler, the Creator reflects but also denies the most known and commented frames of rap music.

Space and Place in Joan Kemp-Welch’s Television Productions of Theatre Plays

Joan Kemp-Welch (1906–1999), one of the first female television directors, started out as an actor on both the stage and film before becoming a theatre director and finally moving to television in 1955. She directed a variety of entertainment programmes for Associated-Rediffusion before marrying her evident skills as a television director with her rich experience of theatre work, in a number of important television plays, some from the stage and others written for the new medium. This article will examine how Kemp-Welch’s experience of theatre practice may have inscribed itself on her television productions of stage plays, focusing on the practical and aesthetic use she made of space in extant studio productions of plays set in very different locales and time periods, including Sophocles’ Electra (1962), Three Sisters (1963), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964) and Romeo and Juliet (1976). This case study of an accomplished director of television plays will, therefore, attempt to understand the social, cultural and specifically theatrical meanings of the use of space in these productions to represent and suggest a variety of domestic, rural, urban and national places on the British small screen.

Interview with Music Video Director and Auteur Floria Sigismondi

IntroductionMusic video continually reconfigures and reasserts itself, emerging in new guises. It jumps platforms: from television, cable, DVDs to iTunes and YouTube; from high-gloss looks and extravagant budgets to footage shot on cell phones. Its borders are changing and uncertain. Few directors have stayed in the game through the genre's many shifts. Floria Sigismondi, along with only a handful of others - Hype Williams, Dave Meyers, Sophia Mueller - has been able to reinvent herself throughout music video's transitions.Interviews with music video directors are rare. Until recently there wasn't a venue for them. Academic journals have given little space to scholarship on music video and much less to the directors. This interview with Floria Sigismondi aims to give a sense of her craft and what it's like to work in an industry over a twenty-year period.1This conversation starts near the beginning of her career and takes us to the present. Born to Italian opera singers and raised in a Canadian industrial town, Floria Sigismondi was educated in Catholic girls' schools and received her artistic training at the Ontario College of Art. Her work draws from painting, illustration, sculpture, photography and film. This article will consider six of her videos: 'Little Wonder' for David Bowie (1997), 'Makes Me Wanna Die' for Tricky (1998), 'The Beautiful People' and 'Tourniquet' for Marilyn Manson (1999), 'Hurt' for Christina Aguilera (2006), and 'E.T.' for Katy Perry and Kanye West (2011).2But before we begin the interview, some context may be helpful. Today, participation with the audiovisual is informed by an explosion of platforms, formats and styles; but what lies behind these media changes? I (interviewer, Carol Vernallis) want to argue that music video has been a prime driver of this new media swirl. Music video's role has been under- acknowledged. Today's media relations become malleable and volatile in a 'mixing board' aesthetic, and our accrued knowledge about how to work fluidly with this material is informed by music video. Music video's major contribution to today's audiovisual turn stems from the fact that ways of placing music and image together are learned: they form genealogies. One can't just speed up Godard and put music against it. Today's unique audiovisual relations developed through music video directors' and editors' experiments at reconfiguring images and sounds. From its advent in the 1980s, music video deployed new technologies (cheap, reusable videotape) and was shaped by new commercial and social demands (the impetus to make it fast, creative, musical, different, wild). Subsequently, these changing audiovisual relations of music video have influenced practices in film sound and music; the soundtrack in toto has become 'musicalised': sound effects and dialogue are now shaped alongside composed music into musical phrases. Sonic features can also adopt leading roles, driving the film; or sound can mediate, enabling individual film parameters to come to the fore. The image acquires a sense of speed and flexibility: the image's contents can seem as if they had been poured from one shot into the next. Cutting, too, can bestow an almost percussive rhythmic drive. An image in the new digital cinema often avoids a ground because the sound wafts it along.These audiovisual forms of knowledge were shaped by music video. In the eighties music video was the laboratory: while commercials and films in that era tended toward tightly controlled client-author supervision and careful storyboarding, a music video director or editor might try anything. (Turn the image on its head and abut it with some red.) In the nineties music video directors streaming into cinema helped drive the new, audiovisually intensified, post-classical cinema.3 A second wave then immigrated, as industry funding, in response to free downloading, dried up in the noughties. Music video directors have flourished in the industry because they're especially attuned to the new technologies and the new audiovisual relations. …

Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America by Andreas Skipis (review)

Reviewed by: Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America by Andreas Skipis John Clark Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America. DVD. A film by Andreas Skipis. [Halle/Saale, Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2011, 2001. 101 573. $28.98. This 2001 production by Hessischer Rund funk for Arthaus Musik presents an interesting overview of the career of Aaron Copland. By no means an exhaustive account, it gives what is a generally good cross section of his life and works, with many archival television clips and photographs, as well as a present-day tour through the Brooklyn of his early years. With a running time of only an hour, this film leaps from peak to peak, concentrating on the years from Copland’s study in Paris in the 1920’s to his serial pieces Twelve Poems of Emily Dickenson (1951) and Connotations, commissioned for the opening of Lincoln Center in 1962. The narration of the film is in German, although the menu presents an option of subtitles in English as well as several other languages, but the interviews (with conductor Hugh Wolff, biographer Howard Pollack and Copland himself) are in [End Page 166] English. By limiting the talking heads, director Andreas Skipis actually achieves more unity and structural coherence than might be expected from such a short film. Copland is presented in interviews done towards the end of his professional life (presumably in the 1970’s and early 80’s, although information for this is not given) and is compelling in his discussion of his music and life - especially his Zen-like acceptance of the difficulties he encountered in the McCarthy era congressional hearings. Wolff is lucid and engaging in his discussions of the music he conducts, although the sometimes bizarre film style gets in the way. Initially, I thought I was watching some very modestly gifted actors imitating symphonic musicians playing Copland’s music, but they are indeed Wolff leading the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (shortly to change its name to Hessischer Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester). Why film-makers and television directors feel these community theater histrionics make Classical music more accessible is a question for future generations. Once one gets by, for example, the oddity of the rapidly appearing and disappearing soloists in Music for the Theater (1925) in front of a single music stand in an all-white room, one can appreciate the beautiful performance. A composer and pianist in his own right, Howard Pollack is responsible for the definitive biography of Copland (Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, University of Illinois Press, 1999) and here provides insights that go well beyond the merely biographical. The shortcomings of his contributions are that he is interviewed on the New York subway (apparently during rush hour, with all the attendant noise) and walking down a busy street - two more strange filmic conceits. Pollack’s musical analysis (given on a large scale in reference to Copland’s entire career) is extremely insightful and present Copland’s integrated ideas of music, politics and life in general. Musically, the film is focused on the performances by Wolff and the Frankfurt Symphony, but the DVD case includes pictures of live performances with Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein and Martha Graham - none of which lasts more than a minute or two or can stand on its own as a musical statement. In general, the musical interludes are well spaced and present a good chronological overview of Copland’s work, with the single exception of his Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (1948) with Goodman, which is presented as a development of his interest in the Jazz of the 1920’s (which inspired his Music for the Theater). The work by Wolff and the orchestra are fortunately presented in if not complete form, then at least long excerpts. Among these selections, the most outstanding is the portion of the orchestral version of Twelve Poems of Emily Dickenson which feature soprano Stella Doufexis. While the brevity of this film can be viewed as both positive and negative, its treatment of the career of Aaron Copland is an excellent introduction to his works and philosophy. Fortunately, the theatrics of the presentation do not get in the way of the essential delivery of...

From Five Women to Leeds United!: Roy Battersby and the Politics of ‘Radical’ Television Drama

Focusing on the work of the left-wing film and television director Roy Battersby, this article seeks to shed light on the issues at stake in the controversies surrounding the production and reception of ‘radical television drama’ during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through an examination of a number of BBC productions that were either cut (Five Women), banned (Hit Suddenly Hit) or the subject of moral and political objections (The Operation and Leeds United!), the discussion indicates how arguments over ‘radical’ television drama involved a degree of shift away from concerns with the blurring of boundaries between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ towards a preoccupation with political ‘balance’ (that involved the application of criteria to drama that were originally reserved for documentaries). Although the period in question is often characterised as one in which the creators of television drama enjoyed substantial creative freedom to make work that challenged the status quo, this article also reveals how such work was far from the norm and often only got made, and shown, in the face of considerable opposition. The article therefore concludes with an assessment of some of the ideological and institutional constraints weighing upon ‘radical’ political expression in television drama at this time.

El síndrome de cautiverio en la literatura, el cine y la televisión

Many diseases have been dealt with in literature, cinema or television, including epilepsy, cancer, mental disorders, movement disorders or infectious diseases. Among the many pathologies that have been considered, locked-in syndrome is one that has been of particular interest to writers and film-makers. To review how locked-in syndrome has been portrayed in literature, cinema and television. Locked-in syndrome is a state that is generally secondary to a brainstem lesion with involvement of the corticobulbar and corticospinal tracts, thereby impeding the patient from producing any kind of motor response. Patients remain conscious, maintain their higher functions and can both see and hear. Yet, they are quadriplegic with paralysis of the lower cranial nerves and cannot move or speak. They only conserve the capacity to move their eyes vertically and their eyelids, which they can use as a way to communicate. This pathology has come to the attention of writers and film and television directors, who have described characters with this syndrome. Likewise, there are also stories told in the first person by patients who have experienced this condition and who have written their story using eye movements as a means to communicate. Literature, cinema and television have shown an interest in locked-in syndrome and have placed special attention on the problems these patients have to communicate with others.

A qualitative analysis of charismatic leadership in creative teams: the case of Turkish TV series directors

TV and media play an important role in our life and it has been stated that TV series are the second most followed program type after news. Apart from their rationality and consistency, directors and teams play a major role in the recognition of the series by the society. It has been contented that the most popular Turkish TV series have been differentiated from all their equals by the charismatic leadership qualities of their directors. It has also been contented that these charismatic leader- directors act as facilitators for their teams to optimize their creativity at work.Although there are a large number of studies related to leadership theories, only two studies related to television directors’ leadership style were found in the literature. For this reason, this research was carried out on three of top ten, well-known directors who had directed or have currently been directing numerous famous movies and televisions series. They were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire depend on Conger and Kanungo's (1994) model which has been acknowledged as one of the most influential studies about charismatic leadership behavior. Pattern matching was used as a technique to explore whether the pattern of reported team leader behavior of television directors matches the theory of charismatic leadership as conceptualized by Conger and Kanungo.Results of the present study revealed that charismatic leadership can be important in explaining the leadership role of sampled Turkish TV series directors in teams.

Lost in participation

In a keynote address to the most recent London Film Festival, the veteran film and television director Ken Loach rehearsed two not altogether unfamiliar complaints: one that managerial and editorial controls at the BBC are stifling creative agency and expression; the other that British television has manifestly failed to live up to early expectations. ‘Television began with such high hopes. It was going to be the national theatre of the air. It was going to really be a place where society could have a national discourse, and they've reduced it to a grotesque reality game.’1 It is timely then that John Caughie's recent essay, ‘Mourning television: the other screen’,2 should commence with an observation as to how a sense of loss has also lately inflected academic discourses and conversations about television. He reminds us that writers for Screen once sought to intervene in television practice as well as theory, apparently inviting a debate which could again contribute to the collective imagination of ‘a different television’, not least by identifying the ‘other possibilities of meaning and engagement’ it might yet offer. Mindful of my description of his earlier expression of regret for ‘serious drama’3 Caughie takes care to distance his perspective from one of nostalgia, and concludes with the observation that television theorizing needs to continue to work through a particular lost dimension, ‘the loss of a public space, television's part in the waning of the public sphere’.4 The drama Occupation (BBC, 2009) is cited to compare present with past, an eloquent demonstration of how even a hard-hitting serial that engages with issues of national controversy is today more likely to provoke private affect than political and collective debate. It is an example that dovetails quite neatly with his earlier citations of scholarship that functioned as intervention, thus imbricating radical practice and effect alongside radical academic writing, all dimensions of a period of lost possibility.

New Directions in Music Video: Vincent Moon and the ‘ascetic aesthetic’

This article takes the form of a case study on the work of French filmmaker and music video director Vincent Moon, and his ‘Takeaway Shows’ at the video podcast site La Blogothèque. This discussion examines the state, and status, of music video as a dynamic mode of convergent screen media today. It is argued that the recent shift of music video online represents a revival of music video—its form and aesthetics— together with a rejuvenation of music video scholarship. The emergence of the ‘ascetic aesthetic’ is offered as a new paradigm for music video far removed from that of the postmodern MTV model. In this context, new music video production intersects with notions of immediacy, authenticity and globalised film practice. Here, convergent music video is enabled by the network of Web 2.0 and facilitated by the trend towards amateur content, participatory media and Creative Commons licensing. The pedagogical implications of teaching new music video within screen media arts curricula is highlighted as a trajectory of this research.

Paris from the Ground Up , and: The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 (review)

Reviewed by: Paris from the Ground Up , and: The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 Katherine Gantz (bio) James H.S. McGregor. Paris from the Ground Up. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 352 pp. $29.95 (cloth). Rosemary Wakeman. The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xiii + 401 pp. $35.00 (cloth). “The production of urban space is always a battlefield of contending forces, and the Parisian story is a complicated one,” writes Rosemary Wakeman in a conspicuous understatement, adding that “One can immediately put forward the seemingly simple supposition that the spaces of Paris evoked the past at the same time as they summoned the future” (10). It is this very supposition—that [End Page 126] some of the long-established functions of city spaces will remain preserved and viable even while the city continues to transform itself—that guides two recent texts on the history and significance of Paris as an urban center. The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 takes an absorbing look at Paris in the post-war years as France struggled to rethink its cultural identity. Wakeman considers the catastrophic damage done to the public realm by the Second World War; space artfully inscribed by the state had been left both physically and symbolically stripped of its meanings. Once the French—and the world—had seen Hitler victoriously touring the city, Paris was rendered strangely unintelligible. The luster of modernity had faded by the 1940s and 1950s, and nothing had filled the vacuum left by what had once been Haussmann’s cohesive, unquestioned Paris, a commanding network of monuments and boulevards, now part of a larger French trauma of repression and displacement. Collective life fell victim to the multiple forces of wartime disaster, postwar industrialization, a mass media boom, and a burgeoning youth culture. Lacking in a civic focal point, “Paris was a disassembled city. Its spaces were undergoing rupture and upheaval. The mesmerizing imagery of the City of Light was at risk of disintegrating” (11). The response to this moment of crisis, argues The Heroic City, was a fervent reanimation of collective practices, a potent fusion of historical memory and public life as staged in the city’s spaces. The growing influence of cinema at the midpoint of the twentieth century gave Parisians a new visual language to express their ardor for the timeless beauty of the city, while paying new attention to the meaning and vitality of day-to-day urban existence. This was Robert Doisneau’s Paris, whose photographs often featured the hyper-monumental Eiffel Tower, while at the same time sharing the frame with a string of drying laundry or schoolchildren along the Champs de Mars. Yet this was not merely an artistic exercise; a surprising spectrum of perspectives found common purpose in the streets of Paris, from early television directors to a staggering Who’s Who of emerging French intellectuals: “The fragmented city was sighted, surveyed, opened up for examination. [ . . . ] The ordinary was heroicized. Anyone could become a celebrity, anything made into a celebrity event” (12). With the all of the urban center’s most and least famous spaces available as a backdrop, Parisians were once again able to reattribute meaning to the world immediately around them. Wakeman’s extraordinary chapter on “Spatial Imagination and the Avant- Garde” reveals diverse intellectual movements at the fore in the 1950s (social Marxism, surrealism, technocratic rationalism), all with a stake in urban spatiality. The author traces the evolution of numerous urban observers, including Guy Debord’s experimental band of Situationists and urban sociology’s pioneers (Louis Chevalier, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe) who sought to demystify the working classes through engaged, empirical study of the city’s îlots insalubres (unhygienic isolated districts). Postwar urbanists and intellectuals of the avantgarde exposed the skewed priorities of a capital designed for centuries around esthetic or commercial, rather than human, priorities. [End Page 127] Wakeman’s reading of youth culture as a spatializing force on the Left Bank offers a particularly innovative perspective on Paris at the start of les Trente Glorieuses (the period of economic growth from 1947 to 1974). She rightly argues that the youth of Paris had already taken on a...

Dead on arrival: The fate of Australian film noir

ABSTRACTIn the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reg Goldsworthy brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films, It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1969) and That Lady from Peking (1970). The second of these, Color Me Dead, was a direct (credited) remake of the film noir classic D.O.A. (Maté, 1949). Discarding the flashback structure of the original, Color Me Dead begins with an atmospheric night-sequence, but soon settles into a routine (if convoluted) thriller in which the poisoned protagonist attempts to track down his own killer. While the Davis version closely follows the dialogue and plot of Mate's film, the form and style of the Australian remake owes less to its precursor than it does to post-classical noirs (Harper, 1966; The Detective, 1968; Lady in Cement, 1968), and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–1959; Naked City, 1958–1963; The Fugitive, 1963–1967). This article looks at the antipodean, cultural remaking of D.O.A., historically situated midway between its classic original (1949) and its second, neo-noir remaking, D.O.A. (Morton and Jankel, 1988). The remake's television aesthetic (and US cable release) adds weight to the suggestion that, through the 1960s, the noir of the classic sensibility was kept alive mainly through television series.

Subjective Perspectives through Word, Image and Sound : Temporality, narrative agency and embodiment in the Dixie Chicks' video 'Top of the World'

The Dixie Chicks have claimed a prominent place in country music video while at the same time confronting the normative values of the traditional country music genre. Their 2003 collaboration with video director Sophie Muller set aside the sense of youthful liberation evident in their earlier videos, adopting more sophisticated editing techniques to take a critical stance on serious social issues. The video for ‘Top of the World’ addresses the cyclic generational effects of domestic abuse, using montage editing and image superimposition to convey a complex multi-generational narrative structure. This paper analyses the lyrics, images, and music of ‘Top of the World’, as they are integrated into a video form that accommodates multiple subject positions in a narrative of domestic abuse. The gendered and subjective perspectives of the story reveal both the origins and consequences of abuse through three generations of one family. In the domain of images these perspectives are suggested through characterisation and action, while in the domain of vocal and musical presentation the Dixie Chicks develop a musical ‘voice’ that accommodates a narrative of multiple agencies. In order to explore the ways in which words, images, and music are combined to communicate these, we draw upon the scholarship of literary, music, and film theorists. The analysis focuses on three interpretive perspectives: temporality, narrative agency, and embodiment.

Simple Stories for a Complicated World: An Interview with Filmmaker Izidore Musallam

Film and television director, writer, and producer Izadore Musallam’s work stretches across national boundaries and explores shifting identities.1 Born and raised in the Middle East and educated as a filmmaker in North America, he continues to reside in Canada while making English and Arabic-language films at home and abroad. Musallam’s debut feature Foreign Nights (1989) dealt with cultural and generational clashes within the Arab diaspora with the story of a Canadian teen dancer and her traditional Palestinian parents; his follow-up Nothing to Lose (1994) is a gangster spoof about a French Canadian boxer. Heaven Before I Die (1997) is a comedy about a young man from Palestine who moves to Toronto, receives advice from the ghost of Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran played by Omar Sharif, and gets a job as a Charlie Chaplin imitator. Forbidden Fruit (2002) is an updated Adam and Eve story of the seduction of a priest.

"Singing Love Songs to Mr. Death": Racial Terror and the State of Erection in D'Angelo's "(Untitled) How Does It Feel?"

"Singing Love Songs to Mr. Death":Racial Terror and the State of Erection in D'Angelo's "(Untitled) How Does It Feel?" Aimé J. Ellis (bio) In 2000, hip hop soul artist extraordinaire Michael "D'Angelo" Archer dropped his much anticipated second album, Voodoo. The album was introduced over U. S. mainstream radio and music video stations in late 1999 with his Grammy-winning single, "(Untitled) How Does It Feel?" As D'Angelo's lyrical style and captivating visual performance of the song reliably returns to the rather straightforward convention of the soulful R&B ballad, it also contains palpable traces of something else. This sexy love song and its accompanying video were produced in an era when the black male body has come to signify—both literally and figuratively—the very convergence of death and desire in contemporary U. S. popular culture. That is, D'Angelo's seductive force in the song represents one of the ways in which black men have come to experience a precarious relation to both life and death. In the highly frenetic space of erotic song, black men's passionate and emancipatory longing for life becomes inextricably tied to a paradoxical yearning for death, a yearning that exemplifies many black men's complicity with and, for my purposes, resistance to the erotics of racism in contemporary U. S. popular culture. I am suggesting that "Untitled" serves as a stage upon which D'Angelo sings not only of sexual joy and intimacy but also hints at what is largely deemed impermissible in the culture—the possibilities of freedom to be found in the space of death. In looking to "Untitled" as enmeshed within a political economy of life and death meted out in each lyrical phrase and vocal vibrato, I want to take seriously if not literally D'Angelo's mystical aspiration in the liner notes of the Voodoo album to "seduce and serenade the night and powers of darkness" in order to evoke "the mysteries of the unseen." While the liner notes go on to paint a rather grandiose picture of D'Angelo as a self-anointed "conjur [sic] man" whose artistic genius invokes the spirits of "Jimi [Hendrix], Sly [Stone], Marvin [Gaye], [and] Stevie [Wonder]," the lyrics of "Untitled" (like most of the songs from the Voodoo album) are strikingly bare yet curiously difficult to understand. 1 Certainly, the penetrating visual focus of the music video implicitly overshadows the lyrical performance of the song. In part, this privileged attention to D'Angelo's body and physical movement is symptomatic of the visual medium of music videos itself. Famed pop music video director Paul Hunter's repeated shifting away from D'Angelo's mouth while he sings—his cutting back and forth between D'Angelo's face, torso, lower abdomen, and back so that the lyrics appear at moments displaced if not dubbed over the video frame—only magnifies the camera's wanderlust into the erotic landscape of D'Angelo's body. Appearing to convey disinterest in the vocal material, Hunter's photographic if not pornographic gaze slices away at the song's poetic intelligibility. To make matters more complicated, the music video version of the "original," full-length song from the album is drastically abridged for television and radio. This is par for the course in a music industry that came to rely on eagerly awaited, larger-than-life music videos as promotional advertisements for the sale of records; the abbreviated and edited music video (as well as the radio-edit versions) appeared to the public well before the original version of the song was available for [End Page 295] purchase. Given these market constraints and challenges, Hunter's camera subtly edits out the musical text deemed nonessential. This hyper-digitized reconstitution of the music and music video effectively takes place through directing viewers away from what D'Angelo is saying, violently obfuscating if not hollowing out his subjective voice even as the camera returns to accentuate the workings and contours of D'Angelo's oral cavity. Hunter's privileging of D'Angelo's body, the invasive editing of the music-video text, and the barren transcription of the lyrics all work to...

Music video, songs, sound: experience, technique and emotion in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

A close reading of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine will show that music video directors bring to the cinema not only fancy editing, nor simply a special way of handling film-sound and music, but something more: a way of assembling material in general. Music video is a musical form. Videos often reflect a song's form and pick up on specific melodic, rhythmic and timbral features. The image can even seem to imitate sonic properties like ebb, flow and indeterminacy of boundaries. Music video stylistics transferable to cinema include unusual representations of time, space and causality, an emphasis on texture, color and mood, as well as a highlighting of ephemerality, process, and condensation. How does Eternal Sunshine create its structure, and sense of musicality? Lacunae in the story, built up through a bewildering number of flashbacks as well as process-oriented and mood-based events, make a space for the soundtrack. Alongside these lacunae are carefully refined structures. These include connections between shots based on visual or aural associations, and short sequences that undergo repetition and intensification. At least thirty visual motifs — like the skeleton posada figures, lamps, and hair dye — crisscross the film, playing a variety of roles. These motifs and the lattices that hold them are structured to connect with the soundtrack in an intimate fashion. The film's soundtrack contains much music. But even when music is absent, the dialogue and environmental sounds are designed to work musically. In Eternal Sunshine, a latticework of sound-image relations help to create new kinds of characterization, affect and story. A prismatic style, based on intensified continuity, is becoming a shared global phenomenon. Bordwell provides a good description of this new “amped-up…higher pitched” filmmaking aesthetic, but he only discusses visual parameters. Through an attention to the soundtrack and the image, my analysis is one of the first to describe how these new films can hold together.