New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

With the recent release of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, let’s look back now at a 2003 disk of director Michel Gondry’s previous body of film and video.

Somewhat overlooked amongst the deluge of brilliant DVD’s released last year, Palm Pictures’ excellent compilation of the music videos and short films of Michel Gondry was a disk I only just got around to at Christmas time. But as that hoary saw goes, better late than never — for ultimately, this proved to be perhaps the best music DVD released inside the past calendar year (with apologies to Spoon Records and Sublime Frequencies, whose respective DVD’s of German prog rockers Can and Burmese Nat Pwe also contended). Not satisfied to merely slap together videos by famous music artists as an easy sell item, the publisher of The Work of Director Michel Gondry has smartly included lots of extra material here that helps to flesh out a view of one of today’s most unique visual artists.

Having not yet seen either of the filmmaker’s directorial efforts, I can’t comment today on whether or not Gondry’s many skills actually extend to the feature length film. However, now that I’ve digested much of his shorter work as it’s served up on this particular platter, what can easily be stated is that he is one of the most creative and fascinating artists working inside the mainstream today. Throughout the videos, commercials and short films collected on Palm’s DVD runs an iconoclastic vision that is executed with the craft of a master technician; Gondry appears in these small doses to masterfully combine the imaginative talents of the inventor with the sharp eye for detail generally more associated with the machinist. There’s a rare unity of artist and artisan that reveals itself in the director’s carefully staged flights of fancy, and the melding of these two sometimes opposing camps within one man’s vision is perhaps what helps make the filmmaker the true original that he is.

This collection of material runs the proverbial gamut of Gondry’s output, including his early French music videos and running right up through some of his more recent creations for the music industry’s biggest stars. There are also some shorter films on the DVD that showcase the varying aspects of the director’s idiosyncratic mode of moviemaking, in addition to a few more commercial productions that he has helmed for big companies like Smirnoff, Levi’s and Polaroid. Palm Pictures was not content to stop there, though, and has also tossed in some live concert footage of Oui Oui (a French band for which the filmmaker drummed and did much early visual work), a 72 minute documentary on the artist titled I’ve Been 12 Forever and a 52 page booklet that packages together photos, drawings, stories and interviews associated with Gondry. The end result here is a complete overview of the man’s career to this point, displaying the different aspects of his oeuvre to great effect and inexpensively making available the disparate creations of a truly interesting craftsman.

With the wealth of film contained on this release, it’s sort of hard to sum up all of the brilliant moments contained herein. But a selection of highlights would certainly include the music video gems that the director made for musicians such as Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, The White Stripes, Cibo Matto, Kylie Minogue and Bjork. The pieces for Minogue and Cibo Matto are technical wonders, deftly executed short stories that take an accompanying song and harmoniously pair it with a fantastic sense of time and space expansion. The White Stripes videos pair nicely with the stripped down music of these raw blues gravediggers, and the Lego animation used in the film for Fell in Love With a Girl is particularly spectacular as well as being an ideally appropriate technique. Also interesting are the multiple Bjork videos that The Work of Director Michel Gondry presents that are of a somewhat different order than the rest of the music films; these two artists seem to have formed a partnership that brings out the best in both and results in a true collaboration between these two childlike composers of image and sound. Not being much of a fan of the singer’s generally petulant warbling, I was skeptical as to whether I would find these videos at all tolerable — but I have to report that while they haven’t converted me into any sort of Bjorkophile, they are so arrestingly made that they rate among the most interesting films on the DVD. As for The Chemical Brothers Star Guitar entry and the Daft Punk short, it’s with these two videos that the filmmaker’s utter control of visual and sonic qualities reaches its real apotheosis. For the former item, Gondry seamlessly matches manipulated images of a ride on a train immaculately with the rhythmic techno beats of the Brothers’ high beats-per-minute song; for the latter, Daft Punk’s spare Around the World is turned into a synchronous choreography of mummies, Melies-esque skeletons, bathing beauties and space helmeted dancers that pays respectful homage to Busby Berkeley as it unfurls.

There are other musical numbers here by the likes of Beck, The Rolling Stones and others, and all of the featured videos come with at least something special to recommend them. The earlier French ones are especially revealing, as they utilize a less sophisticated visual and animated style than the later films and thus tend to give much more insight into Gondry’s seminal influences as an artist. Also useful in this regard are the wonderful booklet and well made documentary film, both of which delve fairly deeply into the dreams and childhood experiences that help to inform the director’s outlandish creations. The documentary also allows a look at the way that some of the projects were conceived and executed, and additionally highlights the opinions of many of the musicians for whom Gondry has labored. As mentioned above, rounding out this fine release are some other short films and various fragments of the filmmaker’s artistry, which range from a biographical black and white story drawn from his adolescence to spin art animated abstractions, as well as a couple of slick advertising sales pitches and a bizarre little movie called Pecan Pie that has Jim Carrey taking a rollaway bed out for a drive.

All in all, this digital representation of the prior work of a director who is only just now breaking into full flower as a feature length filmmaker helpfully collects onto one disk a whole swath of differing selections from his exceptional corpus. Often the transition from short pieces to more lengthy outings is a tough one for such an artist to make, as there are a multiplicity of differences in approach that are needed to succeed at each level. Still, the hours of videos and other movies included in this 2003 Palm Pictures DVD release would seem to indicate that Gondry’s visual sense should be enough to make Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a treat for the eyes at least — and the obvious care with which he handles his briefer projects should hopefully mean that his profuse imaginative powers will be constantly in evidence throughout even a longer 108 minute format. In any case, there’s little doubt that what we have here is a singular artist whose manner of making films is as individualistic as any to have come along in the last 20 years. One can undoubtedly rest assured that whether he’s making a two minute music video or a feature for the megaplex, that the end result of his efforts will be easily identifiable as pure Gondry in execution. And that, gentle readers, is the hallmark of the kind of real artist that tends to be in far shorter supply than we’d probably like within the whole wide world of film today.