David Lynch’s 55 second short filmed with an original Lumiere camera. 40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, no synchronized sound was [...]

I first experienced a live dot matrix symphony back in the Nineties at a Sonar festival, Barcelona. It’s nice to see James Houston has revisited this concept and ramped it up on both a auditory and visual level to create another pop promo which validates the conclusion of the essay I wrote for the Oberhausen [...]

I was asked to write this piece to accompany the MuVi programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival music video programme and awards this year. It was a great follow up to being on the jury in 2007, and an opportunity to think of the current big narrative and aesthetic trends in the area.
Conceptually Yours
Dynamic [...]

A perverse and almost deliberately naive list in equal measures of Michel Gondry’s Top 25 classic music video picks. It is almost nonsensically random, even though it gives decent credit to first-gen pioneers like Pope, etc - can only think this was deliberately for the EW audience.
Michel Gondry picks 25 classic music videos:


Michael Jackson, ‘Billie [...]

This feels like signature Lost in Space work by Rob Rae. Beautiful austere monochrome precision tracing the lines of human cartography.
Fading Object from Motioncult on Vimeo.

An extraordinary piece of Le cinéma du look, with the author remixing his own text radically? Evaluate in September 2008 when this is due for release…
“Michel Houllebecq’s 2006 novel La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island) has appeared on the Internet. La Possibilité d’une île is an acerbic piece of dystopian science fiction [...]

In honour of the Beijing Olympics, posting one of my favourite music videos of Spike Jonze, Electrobank for the Chemical Brothers, starring Sophia Coppola.
Am wondering why more music videos don’t use this milieu, it feels like an area ripe as a visual playground. Jonze sets the bar high as ever, but there’s still plenty of [...]

Nagi Noda RIP.
Would have loved to get her work in Remixing Music Video, but things didn’t come together. Glad I programmed some of her earlier work in the UK though, bringing it to a new geography/audience. She had a tough time as a female creative director in Japan, but managed to break through and create [...]

CR Blog has an exclusive first-look at maxi-promo/short film for The Cinematic Orchestra, directed by Up the Resolution. Poignant, beautifully shot short film hybrid. Elegiac memory fragments, punctuated by black fade lacunae.
We were initially approached by Vez, commissioning on behalf of Ninja Tune, to submit two separate animated treatments for The Cinematic Orchestra tracks, To [...]

Trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY. Looks difficult, obtuse, uncompromising, uncomfortable of genre = perfect directorial debut from Academy award-laden screenwriter?


Synecdoche is:

a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing, or
a term denoting a thing (a “whole”) is used to refer to part of it, or
a term denoting a [...]