November 21, 2003

3 Directors' Videos That Transcend Music

im Carrey is sitting in bed wearing blue-and-yellow pj's and holding a steering wheel; this makes as much sense as anything, because the bed is mounted on the chassis of a car. While he does an Elvis impersonation, singing about pecan pie, he drives the bed-car into a gas station to fill it up. This surreally funny one-and-a-half minute film directed by Michel Gondry is a tempting prelude to the next, much bigger Gondry-Carrey collaboration, the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (scheduled to open in March). But "Pecan Pie" is available only on the DVD "The Work of Director Michel Gondry," part of a series called The Directors Label that compiles short films and music videos.

Like the other two directors in the series, Mr. Gondry established his reputation with music videos, but the DVD's reveal how such videos go beyond music. Spike Jonze — now a mainstream darling after "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" — is the best known, the slyest and the most sardonic, his style drawn from a total immersion in pop culture. Chris Cunningham, more allied to the world of art and video installations, has yet to make a breakthrough, although he plans to direct a film based on the cyberfiction classic "Neuromancer." And Mr. Gondry is the most visually inventive of the three.

The Directors Label is a trick of packaging, an alternative to typical collections that group works around musicians (the videos of Bjork or Radiohead). But it points to something real: an auteur theory of music videos and an acceptance of them as a cinematic art form. The short works here are not just blueprints for the directors' "real" movies but minifilms that can stand (at least the best of them) next to their features. The series is a shrewd acknowledgment that since an entire generation has grown up with MTV, visuals and music have merged so thoroughly that some people watch music as much as listen to it.

Mr. Gondry's DVD is the freshest, with a variety and stylistic flair that his first movie, "Human Nature," doesn't prepare you for. That film's straightforward direction is less notable than its cockeyed Charlie Kaufman script, about an especially hairy woman (Patricia Arquette) who falls for a man raised by apes (Rhys Ifans).

On the DVD Mr. Gondry becomes an appealing real-life character in his own story. In a 75-minute autobiographical film, "I've Been 12 Forever," he looks like a kid in a red-and-white striped shirt. (He's actually closer to 40.) Born in France, he has a thick accent that can be hard to penetrate, yet he successfully creates the persona of an overgrown child whose boyhood nightmares and toys (Legos to be exact) still shape his playful work. He even interviews his mother, who says that of all his videos she likes his Air France commercial best.

Those really are Legos, not some computer-generated facsimile, shape-shifting throughout his video for the White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl," one of his most striking. Sometimes the colored blocks create the images of Jack and Meg White; sometimes they are a Mondrian-like grid.

And there is the look of a storybook and the feel of a childhood nightmare in "Human Behavior," as Bjork wanders through an animated forest pursued by a hunter and a giant Teddy Bear. All three directors have worked with Bjork, one of the few musicians whose presence is strong enough and voice distinctive enough not to be overwhelmed by the visuals.

The music doesn't pale in "Like a Rolling Stone," either, as the Rolling Stones themselves sing the Bob Dylan song on screen while Ms. Arquette plays a down-on-her-luck woman flashing back to her days of hard living, glamour and rock 'n' roll. Narrative videos usually wear thin fast, but this one is famous for its still-mesmerizing morphing technique that creates a rippling, undulating surface and the sense that Ms. Arquette's character is disconnected from her world.

Still, the best videos are often built around big beat, electronic dance music that easily recedes into the background. For the Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be," a young woman on a New York street is replicated to create kaleidoscopic, Busby Berkeley dance routines all by herself.

While the disarming Mr. Gondry is a front-and-center presence in his DVD, the wily Mr. Jonze offers no commentary on camera. But he's there, hiding behind a fictional character. He plays a dancing fool named Richard Koufey in two of the savviest, most entertaining videos and a documentary. Koufey is a nerdy guy in a golf shirt doing a quasi breakdance on the street to Fatboy Slim's "Rockafeller Skank."

As Fatboy Slim explains (in a commentary made while sitting in a bathtub with a golden faucet; no one takes these commentaries too seriously), Mr. Jonze sent him the tape as an audition. That led to the video for "Praise You," in which the geeky Koufey and a troupe of other bad dancers take over the lobby of a movie theater while a boombox plays Fatboy Slim's upbeat song with its choirlike sampled phrase.

The joke becomes even more elaborate in "Torrance Rising," a mock documentary that follows the fictional Torrance Dance Company to the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, where it really did perform and Mr. Jonze accepted an award in character as Koufey. The satire reminds us that Mr. Jonze was also a producer of MTV's stunt show "Jackass."

Fatboy Slim also provides the techno music for what may be the best Jonze video, "Weapon of Choice." Christopher Walken is a businessman in a hotel lobby who abruptly breaks into a jerking but buoyant dance, leaping onto furniture and flying through the air. In the commentary Mr. Walken reveals where you're watching his stunt double.

Mr. Jonze has created some of the most striking video images, like a man on fire running down a street for Wax's "California," and some of the most cheerfully accessible, like the video for Weezer's "Buddy Holly," in which band members step into the sitcom "Happy Days." But Mr. Jonze always gives a spin to the pop references that he and his audiences have so thoroughly absorbed.

The Cunningham DVD is the skimpiest of the three (one side instead of two) and his toughest work less accessible, even though he appears here as a pleasant-looking Englishman working with Bjork to create her robotic double for "All is Full of Love." He is famous for Aphex Twin's elaborately morphed, mock-gangsta "Windowlicker." But his eerily beautiful video for Portishead's "Only You" suggests where his artistry and the mainstream might meet, as the singer Beth Gibbons and a young boy appear in slow motion on a city street, moving as if they were underwater.

As in all the best films here, his videos become more resonant over time, the images just as catchy as — sometimes catchier than — the sounds behind them.