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There was a time when MTV wasn’t such a joke. From its infancy through the mid-’90s, the music channel actually showed videos—miniature cinematic moments that burned into and then replayed themselves in your mind. Since then, the 18–24 Demographic Channel has devolved into a mix of poor reality programming, self-serving behind-the-scenes shorts, and the same mainstream pop and hiphop schlock stuck on repeat.
But the art of the music video has moved beyond its corporate sponsor. A recent article in the New York Times described the way the medium has shifted to the more democratic realm of the internet and to DVD sets for the true connoisseur. The Directors Label DVD series scored a hit with its debut last year, which drew fresh attention to the early work of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham. The second Directors Label series (Volumes 4-7) focuses on a new set of auteurs: Anton Corbijn, Jonathan Glazer, Stéphane Sednaoui, and Mark Romanek. As with the series’s debut, this set spans an eclectic spectrum of musical (underground, mainstream; rock, electronica, pop, hiphop) and visual aesthetics.
Of the group, Anton Corbijn seems particularly tied to a specific era of music-video programming. He’s behind the stunning visuals (frontman Dave Gahan scouring the countryside dressed as a king) for Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” and his videos are perfectly fashioned for that early 120 Minutes look. Corbijn steps inside the world of the moody brood, giving gothic pop, industrial, and post-punk a stylish noir gloss. His disc includes collaborations with Echo & the Bunnymen and Joy Division, plus the very memorable U2-in-drag video for “One” and Nirvana’s Technicolor creepfest “Heart-Shaped Box.”
My favorite directors here, though, are Jonathan Glazer and Stéphane Sednaoui. The best videos are more than promotional garnish for a musician; they’re short films in and of themselves. In videos for Richard Ashcroft (“A Song for the Lovers”) and Radiohead (“Street Spirit”), Glazer breaks the songs apart to allow the “plot” of the video to progress. Ashcroft takes a piss in a hotel bathroom while working out a song in his head; a transient stumbling through a busy freeway tunnel freezes time in the middle of an automobile accident. Glazer’s selections also showcase musicians whose work is on equal footing with the visuals. Blur, Massive Attack, UNKLE—these aren’t names that need tarting up with flashy, David LaChapelle extravagance (that’s what the Mark Romanek volume, the least interesting of the compilation, is for).
Similarly, Sednaoui is painting on a stunning musical canvas. Truly the standout among his peers, the French photographer/director works some amazing magic with thought-provoking artists like Mirwais, Björk, Tricky, and NTM—musicians have orgies with geishas, orchestrate mob dinners, and become golden gods in his expert hands. In the DVD extras, Sednaoui’s drowned-damsel short “Acqua Natasa” turns underwater distress into something as abstractly stunning as watching a giant jellyfish. And the minimal electronica accompanying the short isn’t half bad either.