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Michel Gondry 

(*1963) is a French film, commercial and music video director and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène.

Michel Gondry's career as a filmmaker began with creating music videos for the French rock band Oui Oui, in which he also served as a drummer. The style of his videos for Oui Oui caught the attention of music artist Björk, who asked him to direct the video for her song Human Behaviour. The collaboration proved long-lasting, with Gondry directing a total of seven music videos for Björk. Other artists who have collaborated with Gondry on more than one occasion include Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radiohead, and Beck. Gondry has also created numerous television commercials.

Gondry, along with directors Spike Jonze and David Fincher, is representative of the influx of music video directors into feature film. Gondry made his feature film debut in 2001 with Human Nature, garnering mixed reviews. His second film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (also his second collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman), was released in 2004 and received very favorable reviews, becoming one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. Eternal Sunshine utilizes many of the image manipulation techniques that Gondry had experimented with in his music videos. Gondry won an Academy Award alongside Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth for the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine. The style of Gondry's music videos often relies on videography and camera tricks which play with frames of reference.

 

Source: Wikipedia

 

 

Michel Gondry, *****, choreography

Reading

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

American Magus: Harry Smith (1996) demonstrates how differently Harry Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man. The films, paintings, and recordings of Harry Smith pay tribute to his genius. Filmmaking, painting, anthropology, musicology, and the occult - his knowledge of each was encyclopedic and firsthand. As might befit a man of such varied interests, his circles of friends were large and, for the most part, wholly independent. (Experimental Cinema)

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© Center for Visual Music

 

Composition in Blue (1935) - original title: Komposition in Blau. Surfaces dominate in the abstract animated film Composition in Blue by Oskar Fischinger. Colorful geometric figures are set in rhythmic motion. The music from Otto Nicolai's The Merry Women of Windsor is impressively visualized through a blending of form and color. (William Moritz: "Oskar Fischinger", in: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Optische Poesie. Oskar Fischinger Leben und Werk, Kinematograph Nr. 9, 1993, p. 42)

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)

Len Lye (2009) co-edited by the curator Tyler Cann and the writer, critic and poet Prof. Wystan Curnow is a tribute to one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed artists is the most comprehensive visual presentation of Len Lye’s art to date.

Over 1,000 new photographs were created and hundreds of them selected for this image-rich publication, presenting the full range of Len Lye’s work, from drawings and paintings right through to his photograms and kinetic experimentations. (Govett-Brewster)

Visual Kitchen explores the semantics of live AV performance and video art from a background of VJ’ing and music video production. As designers of moving images, VK adapts any kind of (non-)narrative structure into dazzling trips of visual flux, combining rigorously structured loops with soft- or hardware-generated chaos. The output is very diverse and versatile, from analogue photographic to digital minimalism, exploring the parameters of the canvas. (Visual Kitchen)

William Forsythe (*1949) is recognized as one of the world's foremost choreographers. His work is acknowledged for reorienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire to a dynamic 21st-century art form. William Forsythe's deep interest in the fundamental principles of organisation has led him to produce a wide range of projects including installations, films, and web-based knowledge creation. (The Forsythe Company)