Aphex Twin: Rubber Johnny 

(2005) 

is a six-minute experimental short film and music video directed by Chris Cunningham, using music composed by Aphex Twin.

The name Rubber Johnny is drawn from a British slang for "condom" as well as a description of the main character, which explains the title sequence. The DVD comes with an art book, containing stills from the film, as well as conceptual drawings, photographs and more.

 

The concept for Rubber Johnny came from Chris Cunningham's imagining a raver morphing as he danced. The idea evolved to the present film, in which Johnny (played by Cunningham) is an isolated deformed (possibly hydrocephalus) teenager kept on a wheelchair and locked in a dark basement with his chihuahua. The film was originally intended to be a 30 second TV commercial for the Aphex Twin album drukqs, using the track afx237 v7. However, Cunningham grew to like the concept more and more and decided to expand the concept into a longer length (the original commercial remains in the film in an altered form.) The film was shot partially in infrared night vision on digital video. The film's music is afx237 v7 (w19rhbasement remix), a remix made by Chris Cunningham; the credits music is gwarek2, also from drukqs.

 

The original 3 minute 50 second version starts out with a blinking fluorescent light, then to a mouse crawling over a press-sticker credit, followed by the title, Rubber Johnny which is seen on a backwards-playing scene of a condom being pulled off a penis.

 

Johnny is first seen leaning backward in his wheelchair with his oversized head hanging over the back of it. Johnny mutters a distorted "Aphex." This begins the Aphex Twin track, and Johnny begins to rhythmically follow it, while his dog watches. His dancing involves him performing balancing tricks with his wheelchair, and deflecting light beams with his hands as he dances.

 

After a minute or so, a door opens and he is interrupted by someone who appears to be his father. During this, Johnny is out of his delusion and is shown sitting upright in the wheelchair, turning to look. His father opens the room's door, yells at him unintelligibly, and slams the door.

 

After he leaves, Johnny is seen inhaling a large line of white powder. The video then becomes even more erratic and delusional, as if the effect of the powder has not only affected Johnny, but the video's world itself. The music becomes more spasmodic remix of the previous tune, and Johnny now hides behind a door, avoiding the white light beams. Later, he gets his face smashed at high speed into a piece of glass, with the camera watching from the other side so that the elastic-like skin and even some innards can be seen flattening out onto the glass every time. This was done using prosthetic-based special effects rather than digital morphing.

 

After a while of this, he is interrupted a second time by his yelling father, after which the video ends with Johnny, once again, reclining back in his wheelchair and babbling at his chihuahua.

 

Source: Wikipedia

 

 

"It started out as a 30 second TV commercial for Druqks. I listened to the track a lot and got carried away. I suggested to Steve Beckett that I should expand it into a full video and that I could knock it out in a few weeks, as it was just shot on a DV camera and it featured me and not much else.

I ended up getting heavily into animation experimentation and started to learn After Effects and other bits of software and before I knew it a year had passed and it seemed less and less relevant as a music video. Then I went off for a year to develop a feature project and worked on this whenever I had free time, like a weekend hobby. I would get my friends to help me shoot a shot here and there, whenever they were up for it. The first day of shooting was actually September 11 2001. I remember being strapped into that fucking wheelchair when I heard about the World Trade Centre."

 

Source: pixelsurgeon

 

 

Aphex Twin: Rubber Johnny, *****, animals, editing, body, Video Clip

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)

 

SEE ALSO

Sitting Room (2008) is 45-minute performance for one performer, two loudspeakers, two microphones, on-body-projection and delicate sound balancing by Depart and Richard Eigner. Richard Eigner and Gregor Ladenhauf were responsible for the acoustic implementation of this concept that was first realised in 1969 by American composer Alvin Lucier. Together with Leonhard Lass, who is responsible for the visual translation of the piece, performer Gregor Ladenhauf adds to the piece as voice and screen at the same time. A speaker transforming into a projection screen of his own voice, gradually disappearing like this voice during the course of the composition. (Depart)

Arthur Lipsett (1936-1986) was a Canadian avant-garde director of short collage films. Arthur Lipsett's meticulous editing and combination of audio and visual montage was both groundbreaking and influential. (Wikipedia)

Scott Pagano creates moving image content utilizing shards of architecture, disfunction, and futurism. With influences ranging from minimal painting to cinema, his work offers a re-envisioned perspective on the graphic stratas that saturate our visual perception. His meticulously constructed abstract artworks push the boundaries of audio-visual composition and process using a dynamic mix of cinematographic and synthetic imagery. (Scott Pagano)

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)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)