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The Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar 

(2002) 

directed by Michel Gondry, features what looks like a continuous shot filmed from the window of a speeding train passing through towns and countryside

Star Guitar is the second single from The Chemical Brothers 2002 album Come with Us. The song reached number eight in the UK Singles Chart. Star Guitar is approximately 126 beats per minute and in the key of F major.

The song contains a four measure-long acoustic guitar sample from the David Bowie song, Starman, hence the name, Star Guitar. This sample is repeated throughout the majority of the track, with various musical elements playing off of it as a main theme.

 

The music video, directed by Michel Gondry, features what looks like a continuous shot filmed from the window of a speeding train passing through towns and countryside; however, the buildings and objects passing by appear exactly in time with the various beats and musical elements of the track. The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France; the train ride between Nîmes and Valence was shot ten different times during the day to get different light gradients. The Pont du Robinet as well as Pierrelatte's station can be seen. Gondry had experimented with a different version of the same effect in his video for Daft Punk's Around the World, where he had represented each element of the music with a dancer.

Gondry actually plotted out the synchronization of the song on graph paper before creating the video, eventually modelling the scenery with oranges, forks, tapes, books, glasses and tennis shoes.

 

Source: Wikipedia

 

 

The Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar, *****, trains, 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)

Notation. Calculation and Form in the Arts (2008) is a comprehensive catalogue (in German) edited by Dieter Appelt, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Peter Weibel which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin and the ZKM | Karlsruhe. (ZKM)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

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)

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)

Ohi Ho Bang Bang (1988) - The music in this video was created from the sounds being played live during filming. The film actually shows what you hear. It is a collaboration between Holger Hiller, Akiko Hada and Karl Bonnie. (Holger Hiller)

David O'Reilly (*1985) is a young Irish animator working out of Berlin. 2009 he won the best short film Golden Bear in Berlin for Please Say Something, a melancholy modern day kitchen sink drama between a loving cat-type creature and an inattentive mouse. He also created the Youtube cult Octocat animations under the pseudonym Randy Peters, a nine year old kid. He also directed the lush animated video for U2 and their new single I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight and has made it into another beautiful small dramatic story. (State.ie)

Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939) - The four-minute, hand-painted Dufaycolor film with a colour accompaniment by Len Lye, matches visual motifs to musical instruments: diagonals introduce piano phrases, circles express drum beats, wavy horizontals represent guitars licks, vertical lines map base parts, etc. Primary red, blue and deep green colour fields are rendered frameless by upwardly cascading kite shapes, luminous tapered stripes, and batik-like patterns. (Senses of Cinema)