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All this video can do is bring up mixed emotions. Back in 1995, Chris was heading the FX workshop for Stanley Kubrick's A.I. (before Kubrick died and it got sent to Steven Spielberg). According to the Directors Label book, Chris was really getting into film, and Second Bad Vilbel was to be his first attempt at putting his ideas into motion. But his inexperience in directing and editing lead to a messy shoot and disappointment at the loss of such potential: this was a classic track and it deserved a classic video!On the other side of the television, I recall seeing this video on MTV's electronic music video show AMP that year, and really liking it. Its visuals - a faceless alien in some underground tunnel, dark fluorescent lights, and surveillance footage of a robot/machine transforming - were sinister and technologically paranoid. It wasn't an amazing video, but most of the other videos on AMP felt similarly low-budget. The fact that such music and videos were actually on national television provided some vindication and assurance that things were okay in the world. Sure, the first minute of the video could easily be replaced without harm, but that hardly mattered because the song was so good.Now that Chris Cunningham is who he is, it's hard not to feel disappointed with both the original version of the video and Chris' re-edit, released in 2002. Chris says in the Directors Label book that he was "trying to build this chunk of non-specific industrial machinery that would come apart in time to the music. So I built this model in my back garden and got all these pieces of machinery and stuff and ended up filming them." Given Chris' current body of work, and comparing Alex Rutterford's Gantz Graf video for Autechre, one can easily imagine how this would look.Turning back to the first version, you can tell. The editing is sometimes incoherent, and the visuals don't impact you like Chris' later work. The second version is tight and mechanical, but you can sense that there's not enough footage to work with.But hell, the first version of this site always gave me a hint of disappointment.Chris Cunningham's first Auteurs video is an eerie little clip. Dressed in darkness, the video features a humanoid creature (body similar to the thing in Come To Daddy) that is being held by two large men. First the being is retained in a glass chamber. While inside the tube, the creepy, eyeless thing lip syncs Luke Haines' vocals.Next, the organism is sequestered in a small, dark room. It flails its arms and body about the room, acting more like an animal than a human. Like the robot in Second Bad Vilbel, the thing is watched ..d circuit television. Then it is inspected by the two men, and then sat down in an electric chair.We ultimately don't know what happens to it because we've only seen the first half of the clip. It would seem the men wish to experiment with or electrocute the creature. Whether the thing fights back is another question. Creepy nonetheless.A girl sits in a cinema seat watching a film. Luke Haines, the Auteurs' lead singer, stares at her from the screen. The band plays on screen, set in a snow covered baroque garden. The girl is handed a wand. As she takes hold, she appears now on the other side, in colour. Dressed in a tutu she dances around.As the band continues to play, her dance casts a spell. The features of Luke become distored by a lens, while the rest of the band's heads metamorphosise under the spell: the bass player into a cat, the lead guitarist into a bull terrier and the drummer into a pig. The transformation only lasts a short while, though.The girl snatches Luke's mic stand and begins to smash up their instruments. After trashing the drums she strikes the guitar against the floor. The video then cuts back to the opening sequence, now on the other side of the screen.
Watching Chris' early videos is a bit difficult. It's hard to mesh the quality of his later brilliance with the middling stew of visuals he created before Come to Daddy. Chris doesn't like his early work either, and would rather you not see it.For 36 Degrees, Chris sent Placebo into a bog. Singer Brian Molko flips between keeping his chin above the water line, and descending to the bottom, where the band can rock out awkwardly.Given Chris' work, one gets the feeling the parts he enjoys most here are those that don't involve performance footage. The stills in his Directors Label book are mostly of the scene intercut through the video of a man crawling through the mud. While the underwater scenes have some footage of lights coming from above, lightly evoking flex, this scene with the man is a bit of a sculptural examination of the human form, especially as it relates to the rushing water.You can see the video here at iFilm, here at the Raft, or be nice and buy it on the Placebo DVD 'Once More With Feeling - Singles 1996 to 2004.'In the DVD's commentary, Brian Molko relates some of the circumstances of the shoot:
"It was done in two days. One of the days entailed us spending about ten hours underwater in this scuba pool. It's a man-made ... lake/pond sort of thing, which they had to do bacterial tests on on the day to make sure that we weren't going to catch any weird diseases.""They'd feed us air in between takes. It was very hard to communicate with Chris.""It wasn't 36 degrees that day, it was completely freezing. After this video we swore that we would never make another video underwater. We actually did a couple years later."
Filmed in London in April 1997, The Next Big Thing is one of Cunningham's early throwaway pop videos. The video shows the band playing inside a circular, space station-type hallway. Taking advantage of the anti-gravity, the members play on different sides of the hallway. The video is reminiscent of similar shots in Michel Gondry's video for Inspiral Carpets' Two Worlds Collide and Mark Romanek's for Michael and Janet Jackson's Scream.Watch a good copy of it here at launch.com, or download a copy of it here. Or purchase it; it's on the DVD 'Never Enough - The Best of Jesus Jones.'Mike Edwards, the lead singer of Jesus Jones, wrote a book in 1998 about his music experiences of 1997: "Death Threats from an 8 year old in the Seychelles." That happens to be the year when Chris directed The Next Big Thing, so naturally Chris and the video are also mentioned in the book, which is available for downloading in pdf format.In 1997, the world was a remarkably different place. Back then the Internet, which we dialed into, had arrived but had not yet taken hold. Computers were everywhere but the future, and whatever glories it held, was still something in the distance.Television was, and still is, the most prominent technological force in our houses. From it comes most of our culture, easily packaged, and delivered with a flickering intensity. Television keeps our mornings and evenings set in a near-robotic routine.But while the television is a good clock, in 2007 it struggles to set the time. The ever-expanding Internet and its World Wide Web is now the more active source of our culture. We interact through these "tubes" and cables in ways that are both electric and vital. We are the ghosts in our machines, sending e-mails to each other and chatting online.Its nature as a Richard D. James piss-take aside, Chris Cunningham's "Come to Daddy" is, as it was ten years ago, the story of technology and how we are becoming it. In the video, the faces of Aphex Twin chuckle at us with the same soullessness that occupies the man in the television. When he is borne of that television, we discover him to be a product of his environment: a vaporless void, a mere reflection. He has no soul, and he wants ours. And he is asking us to gather 'round and worship him.And to that end we have little choice. We are already worshipping him, the void of technology. We are writing to each other and having sex with each other. We are uploading our past while chronicling our present. We are buying gadgets which are both growing in capacity and shrinking in size. How we connect, and who we connect with is, more and more, determined by which gadget or website we use.Given all of this media, is it difficult to imagine a future where our souls and our technology will not be collectively hard-wired? As the technology spreads to cover every aspect of our lives like an omniscient, if not omnipresent grey goo, what are our alternatives but to bow down and come to daddy?
Portishead's music has always had a darknening menace, a kind of jazzy noir that recalls the days of Prohibition, and its Hollywood reflection of gangsters, mob men, and lurid romanticism. The timbre of Beth Gibbons' voice hangs in some silky darkness that floats above some on-screen nightclub. It's a voice made for the screen, and Only You provides it its best treatment.Set in a midnight brick alleyway, Chris combines the darkening dread of gangster films with the equally haunting fear of drowning, a fear Chris later explored in greater detail for flex.In his Directors Label book, he remarks, "When I was a kid I used to have this recurring dream of walking down the high street of the village I grew up in and not being able to catch my breath. It was like standing on the sea-bed with lead boots on and looking up and seeing the surface of the water forty feet away and feeling really panicked and wanting to get to the top."This dread he transfers brilliantly onto the man peering out of the old city window four stories up. Skin ghostly white, Beth Gibbons stands in the shadows while a young boy swims eerily above the alleyway, motions guided by the hand of the music. Their relationship is ambiguous, but the feelings of loss generated by the video are certainly real.The video was filmed underwater, which, like Chris' video for Placebo, made the shoot a bit complicated. "We couldn't communicate through the water, there [were] divers splashing around, Beth had snot bubbles coming out of her nose, I was sitting there thinking - what the fuck am I going to do with this, it's a disaster." (Sleaze Nation)Regardless of the complications, the finished video wound up one of Chris' favorites.Just like Second Bad Vilbel, Chris' Madonna video is a mixed affair, but on a much larger scale; hence Chris has decided not to work with big artists again. This one was bogged down at the start, from Chris' point of view.Madonna, on the other hand, took a rather large leap of faith in choosing Chris Cunningham to direct the first single from her new album, Ray of Light. At the time she had only seen Come to Daddy. That would seem to be evidence enough of a director's talent, but this was Chris' first experience with a big name, a big budget, and the negotiations they invoke.The shoot itself was doomed, as they were shooting motion control footage in the Mojave desert, and it rained for the first two days, so many of Chris' ideas were not executable. Chris explains in his Directors Label book, "The original treatment was, like, massive piles of bodies in the desert. All these figurative sculptures made up of bodies that were all multiple Madonnas. They were all going to split and break up and change into ravens and then change into dogs. Just a performance video, but a really elaborate one using her, her clothes, and any shapes that would come out of her clothes. It was 'some visuals' in search of an 'idea.'"But this was a Madonna video! Madonna can carry "some visuals" and hit them out the ballpark.Frozen is definitely not her worst video. Quite the opposite, as is the case with Madonna's best videos, it transformed her public image. After the modern pop of Bedtime Stories, and the lets-go-clubbing sexuality of Erotica, Frozen ushered in a new era of the spiritual Madonna--not to mention the henna craze it jump-started.As accomplished as Frozen is, though, Chris points out that the effects shots are shoddy. He would rather the resulting footage focus on Madonna's mystical, moody performance.How, then, the awards? Perhaps overindulgence. Getting Chris and Madonna together at the time was a brilliant idea. And while some of the effects themselves are excellent, they lack composition. Instead of three Madonnas looking Hydra-like, it looks merely as if their hems are sewn together.Let's get something out of the way. Afrika Shox was shot around the Financial District of Manhattan. Did you see that opening shot? That's the Brooks Brothers Building, black and ominous. Behind it, immersed in fog, is one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Because of September 11, 2001, it is impossible for this writer to fully separate his feelings about this video from the casualties of that day, and the ongoing war that resulted.Both the song and video feel horribly bent with this pre-millennium tension, echoing off the city buildings. I know it's already supposed to be there, but it feels much more immediate, like you're watching the day before the planes are coming, and you know they're coming. This coming from a person who only saw the buildlings collapse on television, and, while I've been to New York City, I never saw the towers up close.It's hard not to sympathize with the accursed man stumbling through the streets, as if he's bearing some unnameable burden on behalf of the rest of humanity, the song's urgency pulsing through his veins. Afrika Bambaataa chanting "The world is on fire / It'll take you higher." It's hard not to create an allegory out of the entire thing. Were we right in fearing the turn of the millenium?It seems almost offensive now that in 1999 the Independent Television Commission (now part of Ofcom, the FCC of the UK) sequestered Afrika Shox to late night viewing. (They cited it in four of their categories: Fear, Car Crash, Death, and Disturbing Images.) On the other hand, such actions can easily fit in today's oversensitive political climate.Regardless, in February 1998 Chris was merely excited to bring to the screen the long-held image in his head of New York at dusk and a man with a voodoo curse staggering down the streets. And it's an entirely compelling, dramatic image to watch. His limbs shatter with such ease! New York City is so hard and careless! Afrika Bambaataa is so goddamn cool!Apparently it was Chris' favorite music video shoot "because it was just running around the streets of New York." Afterwards though it was a different story, as Sony Music delayed the video's release for a year and a half. And before that happened, its idea got eclipsed by Jonathan Glazer, who smashed cars into a desperate, muscular man stumbling through a tunnel in UNKLE's Rabbit in Your Headlights.Man, after this one came out, there was just no stopping Chris Cunningham. Up to now we had seen Come to Daddy, Only You, and Frozen. After this one aired, though, you could tell Chris was really going to take over here.Allow me to slather a bit: Come on My Selector is brilliant in so many ways. I know it gets old hearing that line in all of the write-ups on this site, but it's for these very reasons this site was created. But we're not alone in our feelings. This video won many big-time industry awards.What makes it brilliant, even years later, is that it's so incredibly tight. It's Chris' first time as an editor, and his work is lazer-sharp. It's so tightly wrapped that you have to wonder which came first, the video or the song? Well, the song, stupid. Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson's Big Loada EP is filled with this futuristic drill-n-bass madness. After production wrapped, Chris had all of the edits in his head, so he had to take over editing.What's surprising is that the video's story wasn't set until three days before production. It was going to be a cartoony cat-and-dog chase around the house, but that was apparently so ambitious (I'm reading out of his Directors Label book here) that he couldn't take the risk. "I remember thinking fuck, I haven't got enough time to think this video through now, so if I set it in a mental hospital I can just do anything because they're all eightball!"So it wound up being a story of a Japanese girl's midnight-escape from some mental hospital, brain swap and doggie drool. It does feel a bit like a comic strip, a bit like manga, and a bit like old Tex Avery cartoons (hey, Chris really nailed it in his Directors Label book).If anything, what you can say about Chris Cunningham is that each project he does (since Come to Daddy at least) is its own beast, with its own world and perverse logic. Windowlicker, speaking of perversion, is yet another brick in Chris' ever-engrossing ouevre.Coming off of his chilling first Aphex Twin video, Chris uses masks to completely different effect here in his second work for Richard D. James. Instead of the horror (and, well, comedy) of mutant kids running around smashing each other, we have voluptuous hoochies beckoning us and disturbing us deeply. It's hard to decide which video's more disturbing.Windowlicker is such a kick because it closely parodies the sexism inherent in most rap videos. From the lamest rap video (oh, and there are a lot of those) to Jay-Z's Big Pimpin', bling is so prevalent, and many rappers boast cash money and bitches so earnestly, that Chris Rock should have enough material all the way to the nursing home, and beyond.Windowlicker's intro is hilarious. "You make a nigger wanta fuck, girl." Check the bleeped version - did this actually air? Vincent Patterson's tawdry dance sequence? That slow-motion, raunchy jiggle-fest at the end, where the hoochies are showered in the Aphex Twin's personal vintage? Nah, in America MTV wouldn't air it, so Warp Records wound up releasing it on VHS. While I don't have the numbers, I've read that it sold quite well.And it was made to sell. Chris and company were making a conscious decision to make the most commercially accessible video possible, despite (or maybe because of) its disturbing imagery. Richard D. James is a brilliant marketer that way. The video is filled with his custom-made logos: his face, for one, and that identifiable (but undescribable) circular graphic, both of which he's used heavily throughout his entire career. Subversion is one of his trademarks as well: you know that weird high-pitched noise at the end of the video? If you plug that through a spectrograph, you'll see an image of a spiral. And on the single's second track, you'll find an x-ray image of Richard's face.Windowlicker was released on VHS, an enhanced CD, and Chris' Directors Label DVD. The video also came with a wealth of promotional material, including a calendar, poster, and photos for the New Musical Express, all of which we cover in our folio. And no, the Gold Aphex Pendant we had at the top of the previous page covering Windowlicker was not real. That image was created by Matt Fretwell, who designed all of the promo titles on the previous version of this site.As of 2003, the Warp releases of Come to Daddy and Windowlicker together sold 90,000 copies.
"Most video directors have one trick that they use all the time. Then there are people who build a whole world around them. Chris is like that. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg with Chris."All is Full of Love is an elegant, moving description of two Björk robots in love. As they are pieced and wired into existence, they sing to each other and fall in love. The video reaches its harmonious climax as the robots join in embrace while still being detailed by the industrial machines beside them. Each robot was designed by Cunningham, faces reminiscent of Björk's own delicate features."When I first heard the track I wrote down the words 'sexual,' 'milk,' 'white porcelain,' 'surgery.' [The video]'s a combination of several fetishes: industrial robotics, female anatomy, and flourescent light in that order." (Dazed and Confused)"I think I mentioned that I think it should be ... something that's white and frozen, and then it sort of melts, because of love, and making love."The robots were built by Paul Catling, who also sculpted the masks for Windowlicker, and mentored Cunningham about model-making. He sculpted the full-sized robots in clay in two hours."Every single shot in the video has about four layers. The first element is the shot of the set and the robot prop doing nothing, which we'd film for about 21 seconds. We'd then remove the prop Björk robot and put (the real) Björk in with her face painted white and wearing a blue suit. Using a mix of the (master shot and a live feed of Björk in frame) on the video monitor, we'd then try to match up as much as possible. It was a pretty crude and fairly terrifying method of shooting the video. For the Avid editing, I basically had a series of stills of a robot on a set and some crude shots of Björk wearing a blue suit with her face painted white. There was a definite feeling of insecurity all the way until the first couple of shots were finished in post, when I could finally tell whether it was working or not." (American Cinematographer)"[Then] I started ... having ideas for ways of making the video better... So we were kind of improvising stuff in post. Up until that point I had absolutely no faith whatsoever in computer graphics, and now I'm more of a convert, really.""I guess when you come across someone as special as Chris ... you just go humble. And you kind of realize that your role is more to make sure that there is a connection between the tune and the video. And then you set up a space, or like a place where he can work with no interference. And that sort of ... ends up being your role."Chris Cunningham's first promo in 7 years is Sheena is a Parasite for The Horrors, a band that Chris picked off MySpace. The 1.5-minute clip, narrated by lead singer Faris Badwan, stars Samantha Morton as the song's manic, transmogrifying subject, a punked-up Carrie who whips around like a banshee and spews her intestines at you. Sharply edited and shot on a low budget, the video burns on the bass' running pulse, and provides more fleshy fodder for Cunningham fans. The video's producer was Jim Wilson; it was posted at Golden Square.The video was released on a DVD single on 7 August 2006 via The Horrors' homebase, Loog Records. It was included on their following single, actually, for Death at the Chapel, in a limited edition of 1500 copies.
