Mark Romanek

If I were an up-and-coming music video director, Romanek's videos would serve as my model. The work is handsome and meticulously rendered, and even when the director tries to transcend his own style–for example, his homage to crime photographer Weegee in the Keith Richards “Wicked Lies” video–everything feels set in place. The power of Romanek's videos is opaque, especially because his personal voice seems nearly invisible under an iron-clad technique. Details revealed on the DVD's documentary suggest that sheer labor contributes to the realization of his style. A glimpse into the background of spaces reveals elaborate preparatory sketches and models. His shoots as well as his pre- and post-production processes are also more exhaustive than standard industry practice. The shoot for Jay-Z's “99 Problems” consumed twelve days, produced twelve hours of footage, required four editors, and drew on the industry's best. Romanek pushes hard for what he wants, as do his clients; Jay-Z muses about hoofing it for what felt like hundreds of miles. For the video “Hellagood,” Gwen Stefani describes catching a camera midair on its downward plunge into the ocean. Although Romanek's performers recall the wearying intensity of the shoots, they seem exceptionally grateful once their work appears on the screen.

Romanek's training is first-rate. He attended Chicago's New Trier High School, one of the best public schools in the country, and then went on to Ithaca Film School, gaining exposure to directors such as Brakhage, Warhol, and Kubrick. Like most music video directors, he is steeped in visual references, and his conversation is littered with references to high art and popular culture, from Tati, Godard, Warhol, and Wurm to Mary Poppins. I've heard other music video directors grouse that Romanek simply creates collages from tear sheets (images pulled from photo books and magazines), but these comments may reveal insider policing and peer competitiveness. Some viewers may be put off by Romanek's agonistic relationship to famous painters, sculptors, and photographers. Others may feel his level of control is antithetical to pop music. But this is small stuff, for the work is magical. I believe it succeeds because Romanek treats each visual and musical parameter individually and analytically to meld them into a whole.

At first glance, Romanek's tactics fit standard practices. The visuals carry a semiotic wallop built to match the song's intensity. We see titillating imagery of phallic power: Linkin Park sprays water at the crowd as if it were ejaculate, Jay-Z's jacket trim resembles male briefs (to trigger anxiety about African American male sexuality?), and Fiona Apple's “Criminal” carries more than a whiff of kiddie porn. Other arresting images–Lenny Kravitz as Christ, Mick Jagger as the devil–also capture our attention. Perhaps to elicit a kinesthetic response in the viewer's body, the characters perch precariously, leap from great heights, float, or fly. One trademark of Romanek's style involves holding figures in tableaux before they suddenly move to the music in a showy, beautifully shaped gesture: the businessmen rising and falling from a seated position into a body wave in David Bowie's “Jump They Say;” slow-motion whirling dervishes in Madonna's “Bedtime Stories”; and Trent Reznor twirling in midair as if he were shawarma on a spit in “Closer.” But what distinguishes Romanek's work is that these effects are so well integrated into the texture that they do not separate out as discrete elements.

Romanek's environments are also consistently interesting, somehow suggestive of both the miniature and the enormous. The texture, shape, and volume of these places and their objects suggest sonic features. Imagery eliciting aural associations include resonators, such as an imposing obelisk or a microphone shaped like a breast; reflective surfaces, including curved wooden walls or spongy, protruding materials; visual movement evoking the processual nature of sound, whether banks of lights or rushing water. In Romanek's work, every moment is photographic; every instant arrests us. Some videos hold together through a single conceit: in “Closer” a hand-cranked Bolex produces jittery, damaged footage using a restrained palette of dun browns and dabs of blood reds. A bodycam strapped to the performers' bodies and luridly colored five-and-dime materials produce wildly different effects in Mick Jagger's “God Gave Me Everything.” Some video directors burrow their way through songs, responding moment by moment, while others, like Romanek, adopt a bird's-eye view, as if they had constructed scaffolding on which to hang the song. Romanek's techniques–finding relations between lyrics and image, tuning the color scheme, using evocative gestures, spaces, and props–all work in concert to illuminate the song's formal features. This makes his videos particularly effective in the classroom. His work demonstrates the ways that music video's musicality differs from that of genres like Hollywood narrative film, commercials, or the American musical.

Michel Gondry

Of all the Palm directors, Michel Gondry is the wunderkind with the largest cultural cachet. Directing Hollywood films confers greater status than making music videos, and Gondry's Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, and The Science of Sleep possess the widest reach and most coveted audiences. Gondry's films and music videos shimmer between conflicting impulses. On the one hand, Gondry's work is the antithesis of Romanek's. It comes out of an exceedingly personal iconography, often linked to childhood or dreams, and constructed from the handmade: Gondry relies on materials like cardboard cutouts, Lego blocks, television noise, puppets, dolls, tinfoil, and so on. On the other hand, he possesses a mathematical mind, and integrates visual canons, palindromes, and complex graphic schema. With his background in experimental film and animation, Gondry prizes hands-on control. He also adapts mickey mouse techniques to produce interesting effects like interweaving multiple strands of imagery, or subtly offsetting one or more of these lines to create a contrapuntal effect. If Romanek's aesthetic is Mozartian, Gondry's would be Baroque. As Gondry says on the DVD, “I saw Romanek's work and decided I had to go in a completely different direction.”

Gondry aims to create a sense of enchantment. Since the edges of the art brut materials are meant to show, the viewer often experiences a rugged ride before suddenly things fall into place and a moment provokes a powerful emotional response. In the Foo Fighters “Everlong,” hoodlums inexplicably chase singer Dave Grohl and his girlfriend (played by a fellow male band member in drag) out of a twenty-something apartment party into a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario. “Everlong” presents powerful moments of audiovisual connection, such as a guitar riff accompanied by gnashing of teeth, hands swelling to baseball-bat size, legs morphing into blobs, Grohl pushing a room-size phone receiver, and band members emerging from their hooligan costumes. This can suggest that viewers are caught in some sort of dream work. Sometimes, as in Massive Attack's “Protection,” Gondry's iconography becomes inscrutable. Here, we peer through cubbyholed apartment windows à la Hitchcock's Rear Window and see characters floating among 1950s and 1960s bric-a-brac while they play cards, throw balls, and so on. It feels like watching an obtuse art video on a tiny screen at MoMA.

The most beautifully packaged in the Palm set, Gondry's DVD contains punch-through menus that look like pots of paint or colored pencils in a tray. On one menu Gondry plays a drum set and children's heads wedged inside the toms pop up and squeak: pressing a button brings up another menu and stops the abuse. This show reel becomes a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, and perhaps back, as family members become momentary focal points, including Gondry's mother (who suffers from senility); Gondry's father (chronicled as a young musician in Super 8 footage); Gondry's nine-year-old son, whose script is included; Gondry's girlfriend, who streaks in front of the camera while Gondry sits on the couch; and even Gondry's grandfather (through his landscape painting in the style of Cezanne). Seemingly every animation Gondry has made since age six has been included. Unlike Romanek's work, which makes one want to throw in the towel, Gondry's work may encourage projects of self-discovery and autobiography.

Hype Williams

Hype Williams is one of the most prolific music video directors, releasing 189 videos to date. Industry insiders confide that at certain high points in his career–such as when he held four of the top ten videos–Williams would demand 15 percent rather than the industry standard 10 percent off the top of the video's total budget. Considering he lacks the art school training of his colleagues–his inspirations come from everyday materials like Eddie Murphy's Coming to America and Brian DePalma's Scarface–and did not grow up with a privileged background, such self-promotion can be seen as charming. Nor was his entrance to the industry a bed of roses: Williams painted graffiti for a TLC video, but the first show reel so upset the producer that the videos were trashed and Williams got cursed out. Still, if Palm is footing the bill for these DVDs, it is troubling that Williams did not receive the kind of red-carpet treatment bestowed on Romanek and Gondry, since the ten music videos on the Williams DVD in no way reflect the range and power of his enormous output.

Williams, who sometimes goes simply by “Hype,” was one of the first to secure sizable budgets for hip-hop videos and became one of the first renowned African American directors. Williams's most striking work tends to be for women artists, although it remains unclear from the DVD commentary whether Williams establishes better rapport with women or whether hip-hop provides greater latitude for depictions of female performers. Many landmark videos featuring female artists have been left out of the collection. Missy Elliott's “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” has received the greatest critical acclaim, but it's not packaged here. Likewise, I love his stripped-down video for Taral Hicks's cover of Deniece Williams's “Silly.” It contains his typically strong cameos–the singer in the foreground against a white cyclorama–yet what draws me in are shirtless men in the back. Neither does this DVD include Aaliyah's “Rock the Boat,” which may not be novel but is one of the most sensual, free-flowing, Busby Berkeleyesque videos ever made. Instead, we have Hype's other legacy, T&A, which shows women's breasts and buttocks swelling up as enormous obstacles slightly above eye level. (One might acknowledge, though, that he has also done what could be considered progressive work with faces.) As part of his DVD commentary, which is often terse and enigmatic, Williams calls the T&A videos fun. Even with these drawbacks and omissions, the Williams DVD contains many strong pieces. The Wu-Tang Clan's “Can It Be All So Simple” reflects a very different image of black urban life from that of Romanek's “99 Problems” or Spike Jonze's video for The Notorious B.I.G.'s “Sky's the Limit.” Similarly, his voiceover suggests that he aims to create a different sort of working relationship with actors from that of the other Palm directors, one that emphasizes a sense of family and community (although he can start to sound like the Godfather).

Spike Jonze

Before directing music videos, Spike Jonze was a skateboarder and surfer who made sports documentaries. His work continues to focus on physicality and social roles. Jonze's videos incorporate gymnastics and dance competitions, as well as other demonstrations of physical prowess: performers on fire, running down streets, or delivering lyrics in reverse as they hop backwards through city streets. Yet it's the opposite of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia: here beauty is to be found in the body's awkwardness. Athleticism so permeates Jonze's ways of experiencing music that it becomes a part of the camera's teleology: the camera hugs the sidewalk like a skateboarder, or rushes forward and does a 360 as if riding a wave. The director's playful sense of life may stem from his wealthy background. Growing up as the son of a Spiegel catalog mogul, Jonze may have found traditional social roles a little strange. From his video for Fatboy Slim's “Praise You,” featuring the Torrance Community Dance Troupe, to his remake of Happy Days for Weezer, Jonze acts like an anthropologist looking in on the natives. In a sense his development might seem arrested, like Gondry's. Jonze likes working-class uniforms as well as funny-looking trucks.

As it does with the other featured directors, the Palm collection reveals Jonze's particular relation to music. His videos often begin with a simple conceit: it might be a television sitcom trailer, or someone dressed up in a giant dog suit with a broken leg and a boombox walking around LA. These witty one-offs are charming. The mechanism is set to go, and then two-thirds into the piece there's an interesting turn. Since pop songs tend to possess a lyric rather than teleological structure (choruses, verses, and bridges), we wonder if Jonze picks up an underlying narrative curve already present in the music, or if we have the tendency to tie narrative patterns of conflict and resolution to everything we watch. One of his best videos, the Beastie Boys' “Sabotage,” pays homage to the title sequence of Kojak as a game in role-playing and dress-up, as the band members excitedly jump across buildings and kick down doors. Another memorable effort, Fatboy Slim's “Weapon of Choice,” features Christopher Walken in an empty corporate hotel as an aging Fred Astaire dancing to the music while lip-synching to P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins's vocoder-processed voice. As in many music videos, there's a suggestion that the performer has been overcome by outside forces–film, in the act of viewing? music, in the act of listening?–and that his status has become uncertain. Is Walken a weapon of choice? What powers does he have? These aporias often help to create music video's allure.

Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham's videos work by encouraging us to inhabit on-screen bodies who possess something strange. As viewers we may bind to the musculature or mechanical structure of the figure and feel different. In “Frozen,” Madonna appears in a black satin Kabuki/Victorian dress and hovers in a dark sky over desert flats. Portishead's “Only You” possesses characters who float in a kind of ether between ominous, run-down buildings. Björk's “All Is Full of Love” shows two cyborgs making out. In Aphex Twin's “Windowlicker,” nubile, mostly African American bikinied female bodies carry prosthetic heads or the head of the lead singer, who is not what they are: with his fatuous grin, he resembles a somewhat maniacal, slovenly European American male. Bernard Herrmann discovered that film music seeks out projected forms and animates them. Cunningham's work gives us an opportunity to reorient our bodies kinesthetically: testing a different tautness, a different throw. But it is the microrhythms, as Michel Chion called them, local changes in light, water, and wind as they respond to musical changes, that define Cunningham's glory.⁰⁰³

There is something disquieting about Cunningham's work–pretty, but it leaves an aftertaste. Is it that he works with taboo subject positions, or does he possess a subtle mean streak? “Windowlicker” may encourage the viewer to wonder whether music videos run mainly on images of pleasure, most readily achieved through bounteous flesh. But when pleasure is disrupted, how do we respond? The image is carefully titrated to elicit a balanced proportion between engagement and repulsion: the youthful bodies pull us in, and the grotesqueries keep us at bay. Nicholas Cook points out that music-image relations are volatile; when music and image are put together, a new, unpredictable product emerges.⁰⁰⁴

In some moods we may feel that music videos are not art, but commercials, or that they damage the listener's ability, through personal imagery, to forge a relationship to a song. The supplementary materials included with the Palm DVDs reveal that the directors themselves think of and experience the genre as an art. Even if music videos disrupt some sort of private listening experience, they also give us something: music videos are a way to teach us about a song. As an encapsulation of music video, Palm's contribution is only a first step. But it does provide us with a larger body of work to share and talk about.