Very simply: He's an artist that expresses himself mostly through moving image combining video and film with arts and crafts.
I am going to start with a quick overview of his life and work and then I want to focus on his movie making aspects, which, I think is where he puts a lot of himself, including his life experiences, emotions, way of seeing the world and most important, his way of creating narratives.
And making videos for his band was how Bjork got to know him, and this was the beginning of an amazing music-video's director career.
Born in Versailles, France, he was good at drawing from a very young age. His interest for animation also comes from this time. At the age of 12, he and his cousin built a prototype cartoon machine, something similar to a zoetrope. And they also made lots of flipbooks.
"When people know you can draw they ask you to draw different things (...). If you're good at drawing you have a social role, however young you are."
At the same age he was also interested in photography "I was hiding from reality, I took pictures of one girl over and over. I was not even dating her, although I wish I was. She ended up dating my older brother"
And later on this becomes the subject of his first short movie:
His grandfather was an inventor and created one of the first keyboards, called Clavioline. His father owned a musical instruments shop and his mother was a pianist. His father gave him a drum kit and to his brother a guitar. They formed a couple of bands that used to play Punk Rock and when Michel Gondry left Versailles to go to an Art School in Paris, he formed the band Oui Oui with friends from the college. This is how he got into music, but also how he got into video.
He had experienced playing with his father's Super 8 camera and had made some animations with his flipbooks, but it was during college when sharing an apartment with a guy who owned a 16mm camera that he started making some animations for his band's music videos.
This is his very first music video
and another lovely piece of stop-motion animation, also for Oui Oui
And making videos for his band was how Bjork got to know him, and this was the beginning of an amazing music-video's director career.
Michel Gondry has a repertory of work that goes from drawings to comercial videos, from music videos to featured movies and short films. He is known to have a child- like creativity and out-of-control imagination and considered by many as a genius.
On this Chemical Brother's one, the way he translates the music into images is, for me, genial!
Dreaminess, surrealism, humor are achieved by the use of low-tech or non-digital means like stop-motion animation, camera movements and editing tricks.
Gondry plays very well with the notion of time and space and with quotidian facts which brings the characters on his videos and specially on his movies to a very friendly level, putting them very close to the spectator.
CGI are often not obviously noticeable and when used it's mixed with real images. And it's clear that even though his work is visually very rich it will never weight more than the narrative or the content of his work.
He was the first one to use the 'bullet time' effect on this video for Bjork in 1995:
And was after shooting another video for Bjork that Gondry felt he wanted to move on to work with film and the big screen.
His movies are still marked with most of the characteristics of his videos. But working with movies he can explore the characters deeply, bringing the spectator into their minds, their dreams... he tells real stories, very often linked to his own experiences, but always questioning what's real what's fantasy.
Since then he directed 4 featured movies
and 1 documentary
source
+ hours and hours of fun on youtube
No comments:
Post a Comment