Music videos on DVD

DVD is a great medium: there's a virtually limitless list of films available, they look much better than they do on VHS, and you can do things like freeze-frame much more effectively. But until now, the market has been dominated by the major theatrical distributors. If you want to rent a movie which came out in theaters for a couple of weeks and then bombed, that's easy. Everything else, on the other hand, is almost impossible to find.

There are three types of DVD I've long wished to be able to find, with very little luck. The first is art films, ranging from short pieces by Bill Viola or Bruce Nauman to feature-length films by Andy Warhol or Rebecca Horn. It's understandable why these films would be difficult to find, however: they're sold at extremely high prices in very small editions through art galleries, and a generally available perfect copy would severely dilute the edition.

The second is made-for-TV material, especially documentaries. There are amazing documentaries out there, but most of them appeared once or twice on television and have since become all but impossible to see. Much more effort goes into making a good feature-length documentary than goes into writing a magazine article, but future researchers on any subject are generally confined to the latter, because the television material is stuck, inaccessible and unindexed, in a basement somewhere.

The third is music videos. On a dollars-per-minute basis, these are probably the most expensive films regularly made, and enormous amounts of effort and creativity are put into them. Yet very few make it onto television, and even fewer are available once the single in question is no longer in the shops. Real classics, like Michael Jackson's Thriller or Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer (now there's a song no one would remember if it wasn't for the video) exist largely in our memories these days: we can't rummage around among old DVDs for them in the same way that we can with our music collection.

(I could add a fourth category here, of television commercials, but while they can be very clever and funny, I personally have no particular desire to watch a whole DVD's worth of them.)

I have friends in Los Angeles who are very plugged in to the music-video production scene, and who collect pirate copies of such things in much the same way as people in the art scene have illicit collections of art videos. But these copies are invariably on VHS. It's also possible to get DVDs featuring collections of an individual recording artist's work. The problem with going down that route, of course, is that it's the music which drives the video selection, and not the other way around, meaning that a lot of the videos are very average in quality. (One exception can be found here, and another here).

But now, thanks to Spike Jonze, there's a whole new company, The Director's Label, devoted to releasing the best work of the best music-video directors. Better yet, the first three releases, coming out at the end of October, also happen to be the best three music-video directors working today. The press release, complete with trailers for each of the DVDs, can be found here.

The subject of the first DVD, of course, is Jonze himself. Jonze first appeared on the scene making skateboard videos, but his unique visual imagination soon made him one of the most celebrated and accomplished music-video directors ever. The Beastie Boys started hiring him on a regular basis: they're the kind of artists who really care about making their music videos into self-standing artworks in their own right.

This DVD features all the Jonze classics. The Beastie Boys' Sabotage is a hilarious send-up of 70s cop shows, while Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice is probably the best place in cinematic history to see just how good a dancer Christopher Walken really is. The cover features a still from Wax's California, a slow-motion sequence of a man on fire, running, which once seen is impossible to forget.

Jonze stands apart from the other directors in the series in that he isn't really known for his cutting-edge use of technology. That said, he spent a lot of effort inserting Weezer into the Happy Days TV show for Buddy Holly, and did their Undone video entirely in one take.

The second DVD is Michel Gondry. Gondry has come to fame more recently, largely thanks to Björk, who has used him in half a dozen videos. Their first collaboration was on Human Behaviour, a video which singlehandedly made Gondry's name with a wonderfully skewed fairy tale featuring Björk as a hunter who eventually winds up inside a bear's stomach.

Gondry also directed the wonderful Kylie Minogue video of Come Into My World. Shot in a Parisian suburb, it shows Kylie dancing and skipping around a crossroads again and again – and each time she circles, another Kylie joins her, until there are four Kylies in all. And it's not only Kylie who replicates, it's also the townsfolk, each of whom is a small little story unto themselves. It's the kind of video which can happily be watched over and over again for the dozens of small things you miss the first few times.

But Gondry is more than just a high-tech wizard: consider probably his most celebrated video, for the White Stripes' aggressively low-tech Fell in Love With a Girl. Done entirely in old-fashioned Lego, the very rawness of the animation pefectly echoes the stripped-down nature of the song, and deservedly makes it to the cover of the DVD.

Finally, there's Chris Cunningham. The fact that he's part of this series at all is particularly impressive, because he's considered an artist in his own right, and sells his work through art galleries. His longest and most expensive piece of video art, Flex, is actually featured on this DVD, which bodes well for the wider availability of other artists' work.

If the American Jonze is associated with the Beastie Boys and the Frenchman Gondry is associated with Björk, then the Englishman Cunningham is very much linked with Aphex Twin. There's a problem here, in that Aphex Twin is not particularly commercially successful, which means that Cunningham's videos have even less chance than most of being seen. What's more, Cunningham's vision in his Aphex Twin videos is genuinely shocking, disconcerting, and scary: these aren't simply clever and imaginative works, they're also the kind of thing which can give you nightmares.

So it's Björk who makes it onto the cover of this DVD, since Cunningham's video for her All is Full of Love is probably the most-watched thing he's ever made. It's technically flawless, especially considering the technology which went into it way back in 1999. It's also stunningly beautiful, with a white porcelain Björk robot building another one and falling in love with her.

I can't wait for these DVDs to be released, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing who Jonze will choose to be the next director tapped for a retrospective. Still, between the three DVDs, there's 20 hours of material here, so that should be enough to keep me occupied for the time being.

Posted by Felix at 17:58 EST

Comments

I believe their would be a market for mixed music video to be sold on DVD. With the automotive industry putting DVD in many vehicles and the portable DVD players.

Posted by: Carl at 10:03 EST, November 10, 2003

of course you can also just download the videos from kazaa

Posted by: bob at 5:04 EST, December 05, 2003

I read your comments on Mixed Video DVD's and wanted to say that I currently put out Mixtape Dvds that have music videos in a bpm mix just like how a club dj would mix records.
Just wanted to say that your thoughts have been answered..

Posted by: Dj SpicyIce at 2:28 EST, May 17, 2004