SONIC CINEMA: SPARKLEHORSE
Various directors
(Sundance Channel)
The music video is usually an instrument of promotion, just another commercial for product. The vapidity of the average clip on MTV or VH1 needs no elucidation here. But what happens when you have an artist who resists marketing of any kind, an artist of such singular distinction that a typical video with big-breasted bikini girls or self-conscious surrealism would be akin to forcing a fish to swim in air? You give the artist a budget and let him/her/it do what he wants. Mark Linkous, auteur of Virginia's unclassifiable Sparklehorse, gave eight different directors carte blanche to create any kind of clip they wanted for any of the songs on the 'horse's latest album It's a Wonderful Life. The results are found in the third episode of the Sundance Channel's Sonic Cinema.
It stands to reason that Linkous, a man who never met a straightforward melody he couldn't make crooked, would hand his work over to filmmakers who feel the same way. Hardly anyone here simply shoots footage and presents it without putting it through the wringer in some fashion. A good example is the first piece, made by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin for the record's title track. To match the snap, crackle and pop of the tune, he makes the film stock look authentically old with a barely-in-focus black and white clip filled with early 20th-century imagery, all rotating on a merry-go-round. It's like a freshly discovered silent film created by an eccentric novice. Garine Torossian's piece for "Babies On the Sun" is even stranger and more artificially aged. Torossian uses an elaborate process involving cutting pictures from children's books, filming them on slides, pasting the slides onto 35 mm film on a flatbed, filming them with a video camera as they run, then editing the whole thing on a computer. The finished work is a psychedelic Dick and Jane story set to one of Linkous' prettier melodies.
By far the most disturbing clip comes from the Brothers Quay, the puppet animation duo known for the dark visions they've inflicted on songs such as Tool's "Sober." Working with the tune "Dog Door," a Linkous collaboration with Tom Waits that's already one of the most mindboggling tunes on It's a Wonderful Life, the brothers use a sexually receptive doll and a sinister dog in a tartan to tell a tale of erotic obsession and impotence. Or something. Regardless of what the imagery means to the Quays, it's going to give puppetry fans nightmares, unless said fans are already on intimate terms with Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles.
Other collaborators include Jem Cohen, who directed the Fugazi documentary Instrument, Grant Gee, who directed the Radiohead movie Meeting People is Easy, 'horse drummer Scott Minor and photographers Braden King and Danny Clinch. All of them contribute videos that range from innocuous to off-kilter and even oddly soothing. It all works, to admittedly varying degrees, but the marriage of music and video is not a shotgun affair here. Linkous' writing is very visual, and even if the clips don't literally match the words being sung, they still sound of a piece. Once again, Sonic Cinema presents an episode that suggests that music video might not be the bankrupt art form we've all assumed it to be. Michael Toland