Review: The White Stripes “The Denial Twist” Music Video
Review: The White Stripes “The Denial Twist” Music Video
by Robert Schober
It would seem that The White Stripes have taken Bjork’s place as Michel Gondry’s muse. “Denial Twist” marks the fourth video that the director and band have collaborated on. Leaving in their wake a pile of Legos and 20-some odd drum kits, they now tackle the Conan O’Brien Show. This may seem an odd setting for video- maybe even a bit like shameless plug for The Late Show- but in fact, Gondry is reconstructing a day out of a week in the White Stripe’s life. Many readers may remember when their album ‘Elephant’ was released, the Stripes played Conan five consecutive nights to promote the record.
Gondry has taken this and applied his classic signatures to it: recursion, the one-take on a perspective-distorted set, and the injection of some autobiography. In the video, Jack and Meg are oddly distorted and elongated while Conan is Conan, but with his head grafted onto a dwarf. While you can instantly tell you are watching a Gondry video here, it’s still visually fresh and innovative. There is something uncanny and disturbing about the effects. The integration of two-dimensional imagery from the show’s broadcast with Gondry’s 3-D set leaves the brain swimming from all the spatial and temporal displacement.
After his inadvert plug for our presidential candidate, Tarja Halonen, Conan O’Brien craze has been going on for months here in Finland. The music video above makes the Conan O’Brien Show seem even more surreal.
I like Michel Gondry’s work a lot. In addition to half a dozen projects for Bjork, he has also made music videos for Daft Punk’s “Around the World” and Massive Attack’s “Protection”.
Posted by api in Audiovisual instinct