Director's Study - Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry was born on May 8th 1963, is a French film, commercial and music video director and a screenwriter. He is noted for his inventive visual style and manipulation of mise en scène. Although he has directed many music videos, he has also directed feature films, such as: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, and most recently The Green Hornet, which is quite unusual of a music video director, to also direct such major films too. He first began directing music videos for the French band Oui Oui, his very first music video in 1988 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuK9fgTYubw (Junior et sa Voir D’or), but since then he has directed for many more well known artists such as Massive Attack, Daft Punk and The White Stripes.

Gondry said a lot of his inspiration comes from the film ‘Le Voyage en Ballon’ as “When I watch this movie, I dream I’m flying and then I do stories where people are flying. I think it’s directly influencing.” Many of Gondry’s music videos are concept based, and he often uses physical things, objects/shapes etc. to represent sounds and music within his videos.

For example, here in the video for Daft Punk’s ‘Around The World’ Gondry has used people, to represent different sounds and beats within the song, and each part has a different costume, to highlight the change. Also the lighting is used to indicate a change in the song, so when some beats or sounds aren’t playing, the people representing them, aren’t lit up, and are in the shadows, to illustrate their absence. Coloured light is also used behind them, in a way that resembles a music equalizer that is constantly in time to the music, also changing colour in contrast to the different pitch and volume of the main beat throughout. This fits with some of Goodwin’s six, as it shows a link between the music and the visuals, as well as a link between the lyrics and the visuals, because when the lyrics ‘around the world’ start (at about 1 min), a group of four spacemen begin to move, to link with the lyrics.

Michel Gondry has influenced me a lot, with my ideas for my music video, and I am now quite strongly considering creating a concept music video, with different shape and colours and objects representing different sounds. I like concept music videos as they are very unique, and offer quite an individual interpretation of a song; that an audience may not have considered before viewing the video, possibly making the music seem more prominent, as the lack of narrative or performance means sole focus can be put on the music.