A promo video is simply an advertisement for a song, said the intro card of the 1993 music video for Babies by British band Pulp. Is it really so? Pulp themselves have systematically broken the dictum. The status of this audiovisual form has always been uncertain, navigating a rather volatile path between art and advertising, occasionally finding itself in the realm of a bastard cinema when figures like Andy Warhol or Gus Van Sant were at the helm. “Where does the music video stand in relation to film?” is the big ontological question, often accompanied by a stigma of lucrative art that works against the short format.

“There’s lots of similarities between the formats, whether short-form or long-form. For me, a short-form is like a sentence and a long-form is like a test. If you’re doing a music video, what is that sentence? Is it a beautiful sentence? When you make a short or a music video, it has to be as fully-formed as a movie,” said prolific ad and music video director Jonathan Glazer in an interview in 2014, upon the release of his previous film, Under the Skin.

Before The Zone of Interest (which won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year) propelled him to the forefront of contemporary cinema discourse, Glazer had established himself as a true auteur of music videos and even commercials – pity those who say Denis Lavant-the shirtless devil tempting you to Succumb to the crumb is not art. Without necessarily denying the mercantile qualities that, for example, several ads for Guinness or Levi’s might come with, Glazer practiced these two forms rather as short films, delivering, as he suggested earlier, complete concepts. The director often argues that his ad work is, in essence, not much different from what a film should do, or rather, that it is a smaller field for feature films – the short format is an economical and efficient format that teaches you to optimize resources, work only with what is essential; for Glazer, it seems to be a kind of cinematic crystal. However, perhaps the connection with art has been more evident in the case of music videos, where, from Radiohead to Blur, to Nick Cave, and others, Glazer has predominantly worked with musicians and artists known for their proclivity for the experimental area – peers whom the director often cited as sharing a certain belief in artistic quality and whose vision he respects.

To give a bit of context: Glazer emerged as a videomaker in 1995 with a music video for Massive Attack, in an era of maximum contamination between high and low art, in the surge of Britpop and one of the best decades for British cinema (from Trainspotting to Mike Leigh’s Naked to Hugh Grant’s heyday). The British music video has always fared well, but the 1990s, especially in its second half, saw an artistic explosion under the waving flag of Cool Britannia and ample scope for experimentation, particularly in alternative circles. In the boom that New Wave had already brought, the marriage between music and screen was sealed with bigger budgets and new expressions of a visual consciousness, be it extremely complex (as with Radiohead) or in the ranks of more immediate cool (as with Oasis). As the above-mentioned Trainspotting shows us, many films of the time were also MTV-ized, often animated by music montages or proper music videos in the film.

Glazer’s work is in sync with pop culture’s new hunger for visuals, but more importantly, it subscribes to the notion that the music video is no longer just a promotional tool for the band but an essential element of their visual identity. More precisely, it is an element that tells a story, that fully qualifies the artist in terms of aspirations, message, and visual territory to which they belong. The ultimate example of a band intensely concerned with the visual dimension and potential of their songs is Radiohead, who, on their album OK Computer, have a music video for each song and hundreds of other audiovisual experiments. Aside from the cinephilia Glazer openly displays in all short formats (including ads quoting from kung fu movies), in his only 10 music videos to date, the director seems drawn to working selectively with musicians who themselves show a cinematic interest and have a plethora of other “cinematic” or conceptual music videos: Massive Attack, Blur, Radiohead, Jamiroquai, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, UNKLE, Richard Ashcroft (see The Verve), The Dead Weather (see Jack White).

1995: A Space Odyssey

Glazer’s videography began with pastiches, gradually maturing into a simpler or more refined, perhaps even naturalistic at times personal style. His first music video, for Karmacoma, is a combination of Kubrickian architecture – quintessentially a hotel and a lobby, including the twins – and elements inspired by the Coen Brothers, featuring idiosyncratic characters and paranoid gun-wielding dum-dums. Moving from room to room and absurd microverse to absurd microverse, the pace is that of a feverish, dizzying trance induced by the camera movement, sometimes gliding and cyclical, sometimes jerky and hysterical. Speaking of cinematic details, the inherently cinematic spirit that the song possesses goes a bit further; the same tune is reworked by Wong Kar-Wai in Fallen Angels (1995).

Kubrick remains a reference in Glazer’s next music video, The Universal by Blur. In fact, Kubrick resides in most of Glazer’s videography as an important figure, from whom he drew inspiration and to whom he returned to varying degrees, albeit more discreetly once he transitioned to feature films. The reference in The Universal is even more obvious than in Karmacoma – perhaps even disturbing in how easily one can trace the thread back to A Clockwork Orange (1971), alluded to here by the bar where the droogs hang out or details like Damon Albarn dressed in white and wearing eyeliner on one of his eyes, slyly smiling at the camera. The mini-narrative resonates with the song’s dystopian lyrics, but the video is – in the humble opinion of a big Blur fan – perhaps one of Glazer’s poorest works, precisely because of a too-direct, I would say lazy, allusion. Despite some original elements – a working class on the grounds of a neo-council estate that worships speakers or a new social category where people are divided into red and blue – the homage is more derivative than appealing. That hasn’t stop the video from becoming iconic – after all, who doesn’t like A Clockwork Orange, and how many youngsters haven’t fetishized the coolness of its anti-authoritarian thugs?

Glazer’s first collaboration with Radiohead preceded what is probably one of the world’s favorite pieces of audiovisual work – the music video for Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity. I will, however, stick to Virtual Insanity to continue the discussion about the Kubrickian spirit, here already becoming more faded. On the surface, it’s a simple concept – a static camera for the most part, a room, and a guy walking around all over the place. A few suspicious details casually creep in as the camera digresses, but otherwise, it’s all playful in an infectious way – there’s something of a child’s joy when watching this carousel montage of tricks and artifices, whose implausibility you suspect but haven’t yet figured out the illusion. Jay Kay’s effortless glides dancing around the room and objects moving untouched, as if the laws of gravity are fickle and uncertain, make the music video one of the most sought-after behind-the-scenes stories – and the moving floor mechanism recalls the large hydraulic machinery used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The dazzling white is also from the same spatial imaginary, but, of course, the iconic big hat takes us to somewhat more playful realms.

The tricks of modern alienation

Glazer’s collaborations with Radiohead on Street Spirit (Fade Out) in 1996 and then Karma Police in 1997 (the latter preceded by a music video for Into My Arms by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) have a lot in common, especially visually portraying a modern alienation otherwise hard to represent. I’ll skip discussing Nick Cave’s music video as there’s little to say; the rudimentary mise-en-scène of starkly contrasting black-and-white, with various faces looking into the camera, doesn’t necessarily do anything but maintain the ballad’s solemn, intimate tone. We might say discreet, but perhaps too discreet to be truly memorable; it pales in comparison to Cave’s other music videos. Still, I’ll emphasize once again the close connection that Nick Cave has with film, claiming him as a hypercinematic presence in Glazer’s videography.

Street Spirit (Fade Out) is also shot in black and white, but its surrealistic accents pierce the classic color scheme and lead into a Lynchian space, where an ordinary trailer park plays host to forces not necessarily macabre but still dark, sordid to the extent that daily life itself is dirty. Glazer’s use of different speeds and perspectives, along with these endless falls and disquieting levitations, communicate a particular Radiohead limbo, where time flows like molasses, and fear, uncertainty, and peace interweave unsettlingly and slowly. This machine will, will not communicate/ These thoughts and the strain I am under, say the lyrics, with Glazer representing the unrepresentable, that hard-to-articulate feeling of alienation that gnaws at you to the point of exasperation.

Karma Police (1997) is what many hail as one of Radiohead’s best music videos, and indeed, it basically takes the form of a well-structured short film, with a beginning and an end, and even a midpoint; it’s a short narrative, simple and economical but of maximum effect. If the music video is sometimes perceived as a collection of beautiful views, edited more or less randomly to satisfy some aesthetic values, Karma Police is one of those meticulously executed works, where the camera movement at the beginning anticipates, “karmically”, the one at the end. The camera pan, the slow pace, and the images shot through the windshield of a car driven by no one but what seems to be its own murderous will bring back to the fore that feeling of time passing monotonously, of an endless and somewhat resigned waiting. Glazer’s talent here, and the talent seen in Radiohead’s videography in general (up to more recent music videos), lies in this combination of sublimations and surreal distortions of immediate reality elements or events – a lonely night road where a man being chased appears out of nowhere is an image as familiar as it is filled with that mysterious feeling of driving after midnight suddenly slipping into a magical realm. A Lynchian parallel here as well, the hypnotic nature of the road recalling the famous opening of Lost Highway (1997). Thom Yorke’s impassivity, a ghostly presence in the backseat witnessing amidst the camera pans the fight between machine and man, is somewhat reminiscent of the boredom creeping into some of the scenes in Karmacoma – where again reality and psyche have given way, and yet business as usual.

Since the collaboration with UNKLE features Thom Yorke, the music video for Rabbit in the Headlights (1998) seems to remain in the same vaguely surrealist sphere. Besides these compact and carefully staged movements, one could extract as Glazer’s stylistic trademark a certain idea of hyper-contained and well-defined space (which seems to sharpen in his recent The Zone of Interest). Rabbit in the Headlights is the first music video to take us into a wide-open space, even if adapted by Glazer to appear incredibly enclosed. We never leave the car tunnel, and a Denis Lavant, either in a mental crisis or in a trance, persists forward in a grueling manner only to be struck to the ground by one car, and then another, and so on. The message here seems less evasive than it might in Radiohead’s music videos; the brutality with which the cars hit and drive past is that of an indifferent society. If the music video is, as Pulp ironically suggested at the beginning, perceived as an advertisement for a song, here Glazer places the music in the background, more like a soundtrack, and focuses on the character’s mutterings and the sounds of cars passing, honking and crashing into him. Rabbit in the Headlights is still gimmicky but completely stripped of overt references, a clear sign of Glazer’s own style.

​The era of naturalism and nothingness

As a coda to the narrative approach in Rabbit in the Headlights, in 2000 comes A Song for the Lovers by former The Verve vocalist Richard Ashcroft, a veteran of the long take and uneventful music video, where nothing happens. A Song for the Lovers is anti-cinematic: the very first verse, I spend the night, Yeah, looking for my inside in a hotel room, describes everything that is happening and what we’re seeing. The music video is extremely controlled in the way it fluidly explores the space of a hotel room, but, paradoxically, it remains bland, vaguely subversive: the beautiful images say nothing, not even for the sake of beauty. Here too, the music is overlapped by different sounds, but in this case, they are trivial sounds, devoid of any metaphorical meaning. The narrative is a non-narrative – the false lead the camera follows turns out to be just a trip to the bathroom.

The choreographic control Glazer practices in A Song for the Lovers is later abandoned: Live With Me (2006) by Massive Attack looks like an adaptation of 2000s British realism – handheld camera and almost no stylization of the reality depicted. The only image revealing any stylistic effect is the final shot, with the starry sky; otherwise, the music video remains a naturalistic drama about a young woman with an alcohol problem, communicated without words, with the music supporting the story. Although less exhibitionist than Glazer’s previous inventive uses of cinematic language, perhaps here we can best see a perspective of the music video as a complete, stand-alone narrative short film.

Of all the music videos Glazer has directed, currently the most recent but already 15 years old, Treat Me Like Your Mother is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing, despite adopting the same minimalist style. Alison Mosshart and Jack White endlessly walking towards each other with their hair in the wind, until they erupt into a shootout – an excessively long one at that – is simply cool. Sure, the music video highlights Glazer’s interest in movement and long takes, but is there anything more to it? Treat Me Like Your Mother is only as much as it offers, but that doesn’t mean that this display of genre-movie-like forces is not highly entertaining.

***

Glazer asserted himself as a videomaker at a time when there was, as one can notice in the extended videographies of the artists he collaborated with, a certain relationship between filmmakers and bands seeking innovative formulas and testing the limits of the music video format. Of course, neither Glazer, nor the bands he worked with, were the only ones who contributed to legitimizing the music video as a potential art form, but it’s certain that the popularity he gained, bolstered by MTV awards and, in parallel, by a possibly even more successful career as a commercial director, has left a great mark on the visual landscape of late 90’s – early 2000s pop culture. His precise movements and cinephile inserts are probably known to most fans following the artists he collaborated with – many people are extremely familiar with Oscar-nominated Jonathan Glazer without actually knowing it.

Is there any connection between his music videos and his films? Looking at the audacious Sexy Beast (2000), absolutely. The film perfectly embraces the combination of humor, playfulness, pastiche, and sordidness that his music videos and commercials have demonstrated up to that point. What about The Zone of Interest? That’s a good question. We clearly see a meticulous control and a concentric space that exacerbate the unease and horrors hidden within the frame, and which seem tributary to Glazer’s evolution towards a more somber personal style. At the same time, it is quite surprising for a programmatic stylist like Glazer to make a film about the Holocaust – because he invites, through his skills as a craftsman of spectacle, an aesthetic reception, which, ultimately, is the greatest threat in depicting horror.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.