Sound And Vision: Johan Renck
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos by director Johan Renck.
Johan Renck's new film Spaceman, is only his second feature, after the minor indie release Downloading Nancy, but that doesn't mean he hasn't had a storied career. In fact, he has worn many hats, and his career seems only now to have reached the stellar proportions where something Renck-directed has automatic buzz.
That is mostly due to a one-two-punch in recent years. After directing some big Breaking Bad episodes he hit it big by directing the entirety of HBO's hit series Chernobyl. Just a few years before that though, he made two music videos that really sealed his status as a classic music video director: David Bowie's Blackstar and Lazarus (see both below).
Both music videos deal with Bowie's past, present and future, facing Bowie's mortality by referencing past album covers (the back of the Station to Station reissue) and characters (Major Tom from A Space Oddity and Ashes to Ashes). Major Tom's skull is part of a death/ resurrection scenario in Blackstar. And in Lazarus Bowie is seen on a sort of death bed in his suit from Station to Station. Both music videos see Bowie's impending death as transitional, a movement into iconhood. Bowie died three days after the release of Lazarus' music video.
If anything exemplifies Rencks directorial work, it is a sense of seriousness and surrealism. His music video for The Knife's Pass This On (see also below) shows a drag queen performing in an ostensibly hostile environment. Due to subtle surreal shifts in mood the real and present danger of homophobia instead turns into a celebration of the queer performer. An idyllic dance party, that due to the wide angle lenses and deliberate camera movements still scans as somewhat off kilter.
By all accounts Rencks new film Spaceman is an oddity itself, where an astronaut played by Adam Sandler gets relationship advice from an interstellar spider. It plays that subject completely straight. There is always a sense of gravitas to whatever Renck makes. That makes it even odder that he started out as a music video director for his own band, eurodance one hit wonder Stakka Bo, for the song Here We Go (the final video below).The playfulness in this early music video is a far cry from the grim and unsettling tone of a lot of his directorial work. Still, it is no surprise that Renck is coming into his own as a director in recent years. It was about time.
