Sound And Vision: Alex Ross Perry
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: the music videos and films that Alex Ross Perry made for Ghost and Pavement.
Alex Ross Perry is a rock and roll scholar. He knows his stuff when it comes to the history of music videos, recorded live shows and music-image-hybrids. This might be partly why after a string of successful indie-films in a diverse array of styles, like The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip, Queen of the Earth and Golden Exits, he has been carving a niche that is all about the intertwinement of sound and vision. This niche started in earnest right around the release of Golden Exits. Alex Ross Perry directed his first few music videos, most of them for Aly & AJ, but the first of them for Sleigh Bells' I Can Only Stare. Around the same time he started to work on his next feature, Her Smell, the story of a volatile rock star told in five parts all set around performances in her life and the subsequent breakdowns. It is a brilliant piece of work, that deftly apes the style and sense of time of a certain brand and type of rock music. It is here that Perry truly seems to have found his calling.
Cause after Her Smell, and a tie-in music video for the fictional rock band The Akergirls, Alex Ross Perry started a second career as a music video director. Most of his work, up until this year, has been music videos. And the two new feature works that Ross Perry released this year literally started from his music video collaborations. Since 2019 Ross Perry has directed about 20 music videos, most notably a trifecta of music videos for Yumi Zouma, a few choice ones for Maya Hawke and Soccer Mommy, and a Tidal Session for Momma. If one thing is ever present in these music videos is that all of them bar none are style pastiches, that use the film grain, video haze and more types of shooting material to convey times and places that are not the present. Harking back to the music videos of the seventies (Yumi Zouma), eighties (Maya Hawke) and nineties (Soccer Mommy), Alex Ross Perry knows his stuff.
Nowhere is that more clear in his two most fulfilling collaborations, the ones that eventually ended in feature films. After directing two irreverent pieces for the metal band Ghost, Alex Ross Perry this year made a feature film with them. Ghost covered Genesis' Jesus He Knows Me (below) for Easter last year, and if the premise of that seems already blasphemous, wait till you have seen Perry's music video, that goes in hard on the hypocrisy and debauchery of televangelists. The more unusual piece that Perry made is a fake-documentary called Metal Myths Pt. 2(there is no part one), a 10 minute piece that mocks Unsolved Mystery-style programs and VH1's Behind the Music, to paint a history of Ghost that gets increasingly weird, paranoid and farfetched (see it below). It is an irreverent piece that paved the way for Rite Here Rite Now, the two hour concert-film/ live-action-film/ animated music video hybrid that was co-directed by Perry, Ghost-frontman Tobias Forge, Jim Parsons and animation director Durty Sean. Rite Here Rite Now is one for the fans of Ghost only, alienating almost everyone else with extended lore ánd long-running Benny Hill-bits. But the inspirations that Perry cited are very much felt, as he stated Kiss' Alive II, The Great Rock 'n'Roll Swindle and the work of Ralph Bakshi as sources for Rite Here Rite Now. These are all felt.
Something only being for the biggest fans is also the case for his first collaboration with Pavement, for the song Harness Your Hopes (finally below). The central premise is a Pavement Scientist researching the band, eventually visiting several of the music videos. The difficulty was placing Sophie Thatcher in a variety of shooting styles and differing image quality, without the whole falling fully apart into a mess. It doesn't fully work as it IS a bit of a mess, that might only make sense to the biggest Stephen Malkmus-fans.
But it also shows some of Perry's biggest strengths as a director, his command of pastiche, for instance, and his willingness to explore his own style through the style of others. That it feels like a Perry music video, even if it pays homage to so many other directors, is a huge compliment. And Perry and Pavement weren't through after this. At the time of publication, Perry's Pavement-film Pavements will just have been released at the Venice Film Festival. It is a hybrid between a fiction film, a documentary film, a concert film and more, just like Rite Here Rite Now. Perry seems to have carved out a new niche for himself, as I stated before, and it is a niche that fits him well.
