Sound And Vision: Steven Soderbergh
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: DTCV's Histoire Seule, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Soderbergh has always been a very prolific director. Even going so far as making more media in his early retirement, around the early 2010's, than most directors make in their lifetime. That 'early retirement' became somewhat of a joke, even though Soderbergh himself has stated it was meant to be more of a sabbatical, as he returned barely a few years later in full force. But let's not treat it as a cinematic meme, but explore some of the things Soderbergh did in this sabbatical in the Sound and Vision, because it includes his sole music video directorial credit thus far.
Soderbergh did dabble in long form musical entertainment, with his early production of the live show YES 9012Live. That live show, for the band YES ranks among the better liked and appreciated recorded live shows from the eighties. It was in fact Soderbergh's first directorial credit, even before Sex, Lies and Videotape made him the quintessential indie-filmmaker in the late eighties/ early nineties. Even though he bagged an Emmy nomination for it, for Best Music Video Long Form, I don't count this as a music video proper, as I feel recorded live shows are an entirely different form of art. Soderbergh did release a re-edit of this show, later in life, though, cutting out all the experimentations with green screen overlays done by animation studio CHRLX and keeping only the proper live show footage.
Which is my segue into what Soderbergh occupied himself with in his extended hiatus: re-editing cinema from the past. As Soderbergh himself has stated, he wanted to learn from the masters and re-find his joy in cinema at the same time. So he started slightly irreverent projects like editing together Hitchock's Psycho with Gus van Sant's ill-fated (but underrated) remake of Psycho, in a supercut called...Psychos. Or re-editing 2001: A Space Odyssey so drastically he renamed it Return of W. De Rijk. Several other mash-ups include a heavy reworking of Heaven's Gate, called The Butcher's Cut, which is an experiment in hurting a film you love by trying to make it better; a split screen cut of the two famous adaptations of The Killers; a split screen cut of several Harry Palmer movies; another split screen experiment juxtaposing Soderbergh's own The Underneath, with its original source inspiration Criss Cross; a black-and-white cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the soundtrack of The Social Network put underneath. Most of them were experiments where Soderbergh wanted to learn about some film technique, like his cut of Raiders was born from the willingness to learn more about staging a scene. They were not necessarily meant to be watched from front to back like a film proper, but instead for perusal, or to fade into the background as a party visual. That is not a joke, that is exactly what Soderbergh himself said that his Harry Palmer-re-edit was made for.
Around the same time Soderbergh also started putting weird videos online that are sort of vlogs, sort of not, that edit together everyday footage from his life in slightly impenetrable ways. These videos play like extended hommages to video diarists like Jem Cohen and Jonas Mekas, but recognizably Soderberghian.
This is the context you need to know to properly appreciate Soderbergh's music video for DTCV's Histoire Seule, because in some ways, it is a blend between one of his re-edited hommages and a Sodervlog.
DTCV's Histoire Seule didn't get one of Soderbergh's usual write-ups when he re-edited something, but context given online at the time of the release does state it is an homage to Godard's Histoire(s) Du Cinéma. Like Godards radical re-editing of cinema history, this music video relies heavily on split screen, juxtaposing newly shot material with repurposed footage. In this case the newly shot material plays a lot like a modern-day Sodervlog, showing footage of airports, whiskey bottles, light dancing on the surface of liquid, a factory setting in what seems to be some kind of distillery. It seems like a whiskey advert, more than a music video.
The other screen in DTCV's Histoire Seule shows imagery from a rural pastoral scene, with a lovely folksy wooden cottage, some woodchopping going on, and for this reviewer at least quite inexplicably vintage illustrations of Abraham Lincoln and other patriotic American imagery. The combination of all the images is somewhat indecipherable, or it might be a case of stuff getting lost in translation. Like Soderbergh's radical re-edits or his Sodervlogs, this is mostly one for him, and less one for his audience.
But the fact is that after his time sketching in the margins, taking his time to experiment for the fun of it, Soderbergh came back with a vengeance. He has released a film a year ever since, if not more, including some late career highlights. There is a method to his madness, and while his sole true music video might be merely a footnote in a highly prolific career, it is emblematic for a time in Soderbergh-history.
