Sound And Vision: Geremy Jasper
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several videos by Geremy Jasper, co-directed with Georgie Greville.
Geremy Jasper is an up-and-coming director, whose achingly sincere yet crowdpleasing Patti Cake$ turned heads on the festival scene. His new film O'dessa is as music oriented, but has divided both audiences and critics with its weird blend of honkytonk musical and dystopian scifi B-movie trappings. Up until the fluke of an ending it was extremely my thing, playing like an update of Six String Samurai for a post-Black Mirror world. It also is clearly a passion project for Jasper, whose music videos are cut from the same cloth. All of them were co-directed with Georgie Greville, as Geremy and Georgie.
If both O'dessa and Patti Cake$ have one thing in common while being wholly different movies, is that they are explorations of authenticity in a world where screens are ubiquitous. In Patti Cake$ a young white woman is trying to make it as a rapper while struggling with the way people react negatively to her weight. O'dessa goes through a similar journey of being sincere and genuinely good in a world where image and media are everything. This obsession with image and the way we interact with screens shows up several times in Jasper and Greville's music videos. The only exception to this media obsession is Florence + the Machine's Dog Days Are Over, even if that video has a lot of similarities to O'dessa in its post-apocalyptic couture.
O'dessa ends with a big performance on a stage of a goverment-ruled talent show. There are similar shades of performance and performativity in two music videos by the duo, that focus on karaoke as a starting point. Selena Gomez' Love You Like A Love Song uses (below) the different backdrops of karaoke-videos as quirky playgrounds in which to play dress-up. Autre Ne Veut's Play by Play (also below) is more interesting as it uses the many screens as a way to show the performer from different angles, deconstruct his face and performance and enhance its voyeurism. It all feels a but dystopian. If Love You Like A Love Song shares the purple fantasy landscapes and the tween pop confection dress-up style with O'dessa, then Play by Play shares the commentary on seeing and being seen. The latter is quite brilliant as a deconstruction of performance, and it shares it's voyeuristic CCTV-feel with La Roux' In For the Kill, another Geremy and Georgie video in which television screens are used to unnerving effect.
A funner side of screen interaction is shown in Rye Rye's Boom Boom, a quirky ode to videogames of the past. As a music video it is lightweight, but it adds to the ever-expanding media obsession of Geremy and Georgie.
It is the final video that I will highlight here, Goldfrapp's Alive (finally below), that is most playful about media and how we interact with it. This time around, the action does not play on television screens, but we are clearly in a media-inspired world. Alisson Goldfrapp is giving her best impression of Olivia Newton John in Physical, or other 80's inspired aerobics sessions. The interesting thing about the workout here, is that the dancers are metalheads, in full Black Metal get-up. There is a foreboding sense of danger, especially when other aerobic dancers join, and the metalheads start menacingly licking their lips. The video turns everything on its head, when the aerobic dancers turn out to be vampires, Alisson Goldfrapp included. The blend between aerobics-video, black metal culture and Jean Rollin-esque vampire horror is too delicious to pass up. It is the everything and the kitchen sink approach that works equally well in videos like Boom Boom and The Dog Days Are Over.
O'dessa is in line with that pure blend of pop culture pastiches of media past, but ultimately fails to coalesce into something new and pure. It is disappointing for a film about purity and sincerity, like Patti Cake$ before it, that the film ultimately fails to fully convince the audience of the power of sincerity. The music videos are different, in that they don't have this theme in common with the films, but mostly just play around with deconstructing media from the past. I am all for more sincerity in films, but the clash between media send-up and bleeding-heart sincerity doesn't fully work for me in Geremy Jasper's cinematic output. Still, given the style of his films and his sharp directorial eye, I feel he still can expand on the promise of his music videos. Maybe next time the formula does click in the way that something like Alive does.
