Sound And Vision: Peter Strickland
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at The KVB's Never Enough, directed by Peter Strickland.
Peter Strickland can make the weirdest subjects both scary and sexy. He finds the lurid and alluring in topics like red dresses (In Fabric), butterflies (The Duke of Burgundy), sound design (Berberian Sound Studio) and... food-based art (Flux Gourmet). His films straddle the line between updated versions of the sex cinema of Jean Rollin, Radley Metzger and Jess Franco, but less exploitative than all of these; avant-garde icons like Stan Brakhage and the updated giallo-pastiches of the likes of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet.
Strickland has made many music videos that connect to his cinematic output in myriad ways. Pieces like Flying Saucer Attack's Instrumental No. 7 and Cavern of Antimatter's Liquid Gate are experiments in texture, the first showing grainy landscapes, and the latter being a collection of found footage of psychedelic fluid color tests. The images serve the music, and while the former can stand on its own as an avant-garde short, the second is more of a visualizer you would use as a backdrop at a seventies-themed party. A Hawk and a Hacksaw's The Magic Spring is a piece of folklore, using the stylistic trappings of early cinema to make a music video that scans as a piece of anthropology. None of them are far removed from something like Katalin Varga, or the stylistic pastiches of Berberian Sound Studio and Duke of Burgundy.
Guo's Guo4 pushes the explicit nature of some of Strickland's output to such an extreme that you can't find it on youtube. It is findable on several arthouse streamers, though, feeling more like a short film than a music video. It might have to do with the noisy abrasive soundtrack, that feels less like a pop song and more like a soundtracked accompaniment especially written for the short. In it, two men are tangled in a violent fight in a locker room, a fight that might be erotically charged. The main theme of a lot of films of Strickland is power dynamics, the fear of losing control and the lure of the same. They are about sex and violence in equal measure.
Never was that more clear than in the main music video in this Sound and Vision: The KVB's Never Enough is a brilliant piece of gonzo music video making, that again apes the styles of the giallo's and sexploitation that Strickland loves so much. Yet again he settles on an object of fetishization, or a piece of symbolism, that is a bit of a head scratcher. Like the cuisineal art pieces in Flux Gourmet, or the lesbian lepidopterists in The Duke of Burgundy, who would've guessed you could make something lurid, alluring, sexy, scary, crazy and cool out of a dentists trip. Even the cleansing tools, looking like torture pieces, are fetishized, as are the dental mouth pieces. This is taking an oral fixation to an extreme. It is a baffling yet amazing piece that brings to the forefront everything Strickland does so well.
And it's not without a wink and nudge. Like the credits in The Duke of Burgundy for 'perfume design' (still one of my favorite credit 'in-jokes'), here there is some clear comedy when it is announced this is a film by "Dr. Lefteris Grammatikopoulis for the 2016 Ionian KVB Dentistry Symposium". It is not only funny in context of the video proper, it also gives way to the idea that this is a piece driven by the personal fetish of a fictitious artist. Strickland's arresting style pastiche, his fixation on unusual subject matter, his sense of humor, his erotic hang-ups and fears, his focus on power and loss of control; it's all right here in this video.
