Sound And Vision: Slava Tsukerman
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at two different videos by Slava Tsukerman.
Slava Tsukerman passed away recently at the age of 86. He left behind only a handful of features, half of them documentaries, some shorts and two music videos. The two music videos in question are stylistically immediately recognizable as his work, using a pop art sheen and deliberately flat-looking effects work to build a colorful, vibrant and joyful vision with a punk queer edge.
Tsukerman's most famous film is Liquid Sky, a film that uses eighties New Wave and Punk fashion to tell a gender blending and bending story about aliens and drugs in New York. In that film the city is a vibrant hot spot, a hodgepodge of cultural signifiers where genders, races and even galaxies mix and intertwine. It is not all rose colored as a vision, as there is a dark undercurrent. After every high, sexually or chemically induced, there is a comedown.
As a film Liquid Sky might be the most visually striking depiction of eighties fashion and pop culture ever depicted. It is the most quintessential and famous new wave document that is out there. The same goes for a music video he made around the same time, Nile Rodgers' Lets Go Out Tonight (see below). It is as vibrant, colorful and pop art as Liquid Sky and just as artificial in its look. Here we also have the added effect of puppetry, using alter egos of the cast in a similar way to the double casting in Liquid Sky. Identity in the work of Slava Tsukerman is mallable, and humans evolve and mirror each other. This might explain some of the cultural naivete in his work. He might call the music video its interpolation of Japanese pop culture a cultural celebration, but it straddles the line between affectionate, stereotyping and appropriation.
In his late career feature film Perestroika he focuses on being bicultural and being displaced in a diaspora as a Russian-American Jew, in the same way that Liquid Sky explored the fluidity of gender and sexuality in ways both celebratory and critical. That film also is noticeable for its use of green screening like Lets Go Out Tonight did before, and its use of a digital shot on video look. That same digital sheen is also present in his second and last music video for Cold Cave's Black Boots (also below), a music video that uses a similarly deliberately flattening style, to embrace the low budget, and the creative possibilities that shooting digitally on green screen affords you. Realism is not a goal here, and never was for Tsukerman. I am reminded a lot of the late career work of Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu), who embraced the distancing surrealism of chroma-key in a similar way, in films like Hanagatami and Labyrinth of Cinema.
Black Boots also has the queer kink undercurrent of a Liquid Sky, using a punk new wave sheen but now in a throwback retro way. Luckily the digital distancing adds a new element, as other effects, like the heat vision colors look too much like Tsukerman relying on old tricks. Still it is undeniable Tsukerman had a singular style and vision, that sadly never resolved into more cultural currency to keep making films. His oeuvre is small but the impact can't be overstated.
