Sound And Vision: AG Rojas
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss the works of AG Rojas.
AG Rojas is a director I long wanted to talk about, but per my own set rules I couldn't, as he only released music videos. And for a Sound and Vision there needs to be a cinematic counterpoint to lynchpin the whole article on. Luckily, last year AG Rojas released a mid-length feature called Pare De Sufrir, that is now available for everyone to see on its own website.
Pare de Sufrir is vintage AG Rojas. If I had to describe his style, I would call it Magical Neo-realism. Like neo-realism, AG Rojas' films are socially conscious, often looking at life's hardships from a fly on the wall perspective, blending non-actors and actors for a sense of heightened realism. Themes that return are poverty, boredom, depression, family relationships, violence and group pressure. You could almost mistake some of his works for documentaries. Like magical realism, tho, AG Rojas works also work in an element of symbolism, where the state of mind of the characters is often showing up in very touchable and tangible ways in the outside world. In other words, the subconscious becomes part of the storyworld, like is the case in the best works of magical realism.
In Pare de Sufrir, scenes over the course of two friends constantly recalibrating their friendship are interspersed with more spiritual, symbolic, even cosmic visuals. In an empty lodge, two literal galaxies intertwine and intersect. A clear metaphor for the lives of the two boys containing whole worlds in-and-of-itself, that overlap sometimes, but also are lived mostly parallel. In the end a flower is shown growing in the dirt of the rubble in the lodge, a visual AG Rojas has returned to a lot, later in his career. Flowers are a spiritual symbol, a signifier of rebirth and the cyclical nature of life. Galaxies, also a late-career returning symbol, signify the richness of our lives, even if it is little in the grand scheme of things. But with AG Rojas, the macro and the micro are similar, even visually. Flowerbeds are compared to seas of stars, and people hold the cosmos in the palms of their hands. All of this is seen in the music video for Kamasi Washington's Truth, a music video that counts as something of a shift in themes for AG Rojas.
There are two music videos, made fairly close to each other, that are part of two very distinct eras and vibes for Rojas. One, I Am What I Am by Spiritualized, is symbolic of an era in which Rojas style was darker, grittier, more aggressive and more nihilistic. Kamasi Washington's Truth, the other, marks something of a starting point for Rojas' more spiritual, positive and inward-looking era.
But let's start first in the muck, before we can bloom.
In his early music videos, like the one for Gill-Scott Heron's I'll Take Care of You, in which a professional boxer is fighting in the ring while also taking care of her children in the meantime, joy and violence, kindness and survival, battle it out for attention. It's there also in the grainy home video of Earl Sweatshirts' Earl, where joy and violence are intertwined in youthful bravado. The darker side of this is seen in Jack White's Sixteen Saltines (see below), which is a series of vignettes in which children are seen in increasingly violent and surrealistic pamphlettes, not as victims but as perpetrators. There are moments of fleeting joy, as when a kid starts levitating suddenly (a theme Rojas returns to several times). Or when a kid starts doing pull-ups from an upside down chair hanging on the ceiling, chairs also being a motive for Rojas. But often the imagery is more violent, showing a cultish undercurrent in youthful groupthink, especially when at the end one of the children immolates a car with Jack White in it, and presumably blows himself up in the process. The youthful abandon as a violent dead-end.
Equally dark are two music videos Rojas made for Spiritualized. Hey Jane (see also below) is the least magical-realist of all of Rojas' pieces, but it still features a heightened sense of stylism that elevates the piece beyond mere misery porn. In the music video a transgender woman works as a sex worker and stripper to provide for her young son in quick and short vignettes that are brutally honest and slice of life. One of her customers turns out to be violent, as we see in the second part of the video that is a tour-de-force of cinematography and fight choreography, as the woman is brutally attacked by the man, and fights back, in a prolonged one-take. It's brutally violent and heart-wrenching and extremely disturbing. Still, it is hard to shake-off, an effect that Rojas was clearly intending.
Equally hard to watch is the music video for I Am What I Am (see also below), in which a disturbed teen played Rory Culkin decides he has enough, and hangs himself on with an invisible noose, floating mid-air on the streets, the neighbours watching from their houses and not interfering. The surrealistic image of the levitating body and the abandoned chair in the middle of the street feels like a natural end-point of the darker grittier surrealism of Rojas' early work. The death of the old self if you will, both figuratively and metaphorically, before he moved into a very different direction three years later with Kamasi Washington's Truth.
Truth (see also below) marks the switch to a more positive and spiritual direction, away from the darker underbelly of humanity and from a sense of realism, into a realm where meaning is more opaque. Still, he does not move away from humanity, instead embracing a more upbeat, diverse view of humans, not so much engaging with bodily limitations as the idea of a shared humanity that transcends beyond the body. We see this in a new symbol that props up, that of humans dressed in flowers, as a symbol of being part of nature and the grander scope of the universe. The latter is also shown through the many galaxies that show up, and the idea of oceans as a symbol for the infinite and unexplored.
Most of the striking visuals in Truth show up again in Pare de Sufrir and a trifecta of music videos for Florence and the Machine: the human form lying on the floor surrounded by flowers in piles of dirt are present in Pare De Sufrir and Florence and the Machine's Sky Full of Song. In the music video for No Choir we see the idea of the landscape by nighttime being part of a sort of spiritual awakening. The spiritual and religious side of things becomes even more overt in Florence and the Machine's Hunger (see also below), in which the human body becomes a place for stigmata, and there is a direct reference to the imagery of the doubting figure of the disciple Thomas touching the wounds in the side of Christ. Here the stigmata eventually get taking over by, what else, flowers, ending on a striking image of a statue or body being overflown with flowers in what seems like an extra-terrestrial or future landscape.
The religious imagery continues in my favorite Rojas' music video, the one for Bon Iver's Naeem (see also below), which fuses the imagery of the story of Moses forcing water out of a rock in the middle of the desert, with a reference to the floating rock in the works of magical-realist painter Magritte. The floating rock in the desert as a form of life has an almost vulva-esque quality to it, again referencing the theme of birth and rebirth, in an ultimate celebration of life. The interaction of a mother and child with the rock, again has religious connotation but otherwise feels more emotional and grounded in a sense of humanity and wonder that is especially present in the later work of Rojas. That this levitating rock also shows up in Pare De Sufrir shows the importance of weightlessness as a theme in Rojas' oeuvre.
Mitski's My Love Mine All Mine (see finally below) shows the culmination of the flower as a symbol of rebirth: a small flower as the yolk in a broken egg starts off the video, which otherwise sees Rojas return to the themes of chairs and levitation. Mitski balances chairs upon chairs upon chairs on the egg, like the princess on the proverbial pea, never harming or cracking the egg in the process. The weightless quality of Mitski, and the video itself, is exhilarating and beautiful. Finally ascending upon her throne of tens upon tens of chairs, she sits down and looks through her fingers, and sees the sea. The infinite, a vision into new worlds. The lodge in which Mitski exists, or Florence, or the galaxies and protagonists of Pare De Sufrir for that matter, do not limit them.
The body of work of Rojas started as an exploration of the things that divide us, ending in a hanging. Then he started a search for the Truth, and settled on the things that binds us, the end of the limitation of the body in a grander belief in a shared cosmos, in rebirth, in rituals, a shared humanity and love. Pare de Sufrir is a larger exploration of this shift, constantly shifting between the two modes and world views, feeling like a culmination of everything Rojas' has done before, and a progression all the same.
