In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at selected music videos by Gus van Sant.
Gus van Sant is a weird director, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from watching his feature work. It's hard to pin-point a main style, as he has evolved through several eras of his work, going from New Queer Cinema-style films like Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues towards highly commercial melodrama fare like Good Will Hunting, before heading into James Benning-inspired Slow Cinema like Gerry, Elephant and Last Days. Detours like his oddball shot-for-shot Hitchcock-remake Psycho aside, he now is mostly churning out fairly rote (political) dramas which lack bite and punch (Milk, The Sea of Trees, Dead Man's Wire). He doesn't have just the one defined style, being more of a chameleon and workman-like director. That is, until you watch his music video work, which at one time was weirder, more singular and more colorful than his feature work ever was.
One of his essential music videos is for Red Hot Chilli Pepper's Under the Bridge (see below), a slice-of-life style music video, where Anthony Kiedis walks the streets. But like Mala Noche before it, this is not a mere documentary piece, having an almost dream-like hazy quality, because of the completely garish hues that split the difference between pastels and neons. It is a unique color-coding that Van Sant returns to several times in his music video work.
Deee-lite's Runaway (also below) is even more garish, and plays like the road-trip adventures of My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, but disco-fied. The 90s style fashion and the eye-soaring color-combinations are delightful, playing more like an ode to Gregg Araki, than something fully-fleshed out Van Sant. Still, there is an oddball hiding somewhere, like the deliciously inexplicable intercutting of a lonely sheep on the road during a Psycho-kill scene.
It is this truly oddball quality that shows up in his music video for Chris Isaak of all people. San Francisco Days(also below) is again a music video full of the typical Van Sant-music video washed-out pastel neons, and is a fairly standard documentation of the city, and Isaak flirting with a woman who is his love interest. The most baffling choice shows up in the lower-left corner, for the eagle-eyed viewer: a superimposition of a small dog walking on the corner of the screen. Other viewers will eventually spot it, during the run time of the music video, as the dog walks from left to right, across the entire screen, and stays superimposed throughout. It's insanity, in the best way possible, elevating the music video from forgettable to truly memorable.
Lest we forget, Van Sant did start out as an acolyte of WIlliam S. Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg and many other queer beatnik-poets and artists. In his short film Discipline of D.E., based on the writing of Burroughs, we see this start as an avant-garde figure, and we also see this in his sources of inspiration in later works, like the truly riveting Last Days trilogy and Paranoid Park, that take inspiration from haptic cinema and slow cinema, and outre figures like British writer/ director Alan Clarke. Van Sant was an avant-gardist, but sadly, his later films like Milk and Dead Man's Wire feel like a form of queer assimilation, having centrist politics at its center, and fully sanitizing some of the political prickliness and revolutionary elements of someone like Harvey Milk, or the hostage-taker Tony Kiritsis. You'd wish a filmmaker like Todd Haynes or Spike Lee would've tackled those subjects, instead of Van Sant.
In his music video work, the origins of Van Sant as post-beatnik are shown in two music videos for two of his mentors. Both William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer (below) and Allan Ginsberg's Ballad of Skeletons (below) are spoken word pieces with some awful decisions in there, like racist slurs (even if meant as political commentary, the use of the N-word here is inexcusable). The style of the two pieces is similar, using black-and-white found footage and talking-head overlays to build an odd-ball compilation of political commentary. It is more incendiary and vitriolic than anything Gus van Sant did before or after, for better or worse.
Still, as a music video director Gus van Sant is wilder, more incisive and more thoroughly his own voice, than he is as a feature director, the Last Days-trilogy aside. The beginning of the end of his weirdness, him losing his wild hairs, oddly enough is for a music video called Weird, by the teen-bop band Hanson (finally below). Here the weirdness is an affectation, all fish-bowlenses borrowed from the school of Spike Jonze and Hype WIlliams, but executed poorly. When the band walks through a metro with a different quirky scenario in each carriage, it mostly feels like a teen boy's version of what weird is. The moment where the band jumps into poorly-rendered CGI-water is the death-knell. There is none of the radical weirdness that Van Sant brought to his early music video work, nor any of the colorful oddities of those. The dog in the lower bottom of the screen is sorely missed.