In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we take a look at several music videos directed by Timur Bekmambetov.
I rarely discuss tie-in music videos, music videos that are made to accompany a feature. Not because I am against them, but because I think the main reason for the existence of the Sound and Vision is the disparity between a filmmaker's output in music videos and features. If a music video is already tied into a feature, there is not much more for me to say or compare. Rarely is there something interesting to add.
Enter Timur Bekmambetov. He made many music videos early in his career, mostly for the singer Chicherina. But it is, for a change, the case that I have the most to say about three music video tie-ins for Bekmambetov's own features, that highlight some of the more idiosyncratic tendencies in Bekmambatov's work.
The director of films like Day Watch, Night Watch, Wanted and the most recent remake of Ben-Hur, started his career with the Russian swords and sandals/ women in prison-mashup Arena, a throwback to exploitation pieces from decades earlier, starring the aforementioned Chicherina. She also provided the credit-song, called Doroga. The music video for Doroga (see below) is an odd duck. It is the credit song, playing out over the credits, but intercut with clips from the film, and shots of Chicherina performing the song while the credits are projected over her face. It is an odd mix between a trailer, a music-video tie-in and a credit roll. It shouldn't work, but it is utterly compelling, especially in its connection to a late-career obsession of Bekmambetov. As the interplay of faces in close-up and the projection of typography over those faces, seems like a pre-amble to his modern Screenlife-project.
Screenlife was an invention of Bekmambetov, who as a producer and director has made a few movies in which the whole premise is the film playing out on computer and phone screens. Hence the prevalence of close-up of faces, over the likes of Teams and Zoom, in backdrops full of typefaces and apps full of text messages. It is not that hard to connect the imagery in films like Mercy and Profile (directed by Bekmambetov) or Searching, Unfriended and Missing (all produced by him), to the visuals in Doroga.
The music video for Linkin Park's Powerless (also below) s also interesting, in that it acts more like a trailer, than a tie-in music video, even going as far as to have the release date and the film title (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) at the end of the video. Here again, it is the use of typography that is noticeable, using lines written in blood-ink as a unifying theme in the video, connecting the concert footage of Linkin Park with some of the bigger setpieces from the film. Make no mistake, this is an advert, but so are all tie-in music videos (and in some way music videos at large). Powerless is Bekmambetov being a bit more honest about it. And he knows how to sell his big images. You could say that is the only thing that Bekmambatov seems to care about in his films, where the likes of Day Watch, Night Watch, Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter are less story-driven than set piece-driven.
Still, it is undeniable Bekmambatov is an auteur, having his own themes and imagery popping up again and again, even having his penchant for quirky typography show up in subtitles with enhanced special effects on the now out of print original Night Watch DVD. Example of what that looks like is for example the subtitles flying off the screen as particles of dust, in scenes where that would be fitting.
Other thematic concerns are the idea of a powerful shadowy elite guiding the history of the world (which shows up in Day Watch, Night Watch, Wanted and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter), the idea of predestined fate (see Wanted, Ben-Hur, Night Watch and Day Watch and his Russian romantic comedy series about serendipity on new years eve, called Yol), copaganda (Mercy, Profile, Wanted, Day Watch, Night Watch), his willingness to experiment with form like aspect ratio, subtitling and special effects rendering; and an all together conservative streak that is present in his movies.
The latter two show up in the last tie-in music video, for Till Lindemann's Lubimiy Gorod,(finally below) for the film Devyataev. Devyataev is a war propaganda piece about heroism, full of patriotic jingoism, some of which you can see in the tie-in music video, which plays out as a very old-fashioned old-timey performance of a famous nationalistic song. That Till Lindemann, the now-cancelled frontman of Rammstein, has himself something of a controversial nationalistic streak (albeit steeped in irony) in his work, only adds to the semi-conservative sentiment of the music video. The more interesting part is the way in which the video interpolates clips of the aerial dogfights in the movie in a way that is seamless. Those dogfights are part of a larger visual experimentation in Devyataev, as they were rendered in a game engine, so being more akin to machinima then computer-animated special effects. The aspect-ratio itself was also more experimental, as it was filmed in a portrait aspect ratio, making it the world's "first vertical blockbuster" (Bekmambetov's own words).
Ever the salesman, it is a good marketing technique, if the film was widely available in most countries. It isn't. Nor is Night Watch or Day Watch easily findable, especially with the enhanced subtitles. And Arena is also very hard to find. Which goes to prove that you can sell the shit out of your product, be it with tie-in-music-video-trailer hybrids, but if the film itself is hard to find... What use is it? In the case of Arena and Devyataev the tie-in music video was even the only art-piece available to me, which is on another level of irony. I find something quite funny about that, the derivative outlasting the thing it is derived from.