Directors Label Series 1 DVD
dir. Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham
Palm Pictures

Directors have their priorities. Movie directors serve the narrative. Avant garde directors seek academic respect. Commercial directors have clients to worry about. Music video directors, however, just have to be cool. A clever idea, well executed, means that the song or the band will stick in viewers' heads, and while that fundamentally affects record company profits, on an artistic level it's purely an exercise in cool. Directors Label, a new series of DVDs collecting the works of music video directors, plunges itself so deeply into the videos of its inaugural subjects that it makes coolness seem almost noble — and yet succeeds best when reaching beyond coolness for something more.

The cachet of music videos was something DVDs latched onto early. Back when Best Buy was still considering whether to carry the format, a collection of Björk videos, Volumen, was a staple of any DVD library. On that disc and its later installments, you'll immediately notice three directors — Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham — whose videos stand out as conceptually witty, visually arresting or both. You could also find their videos on collections for Daft Punk and the Beastie Boys, but not until Directors Label has anyone taken the extra step of presenting the videos by director rather than by musical artist. In doing so, Palm Pictures really allows the idea of video director as auteur to take hold.

Directors Label excels in two critical ways: consistency and quantity. The DVDs have menus overseen by each director — Jonze has a dancing mailbox and scribbled notes; Gondry lists his videos on children's art sets; Cunningham uses jarring jump cuts and noisy sound bites. Touches like that, or the accompanying booklets art-directed by each subject, convey the directors' personalities: Jonze is clever and unswerving; Gondry is surreal and intricate; Cunningham is disturbing and polished. The wonderful thing about these DVDs is that they allow for an immersion into each director's style. That's a pretty impressive feat considering the eclectic mix of music on each disc.

Jonze's style is simple and clear. He'll take a single idea or stylistic trick and see it to its logical conclusion. His video for the Pharcyde's "Drop" uses a favorite technique among post-"Twin Peaks" video and horror directors: filming motion backward and playing it forward. Jonze doesn't cut away, he doesn't wink, he just finds the fun variations in the technique and plays them out. For the Chemical Brothers' "Electrobank," Jonze's wife-to-be Sofia Coppola plays a gymnast performing her routine. That's it. No CGI flair needed. The scene's kinetic and narrative power is enough to match the energy of the music. (Especially with the Karate Kid-esque ankle sprain and blonde villain.)

With these clever ideas and diligent follow-through, Jonze makes videos that are more culturally important/innovative than they are artistically grand. The Beastie Boys running in cop mustaches and the Torrance Community Dance Group flailing outside a movie theater are kind of sloppy fun. Nonetheless, "Sabotage" and "Praise You" both made a huge impact on music videos. Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" are simple concepts carried out so well that they will play forever on video channels.

Jonze's only truly polished video is the flying Christopher Walken video, "Weapon of Choice," which, interestingly, is the only one on the DVD made after he started his feature film career. Strangely, talk of Jonze's amazing full-length movies, or his connection to the guerilla theater of "Jackass," is rather sparse on a DVD collecting his works. Instead, the DVD offers his short films and lightweight documentaries. "How They Got There," a short about tennis shoes and flirtation, is fun and wily, but the rest of the home video-like extras just can't compete with the videos. Even Jonze himself seems to take a supporting role to the videos, avoiding screen time and only genuinely coming through in interviews in the DVD's accompanying booklet.

Michel Gondry, on the other hand, puts himself center stage in his DVD. He introduces the disc, plays drums in the menu and even includes an autobiographical documentary shot specifically for this collection. The two-disc set feels like a personal journal and scrapbook, letting the viewer into director's life. His family is there, his girlfriend, his inventions, his videos, his short films. And while sometimes knowing so much about an artist can be reductive, the more Gondry explains each piece, the more meaning they take on.

Gondry's style is split between two worlds, one of childlike dreams and one of sophisticated patterns. Some videos are straight dream imagery — Bjork's "Human Behavior" with its living teddy bear, the Foo Fighter's "Everlong" with its log nunchakus and oversized hand. Some videos are just intricate patterns — Daft Punk's "Around the World" interweaves choreographed dancers representing each instrument, while Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" adds loops of street scenes over each other. When Gondry combines the dreams and patterns, though, he gets the most amazing results. "Bachelorette" has Bjork acting out a surreal story within a story within a story. The Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be" switches between a woman's regular life and kaleidoscopic dance numbers.

One of Gondry's favorite techniques is, itself, a blend of the two worlds. Stop-motion animation has both the magical quality of dreams and the technical precision of patterns. It comes up again and again, from his early videos for the French group Oui Oui — "Les Cailloux" has a claymation version of the band throwing rocks that sprout into ships and log cabins — to his most recent videos — "Fell in Love With a Girl" models the White Stripes as Lego blocks. This balance of joyfulness and organization makes Gondry's videos so rich. Where Jonze's are messy but perfectly suited for their moment, Gondry's are stylistically grand yet timeless in their childlike wonder.

Where Gondry's videos are innocent dreams, Chris Cunningham's are informed nightmares. Cunningham's videos are arty, serious exercises in the horrific or the disquieting. He hits one or two horror notes again and again in his videos, principally our psychological aversion to crossing or merging boundaries. For instance, his video for Aphex Twins' "Come to Daddy" puts musician Richard D. James' head on children's bodies. He cribs from himself for the band's later video "Windowlicker," this time using James' head on bikinied models. The beautiful and sensual Bjork video "All is Full of Love" fuses human and machine as one robot builds itself a lover. All this horror is a powerful tool in the hands of Cunningham, who creates hugely memorable, though unpleasant, images.

Closer to avant garde films than the videos of Jonze or Gondry, Cunningham's videos demand respect rather than inviting laughter or empathy. And they earn a lot of that respect through sheer technical proficiency. Cunningham is a master of post-production special effects. He uses effects to create upsetting organic images a la David Fincher, though where Fincher uses dirty yellows and negative bleeds, Cunningham uses steely grays and lens flares. His videos are stark and cold and feel thoroughly modern. That's partly because his high production values never hint at how the effect was created, and therefore never break the illusion.

It's just too bad that there isn't more of that production discussed on the Cunningham disc. With only one disc compared to two each for Jonze and Gondry, the Cunningham DVD seems empty, not just because it includes fewer music videos, but because it includes so little content overall. No commentaries, a couple of quick commercials and a bleeped version of "Windowlicker" do not a collection make. The director includes an excerpt (an excerpt!) from his video installation, Flex. The interviews in his accompanying booklet are chopped short to make room for tempting photos of videos not included on the disc. Not that anyone could stomach much more time watching limbs fall off as in Leftfield's "Afrika Shox," or listening to much more Aphex Twin music, or God forbid, seeing another Madonna video. But there's room, and need, for content that shows how Cunningham creates the effects he does.

The Cunningham disc might seem more impressive if it weren't released in the same series as the other two DVDs, especially the Gondry one. That disc brims with behind-the-scenes explanations and endearing insights into the mind of the director. Gondry's autobiographical documentary I've Been Twelve Forever, which tracks his working life and inspiration across both sides of the DVD, is exactly what the entire series should shoot for. It's self-effacing, funny, honest and interesting. Interviews with his mother, recreations of his experiments and sound bites from musicians could have come across as conceited, but instead feel confessional and vulnerable. It only highlights the distance from the artist felt on the Cunningham DVD and, to a lesser but still present extent, on the Jonze DVD.

Michel Gondry's contribution to the Directors Label series proves that coolness isn't just about clever concepts or hip images. There has to be an earnestness involved, a desire to bring other people into your artistic vision. That earnestness must be part of Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham as well, or they wouldn't be able to make such intriguing, affecting works of art, but the discs they created mostly express cool detachment. It's a disappointment … but a ton of great music videos is a fine consolation prize.

— Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)