Cinematographer Gregory Oke, whose credits include Charlotte Wells’s astonishing debut Aftersun, recently made his first foray into music video. His clip for Will Epstein’s “Golden” is unexpected, a pulsing, sinuous work of animation in which he hand-scratched film negative as well as shot the singer and then treated the resulting footage in similarly analogue ways. Watch the video above, and read below statements from both Epstein and Oke. “When I met Greg, I could tell right away he was a kindred spirit even though all the points of our shared aesthetic sensibility weren’t immediately known to us. Naturally, I was […]

An ambitious series of 11 music videos accompanied the new Parquet Courts album, Sympathy for Life, and as the band’s Sean Yeaton writes here in an email, the band has opened up the viewing possibilities behind the original live distribution: In the spirit of miracles, I thought I’d bring up a recent one in PC history, where we somehow incredibly (with the help of so many of our talented friends and colleagues) produced 11 new music videos–one for every song on Sympathy For Life. Until now the only way to see them was a live stream event that I successfully managed […]

Filmmaker Leah Shore — a 25 New Face who contributed an illustration to Joanne McNeil’s Speculations column last issue — has directed a music video for the band The Malpractice. With pink curtains, green shag wallpaper and cardboard broccoli, the video features Sarah Ellen Stephens, who stars in Shore’s recent short film, Puss, and film critic and programmer Aaron Hillis in a playfully menacing infantilism scenario that Shore shot entirely in her own apartment. Check it out above.

David Lynch directs as well as plays on a new video from Scottish songwriter and performer Donovan. The director is credited with “unique Modal Guitar Textures and effects” on the track, which, in a statement posted to Facebook by Donovan, came together quickly: It was all impromptu. I visited the studio and David said … “Sit at the mics with your guitar Don.” David in same room behind control desk with my Linda. He had asked me to only bring in a song just emerging, not anywhere near finished. We would see what happens. It happened! I composed extempore … […]

Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]

New York independent filmmaker Onur Tukel, whose work we have covered quite a bit at Filmmaker, has directed a music video of a song by the anti-folk singer Jamie Block. It’s a small-scale city symphony that speaks to our compulsion to distract ourselves when in the most public of spaces. Block’s new record comes out tomorrow, and, as a preview, the folks at sonaBLAST! Records have sent it along with this press statement: Jamie Block is a New York City based singer-songwriter who is known for his ramshackle, genre bending music. In the 1990’s, he busked, skylarked, and chain smoked […]

It’s been over a decade since Richard James released a storied string of Aphex Twin music videos, including the fiendish hip-hop musical extravaganza Windowlicker (directed by Chris Cunningham and embedded below). But, today, a surprise new video dropped from James’ upcoming EP, Cheetah, and it revisits several classic Aphex Twin tropes — namely, kids and disconcerting James’ masks. In fact, the director is a kid — 12-year-old Ryan Wyer of Rush County, Dublin. Check out “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]” above.

When actress-turned-director Olivia Wilde signed on to direct No Love Like Yours, the latest video from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, she knew she wanted to shoot the project on an iPhone for both financial and stylistic reasons. But her DP, Reed Morano (who directed Wilde in last year’s Meadowland), a self-described film snob, initially resisted, fearing the quality would be sub-par. But eventually, Morano came around to the idea of shooting on an iPhone 6S Plus along with a makeshift camera rig and the Filmic Pro app, the anamorphic adapter which was used to shoot Tangerine. In the resulting 6-minute video, lead singer Alex […]

“I might be a black Bill Gates in the making….” There’s a lot going on in Formation, the new single and music video surprised-released by Beyonce this afternoon. Hurricane Katrina, Black Lives Matter, the antebellum-era American South. Oh, yeah, and Red Lobster in one perversely profane lyric. Plus, the last shot is a fantastic riff on what is a pretty familiar indie-film trope — the actress submerging her face in a bathtub. I’ve been searching around and can’t find a director credit but will add if I come across it. You can download the song for free here.

What was that Godard (or Griffith) line, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and…”? Lana Del Rey’s latest music video, “High by the Beach,” has just dropped, and it’s got a kind of Zabriskie Point-era Antonioni meets Andy Sidaris thing going on, with lovely handheld camerawork, a trendily minimal beachside house location (“no” production design is the new production design) and a blast of a finish.

Accompanying the first track of the anticipated collaboration, Soused, between avant-garde crooner Scott Walker and sludgy noisemeisters Sunn O))) is an arresting short film by French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Walker’s music — with or without Sunn O))) — is the stuff of waking nightmares, and Vienne’s dream-like film matches it fuzzed-out chord by fuzzed-out chord. A house in the mountains, a blonde-tressed woman moving in slow-motion epilepsy; a teenage boy (her son?) locked in tremulous horror; a car crash?; and a sudden appearance by French novelist, theater artist and dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet… it’s eerie, disquieting, and, with its […]

This video has already blown up everywhere, and if you’re like me, you might have ignored the countless posts and recommendations filling up your Facebook walls. Mistake. It really is something, spectacularly choreographed by Ryan Heffington and directed by Sia herself and Daniel Askill. The video features 11-year-old Maddie Ziegler, found on the reality show Dance Moms, in a wig referencing the singer but also, you can’t help but flash on, Daryl Hannah’s Bladerunner character. Ziegler’s dancing is thrilling, and the song itself is a monster, with its big chorus and Sia’s vocal pyrotechnics kicking in unexpectedly and breaktakingly early. […]

Screenings have just kicked off in Manhattan for the Tribeca Film Festival, but as always not all the films are showing in theaters–and there’s more available online this year than ever before. Here’s a quick guide to what you can see and how to see it. Streaming select titles: Four feature films and four shorts will be online after their initial theatrical screenings this week and next; they’ll also be eligible for an audience choice award with prize money totaling $15,000. All of Tribeca’s online material discussed below, including these eight films, is available at http://tribecafilm.com/online. The short films include: * Love in […]

For the video to their single “We Are Explorers,” Cut Copy paired with the Tokyo-New York creative lab Party to relate the tale of a couple of 3-D printed night owls. Cinematographer Sesse Lind shot roughly 200 figurines, printed from a yellow, UV-reactive filament, under black light flashlights, only at night, to achieve the desired effects. The result is downsized nocturnal epic whose scale belies its ambitions. To accompany the release, the creative team packaged a BitTorrent Bundle that includes the musical track, the video and the 3-D printing files, so that fans can craft and upload their own versions. With the […]

Director Matthew Riggieri and d.p. Michael Patrick O’Leary set a camera in concrete to film the music video for Bosley’s “Just Like You.” Then, they left it there for nine months, and built an outhouse on top of it, so that no one could steal it. With its quick cuts, the result isn’t a time lapse per se, but it does give you some idea of the changing seasons.

If you want a quick crash course in music video today — its looks, styles, and assorted tropes — you could do a lot worse than spend seven minutes watching this stream from Beyoncé’s YouTube channel, which begins with the first 30 seconds of every video made for the singer’s surprise, self-titled release. (It just appeared on iTunes last night with no advance publicity.) Living up to her workaholic reputation, Beyoncé has made what look to be lavishly produced, cinematically striking and conceptually varied videos for every song on what she calls her “visual album.” A track list with directors […]

Credit Bob Dylan and a 48-year-old song for the best music video of the moment. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan and co. create a channel-hopping interactive experience in which no two viewings are the same. Click through 16 different channels to watch various TV presenters, reality-show folk, celebrities and, oh yeah, Dylan himself, lip-sync to the song. From the press release: Nearly a half-century later, a groundbreaking interactive project has been created for the song, allowing fans to experience the classic recording in unprecedented ways. Celebrities and reality stars are featured throughout the various channels including cameos by Drew […]

Here’s Mark Romanek’s first music video in a decade or so, a capturing of Jay Z’s recent performance art event at Pace Gallery, where he performed the single “Picasso Baby” for six hours straight. Shot by 25 New Face Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene), it features an all-star cast of participatory spectators, including, first and foremost, artist Marina Abramovic, whose own The Artist is Present performance it was clearly inspired by. Others include Judd Apatow, Adam Driver, Jim Jarmusch, Marilyn Minter, Rose Lee Goldberg, Fab Five Freddy, Rosie Perez (dancing!), George Condo, Jemima Kirke, Alan Cumming and Radical […]

Filmmaker Braden King has made a hauntingly beautiful, web-only “interactive music video” for “Stitches,” the new single from Califone. In real time, the video pulls and sequences images from a curated selection of Tumblrs, sidescrolling them across your monitor in sync to the song’s elegant melancholy. Black-and-white photos and animated GIFs drift by, and by highlighting one with your cursor color bleeds back in. Click and the image flips over, allowing you to write a caption that is then sent to the band (and included on the “Stitches” home page) or, if you want, reblogged. Califone’s Tim Rutili and King are […]

David Lynch may be mostly retired from filmmaking these days, but here he is in Paul Sharits/Tony Conrad mode with a music video that comes with an epilepsy warning. If you are non-epileptic, turn the speakers up, the lights down and enjoy David Lynch’s video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Come Back Haunted.”