Michel Gondry: A New Surrealist
(First written for EL 116: The Common Critic, in December 2006.)
You should start paying more attention to Michel Gondry.
This French director – slight-framed, boyish, sporting a goofy grin – may be breathing new life into an old artistic genre, quietly, through quirky music videos and easy-to-miss indie films.
Among mainstream moviegoers, Gondry is best known for his direction of 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the story of two lovers who undergo a procedure to erase each other from their memories. The bulk of the movie takes place in the memory of one of the lovers, Joel, as he realizes in the middle of the procedure that he doesn’t want to lose his memories of Clementine, and so tries to will himself into remembering her. Gondry presents a stunning image of memory— as tender, dangerous, precious — with an emotional precision that hasn’t been seen in a while. It is a beautiful movie, and touchingly human, but can’t be looked to for Gondry’s most definitive work: with a production full of such shining stars as Charlie Kaufmann (screenwriter), Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey (leading actors), it would be nearly impossible for this movie not to be good.
It is Gondry’s music videos – for which he is virtually unknown outside a knowledgeable few – that truly showcase his talent and innovative genius. There are the simple optical treats – The White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button to Button,” in which the image of two people depicted in three colors is stamped in repetitive patterns all over a city landscape, or Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World,” in which a simple record of the singer’s day turns into a visual mess of duplicates and collisions. Then there are the heady daydreams, the literate upside-down experiments, like Beck’s “Deadweight” or Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water.” In these pieces, Gondry turns the world inside out in a calculated way – Beck’s shadow drags him along the sidewalk while he sings up at us; he walks down the street as someone carries his car along next to him. In these pieces, Gondry shows us the contents of his conscious mind as if he is turning out his pockets: This is what I’ve got, he seems to be saying, It doesn’t really matter if you like it, because I do. Then there are his darker pieces, his fluid, emotional pieces that evoke the hazy sensuality of a nighttime dream world. Bjork’s “Bachelorette” is perhaps the best example of this: while the six-minute video tells a very specific story in some semblance of a traditionally structured narrative, its emphasis of emotion over events and its eerie vagueness – set, of course, to the pulsing foreboding of the music and Bjork’s hauntingly passionate voice – leave the viewer with the sensation of having woken up from a particularly stunning nightmare.
The thing about Michel Gondry is that you never know how seriously to take him. Is there some hidden message in all of this, a profound maxim to glean from the visual candy that he offers up? Well, maybe not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
In 1924, a young artist and theorist named Andre Breton published a “Manifesto of Surrealism.” In it, he proposes the creation of a new kind of reality, a surreality, that resolves “these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality.” He claimed that this new genre of art, surrealism, would release experience from the confines of its logical and rational limitations. Experience “paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge,” Breton wrote.
Michel Gondry might just be the first true surrealist filmmaker. Filmmaker Luis Bunuel is often called surrealist; surrealist Salvador Dali sometimes dabbled in filmmaking. But both were just experimenting with ways to express the same ideas through a different medium. 1929’s “Un Chien Andalou,” a collaborative work by Dali and Buñuel, is a perfect example. In it, a blind woman encounters a severed hand in the street; a man drags two pianos containing dead donkeys, tablets of the Ten Commandments, and priests; ants emerge from various parts of people’s bodies. While these are unquestionably surrealist images, they are strung together like a series of paintings that happen to have the power of motion.
On the other hand, Gondry’s work is surrealist through and through. The plots of his two feature-length films — “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” in which Joel travels through his memory to preserve his time with his former lover, and “The Science of Sleep,” in which Stéphane cannot distinguish between his dreams and the real world — are all about fusing conscious reality with the subconscious world of dreams and thought. He uses the technologies of modern film as well as his own creative artistry to show us the contents of his subconscious – and ours – in a way we have never seen before. After watching one of Gondry’s films, the viewer often thinks, “I think I’ve had that dream before.”
Of course, Gondry’s challenge is a unique one. When surrealism first emerged in the late 1920s, the world seemed to be either black or white, either real or imagined. Breton’s proposal of a new sort of reality that wasn’t quite either but lay somewhere in between was shocking and exciting. Now, as our favorite actors stay in character off screen and real people participate in contrived situations on TV, we have accepted as the status quo a blurred line between reality and imagination. Gondry exploits the blurriness between the three levels of reality he’s working with – dreams, reality, and film reality – by teasing them apart and tying them back together in unexpected ways.
He releases experience from its cage by showing us clearly the boundaries of its cage. Salvador Dali is sometimes accused of kitschiness in his paintings as if it’s an insult. Michel Gondry uses kitsch to his advantage, to show the falseness of the dream world – and more subtly, the film world – even as he tries to create a new reality. In “The Science of Sleep,” for example, many of the props are made like elementary school art projects, from live animals made out of brightly colored felt and clumsy stitches to a boat that moves on cellophane water.
But for all this talk of surrealism, Gondry is far from the dark mustachioed genius of Dali or the acerbic brilliance of Breton. Instead of dark and tortured, with open-clawed tigers and naked women and spindly-legged beasts of burden, Gondry’s brand of surrealism is simple, and almost childlike, with an impeccable sense of playfulness. Of his work, he says things like this: “When I work with Bjork, she’ll come up with 60% or more of the ideas. I don’t care. I would be stupid to refuse all of this amazing stuff coming into my head. … We can build something very rich and diverse because we don’t have to explain everything.” Or this – in a small booklet that comes with his DVD, full of drawings and photos and stories about his work, there is also the following: “There is not much sexy stuff in my videos and people probably think it’s because I’m nerdy and shy. Which is half-true. I’m shy. But I’m not uninterested. I like girls. They are beautiful with their bottoms and boobs and all.” Some of his short pieces, far from being surrealist masterpieces, are just silly, like David Cross as one of Gondry’s turds trying to get him to love it, or Jim Carrey, dressed in blue-and-yellow airplane pajamas, riding up to a gas station in a bed on wheels while singing about pecan pie in a goofy Elvis impersonation.
Perhaps the best part about Gondry’s work is that, as tempting as it is to try to categorize and understand, it needs no label to be enjoyed. His work is many things, all at once. It is playful and whimsical and amazingly imaginative; it is also haunting and powerful and eerie. It is honest, and intensely personal, and always a portrait of emotions rather than a narrative to be dissected and analyzed. It is visually pleasing: colorful, layered and dizzingly creative. Gondry uses everything at his disposal, from handmade props to actors’ bodies to computer-generated camera effects, and the result is a cinematic salad; everything, all in there, all mixed up together.
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