The cinema of music

Spike JONZE hardly sounds like a pioneer, much less an auteur, when he speaks about music videos.

Instead of trying to defend music videos as a filmmaking art or a cultural document, Jonze talks like a kid recounting the best scenes in his comic book collection: “Did you see that video with Joan Collins taking a bath? That’s just perfect.” (Video: Badly Drawn Boy’s “Give Me Something.”) “Do you remember that video where it goes from a single-cell organism to a fat man? That was amazing.” (Video: Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now.”) “Did you see the video [director] Roman Coppola did for Phoenix? Man, you have to track that one down.” (Video: “Funky Squaredance.”)

But Jonze’s giddiness does point to the real significance of the art form: Some people are just plain nuts about music videos from a filmmaking perspective. The first in the new “Directors Label” DVD series, which will be released Tuesday, is the prize for those devotees. The first director-centric music video compilation assembles the work of Jonze, who created groundbreaking videos for the Beastie Boys, Bjork and Wax before directing feature films such as “Adaptation,” along with that of Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham.

If music videos indeed are the cineaste medium for the short-attention-span generation, the series will leave fans jonesing for more.

“I love discovering a video that has less to do with being a video and more with being a complete creative entity -- I just get really, really excited,” says Jonze, whose own videos have been routinely described as such, from the seamless “Happy Days” time warp of the Weezer video “Buddy Holly” to Christopher Walken’s light-footed fantasia in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.”

Jonathan Wells, director of the alternative filmmaking festival Resfest, says that the sellout crowds at Resfest’s music video programs can attest to the burgeoning audience for more adventurous music video filmmaking. But Wells thinks it’s more important to recognize the directors inaugurating this DVD series.

“We’ve always viewed music videos as an art form, and these three directors make art,” Wells says. “You have kids who used to want to be George Lucas. Now they want to be Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham.”

People working in the industry are especially aware of these names. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re the most innovative music video directors of our time,” says music video executive producer Sheira Rees-Davies of Anonymous Content, which represents such directors as David Fincher and Mark Romanek, who will be the next focus of the “Directors Label” in January. “They’ve influenced music videos so much.”

But many of these videos, particularly from France’s Gondry and England’s Cunningham, have rarely been seen by a general American public, since a video’s artistic merit doesn’t automatically qualify it for MTV rotation. These directors often work with nonmainstream music artists, which limits their U.S. exposure.

“We’ve drawn huge crowds for our music video programs because people want to see this stuff, but they can’t see it on TV,” says Wells. “Now fans can collect this work on DVD, and there’s another source of revenue for more risk-taking work.”

Gondry, who has directed multiple videos for Bjork and the White Stripes, has a playful, witty style that’s similar to Jonze’s, though Gondry is considered the most technically innovative of the three. (Gondry’s camera technique in the Rolling Stone video “Like a Rolling Stone” was the inspiration behind the so-called bullet time effect popularized by the movie “The Matrix.”)

“When I first saw his Cibo Matto video,” says Jonze, “I literally had to watch it six times just to try to comprehend it.” The video, for “Sugar Water,” is what Gondry calls a “visual palindrome,” and if Jonze needed six viewings to comprehend the video, there’s no use trying to explain it here. “It’s spooky that he can work on this level,” Jonze says.

Gondry, who’s currently editing his second feature film, “Eternal Sunshine on a Spotless Mind” (starring Jim Carrey), credits record labels that allow him full control over the video’s concept. Many times labels will insist that their artists be shot in some type of performance sequence as a standard marketing tool -- a convention that Gondry finds tiresome.

“I never liked videos that cut back and forth between the performance and a story that has nothing to do with the performance,” Gondry says. “If I shoot the band or the artist, they have to be part of the story.”

That’s why Gondry, as well as Cunningham, has had a successful time working with electronic music artists. “On Chemical Brothers videos [‘Let Forever Be’ and ‘Star Guitar’], I was able to reach a complete abstraction,” Gondry says. “The fact that we didn’t have to show a drum or a guitar allowed for a different expression.”

As for Cunningham, Gondry calls him “completely insane,” but says his visual work is so precise that he makes the music “look like it was done after the images.”

Working with his usual interests -- science and multiplicity -- Cunningham directed one of Bjork’s best videos, “All Is Full of Love,” where identical Bjork androids with lubed sprockets fall in love. But Cunningham’s reel, which includes videos for Madonna (“Frozen”) and Portishead (“Only You”), is better known for its eerie nightmares.

With the increase of music video DVDs, Internet sites, film festivals and channels such as Much Music and MTV’s slightly edgier cousin MTV2 (which will air a special program on the “Directors Label” series on Saturday), the good news is that there are more outlets for music video viewing these days, which means finding alternatives to MTV’s loop of booty quakes and shiny cars has never been easier. The bad news is that most record labels are hurting during this economic downturn, which cuts into video budgets.

But Rees-Davies sees some good may come of this in the long run. “It’s tough for directors right now,” she says, “but at the same time I hope [the tighter budgets] are going to force younger directors to come up with some low-fi, low-cost, really conceptual ideas.

“That’s the way Spike came up.”