Breakthrough Artist: Is it the Musician or the Music Video Director?

Back when music videos were just getting cool, we admirers often waited in anticipation for the latest Bjork video or R.E.M. spot, looking to our favorite musicians for inspired creations that embodied their tunes and pushed the boundaries of the visual medium.

Then we discovered the existence of music video directors—that there were actually filmmakers helping to bring these artists' imaginings into a 3-D world. For the in-the-know crowd, it was these new auteurs that captured our interest, from Spike Jonze to Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry to Mark Romanek, Anton Corbijn to Jonathan Glazer. They introduced some of us to musical artists we'd never listened to before, expanding not just our visual registers, but our auditory ones, as well.

I was reminded of this trajectory after catching Michel Gondry's latest video for Beck's "Cellphone's Dead," available for viewing on the website FEED. It's another puzzling, dream-like clip from Gondry, a master of manipulated space and inanimate objects doing things they don't normally do.

But let's not forget, it's the musicians who are the source of the material. Beck has a long history of groundbreaking videos, much of it available online. Motion Theory's award-winning video for Beck's "Girl" cleverly plays with divided spaces that recall those old kids' magazines whose pages, when folded together, create an entirely new picture. Then there's Beck's strange "Hell Yes" video, featuring a rhythmic choreography of dancing advanced Sony robots, a favorite of technophiles everywhere.

There's also a lot of anticipation around the video for Beck's forthcoming video for his single "Nausea," directed by Patrick Daughters (see more from Daughters at RSA Film's Black Dog Films). And so, we come full circle: From Gondry to Beck to Daughters, and then to Beck again, only to discover another filmmaker, with a talent entirely his own.