Michel Gondry Director Study

Gondry is a French director who works in both film and music video.

He started his career making music videos for the French band “Oui Oui”

He pioneered the “bullet time” technique used in the Matrix.

Gondry has collaborated with; Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, White Stripes, Beck, Bjork and Radiohead and has recently directed film The Green Hornet.

Gondry is most known for his manipulation of mise-en-scene in his work. An example of this is in the film “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” Where Jim Carey plays the main protagonist. The locaton constantly changes around him showing Gondry's manipulation of mise-en-scene. Another example is in his music video for the Chemical Brothers song, Star Guitar, where images of landscape are effortlessly blended into each other and repeated to create the effect of one area.

White Stripes Fell In Love With A Girl

This music video is a stock motion, animation video. It uses Lego to construct a representation of a performance by the awful band, The White Stripes. It includes close-ups of the band, probably because the record label asked for them. This is another example of Gondry manipulating the mise-en-scene of a music video. He does this by changing the costumes and actors into Lego. This is based on a real performance which has been transferred over into the art of Lego.

Cibbo Matto Sugar Water

This music video is not a stock motion video. It uses a split screen where we see two of the band members. This is an unusual video because one side of the screen starts playing backwards, while the other plays forward, then at midpoint of the music video the two swap roles, with the other playing backwards and the first playing forwards.

They use visual representations of the lyrics. For example we see one of them pouring sugar on their hair while the other is in the shower. The video is meant to look like a continuous shot and it is mainly at a mid shot angle of the two band members through out.

This is another example of Michel Gondry manipulating the use of mise-en-scene by playing around with the props, visuals and framing. He plays with the framing by making a distinct confusion between either of the sides and makes the audience active by forcing them to try figure out what is happening.

I also went to see The Green Hornet recently. It was a really interesting film because, as he's more experienced in music videos, he looked differently at the effects and the basic directing of a film than other directors. He used slo mo and colours really well, for example, he used the Sin City effect whilst one of the characters was under pressure.