Making a “film” today rarely involves a journey to the lab as images are more often recorded digitally and not on celluloid. Even video’s electromagnetic record is transformed to bits and bytes. There is no frame to splice. The visual material exists as a virtual reference only. As McLuhan points out, new media doesn’t replace the old, existing media, but changes it. Theorists often point to the photograph and its impact on the painting. A similar event was the emergence of video technology and its ensuing relationship with film, a relationship whose differences have become increasingly transparent.

Looking at the work of Adam K. Beckett offers an opportunity to examine the dialogue between these technologies during the 1970s and to consider the relationship between avant-garde filmmaking and experimental animation. He is an artist whose work deserves to be reconsidered in the ongoing discussion of animation and media art. His animation, unlike that of many of his colleagues, was steeped in process and technical innovation, a proclivity akin to those filmmakers whose paramount concern was the structure and material of film, and video artists who were exploring the electronic signal of video.

Adam Beckett was nationally recognized as a new emerging talent in experimental animation in the 1970s.¹ He was in the inaugural class of the California Institute of the Arts, which opened its doors in 1970, and while there made six groundbreaking films: Dear Janice, Evolution of the Red Star, Heavy-Light, Flesh Flows, Sausage City, and Kitsch in Synch. His animations were screened alongside experimental films but resisted fitting into any specific film theory that was being touted during that time.

Read more… »

Music videos have been being made since the mid 1960s and had their breakthrough in the mid 1970s. Since then it has been the main marketing tool for breaking new pop and rock artists in the international market. When MTV opened on August 1st 1981 by showing the video Video Killed the Radio Star (Russel Mulcahy, 1979) it was prophetic programming. Within a couple of years MTV was the main source for an artist to reach the American market. The enormous success of Michael Jackson and Madonna in the 1980s was at least partly caused by their clever use of the music video medium. Since then almost all pop and rock artists have music videos. The prestige of the medium has been variable, since the first golden period in the 1980s to the subsequent loss of this prestige in the 1990s. However new dance music, rap and hip hop have continued to use it extensively, and there is a new attention given to the videos in the last 10 years, both as an underground phenomenon, an internet medium and as traditional advertising for popular music.

While animated images to music have been made all through film history, the animated music video did not arrive until the mid 1980s with highlights like Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Take on Me by A-ha. They initiated what I call the first golden age of animated music video. Many of the best and most celebrated music videos are animated. I believe there is a correlation between animation and music video quality. Sledgehammer and Take on Me are always high on lists of ‘best music videos ever’. Many of the other videos on the top of such lists are animated as well. In the first part of this essay I will discuss the surprisingly late arrival of the animated music video and the quality of the animated music videos of the late 1980s.

In the 1990s, when the prestige of the music video format declined, the animated music videos virtually disappeared. In the last decade they have come back with magnificent animated music videos by directors and producers like Michel Gondry, Jonas Odell, Jonathan Dayton/Valerie Faris, Shynola and H5. The last part of this essay will discuss these new animated music videos and compare them with the ‘classic’ videos of the first golden age.
Using a triangle model for analyses of music videos (Strøm 1989, Strøm 1995) an argument will be made that both groups of golden age videos belong to the concept kind of music videos (as different from concert and collage videos) and where the directors (more than the artists or the record companies) are the major creative reason for the success of the videos.

Read more… »