Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry Music Videos

Come Into My World – Music Video – Kylie Minogue

This video features pop singer Kylie Minogue strolling around a city block in the suburb of Paris, France. Each time she completes a circuit of the area, a new Kylie emerges from one of the stores (who is in fact the ‘old’ or original Minogue that did the circuit the first time around), also each people in the background are duplicated in slightly different positions. The video concludes with four unperturbed Minogue’s amidst an extremely chaotic scene with each background extra also depicted four times, the video ends as a fifth Minogue emerges from the shop.
Fifty extras were used and it took over fifteen takes to create the desired effect. Fifteen days were required for the video’s special effects.

The music video reminds me of an animation film created by Zbigniew Rybczynski called ‘Tango’. The setting is in a living room with a dining table where actions from a number of different characters work around each other and a repeated over and over.

Let Forever Be – Music Video – The Chemical Brothers

This video utilized ground-breaking video and film effects in its depiction of a young woman’s nightmare shot with grainy hand-held camera.

Michel Gondry successfully and cleverly used invisible transitions to actual real built sets to show effects of this woman’s nightmare, building different objects such as different sized frames and objects to create the impression of a duplicated nightmarish, tormenting, subconscious world. For the effect of the duplicates for the woman he used real life extras and created a choreographed dance so that the duplicates could mirror the woman’s dance to give an added effect of a confused grasp of reality.

Around the world – Music Video - Daft Punk

This video features robots walking around in a circle on a platform (which represents a vinyl record), tall athletes wearing tracksuits with prosthetic heads walk up and down the stairs, women dressed as synchronized swimmers move up and down another set of stairs, skeletons dance in the center of the ‘record’ and mummies dance in time with the song’s drum pattern.

Gondry is portraying a visual representation of the song; each element in the video represents a different instrument. The androids represent the singing robot voice; the physicality and small-minded rapidity of the athlete’s symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the synchronized swimmers represent the high-pitched keyboard; the skeletons serve for the guitars and the mummies represent the drum machine.

‘Around the World’ is Gondry’s first attempt at bringing organized dancing to his music videos.