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If you don't know Chris Cunningham, you're surely familiar with his past works.
He directed (among the most famous) the videos for "Come To Daddy" and "Windowlicker" by Aphex Twin, "Frozen" by Madonna, "All Is Full Of Love" by Bjork, and so on...
Now he has decided to step out under his own name and hits us with a short film. A punch in the stomach and a jolt to the synaptic transmissions.
The overall image of his works mostly deals with disturbing and disturbed, deformed, and surreal elements. Some compare him to Sigismondi, the one with Marilyn Manson, but I keep insisting that SHE borrows from Witkin's photos, Cunningham seems very distant to me.
The DVD arrives in a splendid book-like packaging with stunning photos and drawings by the director.
The initial menu immediately suggests something unpleasant will be broadcast on TV: a fixed camera on a pavement records limbs, parts of the body passing by and bursting at the speed of light in front of the lens, shooting off piercing and amusingly annoying noises.
I press PLAY.
A short interview with Rubber Johnny, the deformed child protagonist of the short film, all shot in the dark with an infrared camera.
Johnny cannot speak, and to the interviewer's questions, he responds with childish, indecipherable and disjointed sounds.
Johnny becomes agitated, the gentleman tries to calm him down, but he doesn’t stop. Total agitation.
Everything calms down again, Johnny is free to roam in his dark basement accompanied by his deformed Chihuahua.
Cunningham wisely uses, for his video-trip, a remix of AFX237-v.7 from the album Drukqs by Aphex Twin. It all proves useful for the final effect.
The song starts.
The child prepares a line of coke on the table, snorts it, and the carousel begins. The music does half the job, and Johnny's disjointed movements in time prevent the brain from thinking about anything else.
I'll leave the rest to you, who will somehow have to be spectators of this artistic frenzy.
Yet another successful work for the Englishman Cunningham, also an author of video installations for exhibitions and biennials.
Let’s hope he soon reaches a full-length film.
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By (sic)VII
Try listening to this song and you will understand that anyone apart from Chris Cunningham would have gone mad making such a work.
This is the classic product that you either love or despise, but on the other hand, when you fall into the hands of two figures like Cunningham and AFX, you cannot hope for something normal that doesn’t aim to shock us.
