Chris Cunningham

[Michael]

I had never heard of Chris Cunningham until this morning. A friend sent me this link to Rubber Johnny on youtube. I remain shaken by what I saw. Holy fuck.

I'm dying to find out what you guys think of this video.

[sevenarts]

I had never heard of Chris Cunningham until this morning. A friend sent me this link to Rubber Johnny on youtube. I remain shaken by what I saw. Holy fuck.

I'm dying to find out what you guys think of this video.

Cunningham is most well-known for his ground-breaking and often jaw-dropping music videos, most notably a pair of crazy mini-films made for songs by Aphex Twin (whose music is also featured in Rubber Johnny). Windowlicker is a real mindfuck, a hilarious and disturbing parody of rap music videos, in which the song doesn't even start until halfway through. Come To Daddy is just creepy and terrifying, probably more so than any traditional horror film. You can find them both at Youtube as well: Windowlicker and Come to Daddy.

The Director's Series DVD of Cunningham's music videos is sadly very incomplete, but it has enough of his excellent work on it to make it worth a definite purchase. And yes, Rubber Johnny is a real stunner as well, a great continuation of his distinctive Aphex Twin vids.

[Rsdio]

Personally I found it a big let down, impressive on some levels but 'Cunningham by numbers' in most ways. His earlier stuff is much better but he seems to have run out of steam a little bit, ten years ago I was hoping he'd be making demented feature-length films by now.

Some of his others, anyway:

Autechre - Second Bad Vilbel
Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy and Windowlicker
Squarepusher - Come On My Selector
Bjork - All Is Full Of Love (I've always thought the I, Robot robots looked suspiciously similar)

[Oedipax]

His recent (well, recent for Cunningham) video for the Horrors' "Sheena is a Parasite" is quite fun. You can see it on YouTube here (yes, that's Samantha Morton!). But his masterpieces in my opinion are his clips for Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector" and Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" ("Come to Daddy" as well).

Cunningham worked for a while with Kubrick on designing robotics stuff for A.I. - no idea if any of it was ever implemented in the movie. I think it mostly ended up in the "All is Full of Love" video, but I could be wrong there.

[Tol_Venden]

He was linked with an adaptation of Gibson's Neuromancer but that project is now apparently moving on entirely without him.

I'm curious, too, why he hasn't done something grand by now. His music videos are some of best in his generation (in my view, the best).

There's a neat website called Director File that features information about Cunningham among others.

[Rsdio]

I didn't know that about Neuromancer, there'd been vague talk about him doing that for so long but it never seemed to be going anywhere.

[colinr0380]

I was flush with cash a few years ago so I bought the DVD release of Rubber Johnny which was basically the video along with a book of the various grotesque poses. It was a bit of an ostentatious purchase but interesting to see the various horrible shapes that pass by too quickly in the video itself. I agree with Rsdio though - nice video but I want to see what he could do with a film!

Cunningham worked for a while with Kubrick on designing robotics stuff for A.I. - no idea if any of it was ever implemented in the movie. I think it mostly ended up in the "All is Full of Love" video, but I could be wrong there.

Not just A.I. but models for Judge Dredd and Nightbreed, worked on the alien in Alien3 and the killer robot in Richard Stanley's Hardware and according to imdb was the senior artist in Stanley's follow up film Dust Devil.

Here are the other videos that are also on the Directors Series DVD:

Portishead - Only You
Madonna - Frozen
Leftfield & Afrika Bambaataa - Afrika Shox

I've always wanted to see the longer version of flex.

Some videos that were not on the DVD:

12 Rounds - Personally
The Holy Barbarians - Space Junkie
Jocasta - Something To Say
The Auteurs - Light Aircraft On Fire
The Auteurs - Back With The Killer Again
Placebo - 36 Degrees - sort of a dry (or wet) run for the Only You video with the water bubbles remaining!
Geneva - Tranquilizer
Jesus Jones - The Next Big Thing

I couldn't find videos for Lodestar - Another Day (1996) and Lifes Addiction - Jesus Coming In For The Kill (also 1996) on YouTube.

[Lino]

Chris Cunningham's videos were the first ones that for me felt that the music was written for the (amazing!) images on display and not the other way around. Not a mean feat, by anyone's standards.

Can't wait for his debut feature film (this has to ultimately happen, right?).

[miless]

Can't wait for his debut feature film (this has to ultimately happen, right?).

Chris seems kind of apprehensive about doing a feature. He's stated in interviews that he's not that interested in doing it, but then he'll be attached to several projects. He probably will make a feature, but it'll probably take a while.

[swo17]

Just discovering some of these commercials for the first time. Incredible stuff!

[beamish14]

Just discovering some of these commercials for the first time. Incredible stuff!

Yep. I believe the PlayStation spot is the only one that aired in North America. He’s been relatively quiet lately, and I really hope we see more of his work soon

I really miss the Director’s Label discs. His, the Jonathan Glazer one, Gondry’s, and Mark Romanek’s are all so wonderful. Gondry subsequently released another volume on his own, but those two sets still don’t cover the huge amount of short form work that he’s made. I kept hoping that the series might continue with people like Jonathan Dayton/Valerie Faris, David Fincher, Phil Joanou, Zbigniew Rybczyński, etc., but I guess it wasn’t to be

[SeizureMilk]

Agreed Swo17, Cunningham is an exceptionally creative man, from the beautifully composed almost dance-like approach to his Gucci ad, to his slow motion captures of time and people in the Nissan ads, to his wonderfully subversive first ad for Levi’s, to the mind-bending technical imagery conjured in his Orange photography ad, Cunningham is not only a master of direction, but a wonder of editing, cutting some of his ads like action flicks giving everyday objects and things life in a way I could only describe as Edgar Wright before Edgar Wright, especially in his ITV ad. His work almost rings with a perverted sense, obviously the peep-show vibes in his ITV ad are prime example, but my favorite is the PlayStation ad which can only be described as an old VHS that shouldn’t have shown to the general public with it’s grimy atmosphere, the desolate background, and the subtle yet somehow completely terrifying performance from the actress that had it been released today but have merely been dismissed as a generic YouTube horror story setup. It’s a shame that Cunningham seems practically retired from his film career but for now we can only imagine what he’d do nowadays.

[colinr0380]

He does have an amazing eye in his work for how the human body can be twisted and shaped, which kind of expands out in both directions into the most technologically inhuman areas of robots and machines (bodies functioning in machine-like ways, as in that Nissan commercial; as well as machines trying to be human, perhaps best shown in the All Is Full of Love music video), and in the other into how the human body itself can cancerously/caricature-ly deform and distort into just sentient blobs of quivering, twerking flesh (which is where his work gets most disturbing, as in something like Rubber Johnny or the other Aphex Twin videos). It does make me wonder what Cunningham makes of this current A.I. trend, given that A.I. generated commercials feel very Cunningham-esque at the moment in how they just don't understand the real-world reasoning that lies behind 'normal' human emotions or behaviours!

The middle ground area is probably when the movements of the body are not either mechanically jerky or disturbingly too fluid but instead are more dream-world and abstracted modern dance pieces, like in the installation piece flex, Only You (even the Frozen video for Madonna) or that beautiful Gucci ad with all of the flowers at the end of the video that swo linked to. I particularly like that Cunningham seems to be able to work across the whole spectrum in that way (maybe forced to do so by having to work to certain briefs, or achieve certain tones for various commissions) and yet still achieve something distinctively of his own style in each.

It is interesting to hear in this 2012 video that Cunningham ended up feeling constrained by the limitations of the music in the music videos and felt that he had to move into actually creating musical soundscapes himself to enable his visual style to exist independently. So that seems to be why we have not seen too much of him for a while, if he has been working more in that live performance art space.

[swo17]

this 2012 video

Thanks for sharing that, which led me to the unreleased Spectral Musicians which someone has helpfully spliced together from a live performance