The music videos of Mark Romanek

I've recently discovered that a number of the music videos I've admired were made by the same director. (Though I'm not really a music person, I really dig the visual poems that the music video genre is able to provide, although way too often MTV proper features lacklustre unpluggeds in a sea of adverts and reality shows).

Anyhoo, Mark Romanek - director of "One Hour Photo" - isn't just a wonderfully imaginative music video auteur - he's also an unapologetically literate one. And call me a wanker, but I lerrrrve his pomo back-references to the Masters. Consider the following works, where artists, writers and musicmakers dead and living crossbreed and fertilise the eyeballs:



Madonna's "Bedtime Story" (Bjork wrote the song!) paired with images from women surrealists Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo.




The Red Hot Chili Peppers'"Can't Stop", with antics inspired by Austrian performance artist/sculptor Eric Wurm.




k.d. lang's "Constant Craving", filmed against a set of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".




Nine Inch Nails's "The Perfect Drug", featuring the live art of Edward Gorey. Also check out the Daliesque gore of their other collaboration with Romanek, "Closer".




And of course, Johnny Cash's cover of Trent Reznor's song "Hurt", the last video of his life, created when he had already been diagnosed with Shy-Drager syndrome and his Museum had recently been damaged by flooding. Video mashup meets Baroque still life/memento mori meets country meets metal. Brilliant.

There's a review of a DVD compilation of his best videos here. Not so crazy about the big-budget ones he did for the Jacksons, Audioslave and Lenny Kravitz (although it turns out "Are You Gonna Go My Way" is patterned after Fellini's "Satyricon"). Gah, and it turns out that he also did that amazing "Do Something" video with naked furries for Macy Gray, only no-one else likes it but me and it's nowhere online.