Music and Sound in the Worlds of Michel Gondry

Kate McQuiston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000244564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Michel Gondry's directorial work buzzes with playfulness and invention: in a body of work that includes feature films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, to music videos, commercials, television episodes, and documentaries, he has experimented with blending animation and live action, complex narrative structures, and philosophical subject matter. Central to that experimentation is Gondry's use of music and sound, which this book addresses in a new detailed study. Kate McQuiston examines the hybrid nature of Gondry's work, his process of collaboration, how he uses sound and music to create a highly stylized reinforcement of often-elusive subjects such as psychology, dreams, the loss of memory, and the fraught relationship between humans and the environment. This concise volume provides new insight into Gondry's richly creative multimedia productions, and their distinctive use of the soundtrack.

1 The Heart and the Brain

Early Influences in Music and Film

Michel Gondry’s youthful ambitions to become an inventor or painter emerged during his upbringing in Versailles. Music was part of family life; his father was a computer programmer and pianist who loved jazz and had a special affinity for the sound of the Hammond B3 organ. Gondry’s father’s dedication to a technical profession and love of music could have set a powerful example for his son, whose work displays a dual dedication to technique, on one hand, and to art, music, abstraction, and emotion, on the other. As Gondry’s collaborator, Charlie Kaufman, puts it, “What I like about Michel is that he’s got this technical brilliance, and yet there’s this human stuff going on. That’s a really unusual combination.”¹ Gondry’s mother, Marie-Noëlle, played piano and taught music. She wrote music that appears in the short film La Lettre (1998), the feature Human Nature (2001) in a mystical sounding cue, and in the 2004 documentary I’ve Been Twelve Forever. Gondry has described the house as full of music and electronics, although his childhood preoccupation was drawing. He recalls: “We had only two gods at home: Serge Gainsbourg and Duke Ellington.”²

The director’s sensitivity to process and fascination with inventions—such as those he wrote into his script for The Science of Sleep—owes too to his grandfather, Constant Martin, who also lived on the family property. In the 1940s Martin designed electronic organs and invented the popular Clavioline, a freestanding keyboard that was often used as a keyboard attachment. The Clavioline imitated a variety of orchestral instruments; it afforded expressive effects and ease of retuning, and it had a knee lever for volume control (this degree of control bears a similarity to that of its famous electronic forebear, the theremin).³ Martin’s invention was popular in homes in Europe and the US, and it made pop music more colorful in the 1960s. Gondry recalls:

[Martin] was working on stereo images and a radio with a huge antenna that could broadcast around the world. He invented speakers, electronic bells, electronic organs, also a synthesizer in ’49, which you can hear in the Beatles songs ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’ and ‘Yellow Submarine.’⁴

Gondry’s pride in his grandfather’s invention mingles with his musical loyalty:

My father played a lot of Duke Ellington, and he loved the sound of the Hammond organ. I love jazz music too but Duke Ellington was one of the first to use the old synthesizers from the Thirties before my grandfather. So I love this music.⁵

Gondry admired both Ellington’s characteristic orchestrations in his best known music and in his avant-garde innovations from later decades, which prompted Gondry to proclaim him “a Picasso of music.”⁶ Gondry’s comments about his early personal history hint at the ways his musical world is shaped by a sensitivity to sound and style, and by factors including cultural history, nostalgia, and broader artistic, intellectual, and civic interests. Gondry’s appreciation for synthesizers, organs, and other instruments of the electronic age proves a defining trait in his collaborations with a number of musicians.

Gondry’s parents supported their sons’ artistic inclinations. They gave Michel a drum kit and gave his brother, Olivier, a bass when they were children, which encouraged them to form their own punk band. Gondry’s activities in these years also included photography and flip book animations. An outdoor screening during his primary school’s summer activities program appears to have furnished a formative inspiration in his career. He recalls seeing Albert Lamorisse’s 1960 film Le voyage en ballon:⁷

It’s the first film I remember. It’s the film I like to rewatch the best. When you’re young, you’re very receptive to all the stuff you see, the emotions. And then you try all the time to match up with those sensations. So in this sense it may have changed my life because I’m always trying to re-create this feeling of watching this movie.

Gondry’s ambition to create emotionally affecting work retains a connection to feelings and fantasies of childhood. Gondry describes his childhood perception as especially vivid and principally concerned with fantasies and dreams, like the wish to fly, and nightmares and a fear of death. Beyond the immediate emotional appeal of Le voyage en ballon, Gondry admired Lamorisse’s working methods, which included having his son film while suspended from a helicopter. Gondry marvels, “It’s not like studio stuff. It’s really flying.”⁸ Gondry emulated Lamorisse when filming Björk’s video for “Joga” while hanging out of a helicopter. Childlike feelings are often at the heart of Gondry’s work; “For me, when you produce art, you’re trying to be in touch with who you were as a child, that purity of happiness.”⁹

Homage is a central thematic interest as well as a practice in Gondry’s work, and how things are made is important to him. In interviews about how he approaches his work, he has named a wide array of filmmakers, many of them French. Gondry imagines Georges Méliès as a kindred spirit interested in stretching the resources and possibilities of the camera:

Méliès was one of the first people to witness a screening of the Frères Lumière in Paris in 1895. He immediately thought of the camera as a tool to improve his magical tricks. Interestingly, I had the same way of thinking—when I had the ability to use a camera, I always used it to explore what I could do with it, pushing the limits, and always being self-sufficient.¹⁰

Also highly important to Gondry are Jean Vigo’s film L’Atalante and the films of Alain Resnais, whom he calls “one of my favorite directors in France and in the world.” Gondry explains: “I love how he finds humanity in science, which I admire, because generally science is regarded as being cold, and just calculation and I don’t believe so. His films are geometrical, and they are human and poetic.”¹¹ Gondry also learned from Resnais’s inventive and conspicuous editing, including cuts from scenes rich with music to scenes of silence, and cutting to images without preparation or explanation.

Outside of France, Gondry points to Yuri Norstein’s stop-motion animated film, The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), as particularly influential. Its influence on the video for “Human Behavior” is evident,¹² and the hedgehog’s worried face comes back in the form of Thom Yorke as a mouse on a mic stand in the “Knives Out” video, and in the mouse in Mood Indigo. Gondry expresses admiration likewise for Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Bowers, for the warmth of Vittorio de Sica’s movies, for Buster Keaton’s physical comedy and elaborate tricks, for the animation of Tex Avery, for the films of Ingmar Bergman and those of David Lynch—another director with art training and musical skill. The animation of Norman McLaren’s films, which he compares to “mini operas,” provokes Gondry to marvel:

He even created sounds with images by painting directly onto the sound stripe to create the melody. So the way he could illustrate the music—sometimes very literally, sometimes in a more abstract way—had a great influence on me and inspired me a lot.¹³

Gondry has named among his favorite films an eclectic bunch, all of which show ambitious imagination or engage science fiction tropes: The Time Machine (George Pal), The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold), Phase IV (Saul Bass), The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris), Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier), The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel), Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis). In television, Gondry is an enthusiastic fan of Mr. Show, whose episodes he claims to know by heart. He also claims to enjoy watching documentaries even more than feature films and has named Night at the Roxbury (John Fortenberry) and Stuck on You (Farrelly Brothers) as guilty pleasures.

Elements of Auteurism: Autobiography, Recurrence, Appearing on Screen, Dreams

Among Gondry’s polarizing qualities are his childishness, lack of substance in storyline or depth in favor of original effects and concepts, and autobiographical elements. Whether tender and innocent or oneiric and grotesque, solipsistic qualities of Gondry’s work have alienated some audiences. Gondry freely admits to drawing on his own experience for material; moments based on his life become all the more evident in the films based on scripts written by Gondry himself, or by Gondry and co-authors (for the films beginning with The Science of Sleep).

Gondry’s sensitivity to the experiences of childhood and early adolescence plays out in the two-part documentary I’ve Been 12 Forever (2003); Gondry models Stéphane in The Science of Sleep on his young adult self, and Daniel in Microbe et Gasoil on his fourteen-year-old self. Gondry’s short film La Lettre (1998) joins Microbe et Gasoil, and particular scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in depicting emotionally charged intimacy, shame, anxiety, and rejection. Characters even restate cutting remarks of Gondry’s former girlfriends, such as Stephanie’s comment that it is unattractive for a man to cry, and Laura’s rejection of Daniel’s invitation to dance. In 2007, Gondry described The Science of Sleep as “one hundred percent personal, about things that happened to me. It’s sort of a compilation.”¹⁴ In 2016 he admitted: “Each film I’ve done reminds me of a breakup which, generally, is me being dumped, so it’s painful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Heart and the Brain
• 2 Superchannels and Other Sound Strategies
• 3 Dreaming up “The Concert I Always Wanted to Go To”: Mosaics in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
• 4 Music Video and Advertising
• 5 Muse-en-scène: Jon Brion Hears the Hidden City in Mia Doi Todd’s “Open Your Heart”
• 6 Original Music, Pre-existing Music, and Palettes
• 7 The Time-Play of Playlists and Original Score in Be Kind Rewind and Mood Indigo
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index