Beggining in advertisments, Jon Glazer has become a well-established feature film director. He has a very british sense of self-deprecating humour.
Both his music videos and adverts contain a lot of recurring motifs. He uses the naked male torso and a lot of masculine motifs. His use of colour is interesting. He often uses muted, almost monochromatic tones. He also uses wild animals, often caged or restrained in some way, as freedom is also a recurring theme in his work. The humans who have freedom often stick to their confined spaces while restrained animals try to break free. A classical example of this is the video for "Street Spirit" - by Radiohead.
Once again embedding has been disabled on the video. But hopefully I can upload some stills later to highlight what I mean.
This video demonstrates many of his key motifs. It's dramatically shot in monochromatic, and often shows animals being restrained and trying to break free, while people with access to freedom stay in there trailerpark environment. Glazer once again uses the male torso, once again demonstrating ideas of power, once again showing christlike imagery.
Similar effects are used in another Jonathan Glazer video, "Rabbit in Your Headlights" - Unkle featuring Thom Yorke (Embedding disabled again!). This is a concept based video that fits the lyrics well, with a narrative element.
He once again uses a lot of images of power, most specifically the final shot of the car crashing into the shirtless man at the end, while he stands looking almost crucified. Once again, he uses the naked male torso to represent male strength.He toys with reality throughout the video as well, using bad/odd continuity add a confused and disjointed feel, matching the man's confused state. He also once again uses a muted, almost monochromatic colour scheme to highlight the drama of the video.
Something important I'll take away is the power of using a muted or monochromatic colour palate, something that's definitely going to inspire me in my music video project.
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Great post - good ananlysis of glazer a clear link to your own work at the end (although the more specific these are the better). your use of hyperlinks to youtube is useful when the embedding is disabled.
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