Director's Series, Vol. 2 - The Work of Director Chris Cunningham

Starring:Aphex Twin, Stephen Ball (II), Robert Ball (VI), William Baraket, BjÃ¶rk, Gary Cruz, Brian Friedman, Beth Gibbons, Steve Gibbons, Coral Lorne, Nikki McInness, Heather McKenney, Marcus Morris, Takatsuna Mukai, Rick Poli, Kiran Shah, Al Stokes (II), Jim Tosney
Director: Lance Bangs
Studio: Palm Pictures / Umvd
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
Like the other volumes in the acclaimed Director's Series (featuring the work of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry), The Work of Director Chris Cunningham offers a feast of visual ingenuity, with one major difference: Unlike the relatively playful brightness of Jonze and Gondry, Cunningham wants to involve you in his nightmares. From the urban monstrosities of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" to the limb-shattering weirdness of Leftfield's "Afrika Shox," Cunningham's music videos emphasize the freakish and the bizarre, but they are also arrestingly beautiful and otherworldly, as in the aquatic effects used for Portishead's "Only You," combining underwater movements with ominous urban landscapes. Some of Cunningham's shock effects are horrifically effective (his 'flex" video installation, excerpted here with music by Aphex Twin, is as disturbing as anything conjured by David Cronenberg), while others are cathartic or, in the case of Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," outrageously amusing. And while the eerie elegance of Madonna's "Frozen" arose from a chaotic production, the signature work in this collection is clearly BjÃ¶rk's "All Is Full of Love," a masterfully simple yet breathtaking vision of intimacy involving advanced robotics and seamless CGI composites. In these and other videos, Cunningham advances a unique aesthetic, infusing each video and commercial he makes with a dark, occasionally gothic sensibility. That these frequently nightmarish visions are also infectiously hypnotic is a tribute to Cunningham's striking originality. --Jeff Shannon

Director's Series, Vol. 2 - The Work of Director Chris Cunningham
Average customer rating:

Why stories aren't necessary for well executed nightmares

The videos aren't bad, but the presentation is horrible...

not 400 minutes - more like 60. Quality awesome, quantity really bad

Amazing videos... where's the rest?

My DVD cracked as soon as I got it!!

Director's Series, Vol. 2 - The Work of Director Chris Cunningham
Starring: Aphex Twin , Stephen Ball (II) , Robert Ball (VI) , William Baraket , and Björk
Director: Lance Bangs
Manufacturer: Palm Pictures / Umvd
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0000DBJ9I
Release Date: 2003-10-28

Amazon.com

Like the other volumes in the acclaimed Director's Series (featuring the work of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry), The Work of Director Chris Cunningham offers a feast of visual ingenuity, with one major difference: Unlike the relatively playful brightness of Jonze and Gondry, Cunningham wants to involve you in his nightmares. From the urban monstrosities of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" to the limb-shattering weirdness of Leftfield's "Afrika Shox," Cunningham's music videos emphasize the freakish and the bizarre, but they are also arrestingly beautiful and otherworldly, as in the aquatic effects used for Portishead's "Only You," combining underwater movements with ominous urban landscapes. Some of Cunningham's shock effects are horrifically effective (his 'flex" video installation, excerpted here with music by Aphex Twin, is as disturbing as anything conjured by David Cronenberg), while others are cathartic or, in the case of Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," outrageously amusing. And while the eerie elegance of Madonna's "Frozen" arose from a chaotic production, the signature work in this collection is clearly Björk's "All Is Full of Love," a masterfully simple yet breathtaking vision of intimacy involving advanced robotics and seamless CGI composites. In these and other videos, Cunningham advances a unique aesthetic, infusing each video and commercial he makes with a dark, occasionally gothic sensibility. That these frequently nightmarish visions are also infectiously hypnotic is a tribute to Cunningham's striking originality. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews:

Why stories aren't necessary for well executed nightmares.......2006-06-01

I write this review mainly to react on a kind of comment I often here but never realy get. It's the standard comment that a a book, a movie or a video, how skillfully crafted or how originally conceived in the beginning, is never really good when there is no real story line. Apparently there must be a tale to be told, going from A to B and ending with Z. (And if you are Christopher Nolan or David Lynch your stories may go from B to D to Y and ending with J or something. But, at the end, a lot of people keep on saying: "there must be a narrative".)

Why? I ask. What is wrong with a single image? I mean look at American painter Edward Hopper, to me the greatest artist of all: He haunts us with scenes of alienation and loneliness that stick, that haunts and reflects. Cetain photographers win World Press Photo Awards for capturing big events in one single shot, or: one single blink of the eye. Of course, the pictures created carry with them loads of tales and history, otherwise the pictures wouldn't have been taken in the first place.

Now here we have a video artist, Chris Cunningham, whose work we now can admire on one disc: Eight video's which presents us with nightmarish worlds in anonymous urban landscapes (Leftfield's "Afrika Shox" and Aphex Twins' "Come to daddy" and "Windowlicker"), nameless deserts (Madonna's "Frozen"), surreal Japanese lunybins for deranged kiddies (Squarepusher's "Come to my selector") and a static white room where futuristic robo-intelligence is perfectly combined with claustrophobic erotisism (Bjýrk's "All is full of love"). All of these worlds presented here have a kind of autism, in the sense of `being in it's own world'.

So following this comment I conclude that Cunningham makes Art For The Sake Of Art. (the original Frensh slogan for this kind of work of course, by the way, is: l'Art pour l'art).
These video's are sometimes scary as in the case of the menacing bunch of ever-grinning gettho-midges in "Come to daddy", but at the same time, drenched in a juicy sause of oozing black humour. The same can be said about "Afrika Shock" in which a psychotic black guy wanders the streets without anyone reaching out for him, literaly losing his limbs one at the time. Creepy, otherworldy and yet filled with moments for sickening laughs: We don't know whether to be seriously shocked or secretly amused, as with the best works of Kafka.

And talking about Kafka, here is one of the best writers in the world, whose real strength to me are still his short pieces of fiction, which are as plotless as Cunninghams visions right here, but which visually stunning, arresting and, at best, are little drops of liquid acid, secreted underneath our eyelids.

Story isn't necessary is just what I want to say, when a well crafted portrait, scene, vision or visual prophecy is enough to captivate us, and makes us shiver (or, okay okay, secretly laugh out loud).
And we have Cunningham to prove it. So I can now rest my case.

The videos aren't bad, but the presentation is horrible..........2006-03-20

"All is Full of Love" is a brilliant video in every respect - it's perverse and transcendent at the same time, mixing in humaniform robots with flowing water and hard ceramic - it looks like the future of robot porn.

However, what makes me only able to listen to it for brief periods is the menus. Whoever decided that it'd be a good idea to play a hideous cacaphony of every song on the disk, apparently played backwards and at high speed during the menu screens, ought to be horsewhipped for ruining an otherwise good disk. (Even if it is Chris Cunningham.) When the menu screens make you want to take the disk out and throw it out the window, you gotta reconsider the wisdom of doing that.

Fortunately, I believe that "All is Full of Love" is available on another Bjork video collection, so I'll buy that and sell this one to the local CD/Video concern.

-Darren MacLennan

not 400 minutes - more like 60. Quality awesome, quantity really bad.......2006-01-18

I saw this DVD for sale in Urban Outfitters, and decided to use the money I got from returning another gift to the store to get it, after I confirmed on Amazon.com that the running time was long (they say 400 minutes above!). I was worried because it didn't list very many works on the back cover, but I thought maybe they didn't list everything.

Well, I just pulled it out now and after an hour and a half at most, probably more like an hour, I'm done watching the entire DVD. I feel kind of cheated, if what the other reviewer here says is true, that Chris Cunningham actually has a lot of other music videos that weren't put on this DVD. The "flex" video was particularly disappointing, it starts off with so much potential and then suddenly ends, so that it's obvious that they cut it off.

To make things more insulting, the booklet that they include with the DVD, which is full of pictures from his videos and some interviews, includes lots of still frames from videos that aren't on the DVD. There are all these cool shots of videos that I would love to see, but they didn't include them. Nor is there any attempt to explain why they're not there. In fact, in some cases (for example, "Engine") it appears that they actually cut out scenes from the videos on this DVD.

What they do have is great, which just leaves me wanting more. "All is Full Of Love" is mesmerizing, I had to watch it twice it was so good. "Leftfield," "Windowlicker" and "Come to Daddy" manage to be both funny and haunting at the same time. Portishead's "Only You" is a bit of a disappointment, but I could see how others would like it. Madonna's "Frozen" is also beautiful. Anyway I don't want to get more specific lest I ruin it for those who haven't seen it already.

At any rate, I would not recommend this purchase for most people. For *SOME* people it might be a good purchase, if like me you've seen maybe one of the videos and really liked it and want to check out some more of his work. But if you're looking for a complete collection of Chris Cunningham's work, this unfortunately isn't it, and I don't think it will be worth your $20 to get it since all the main features are things you probably have already seen several times.

Also - don't be fooled by the fact that it says it's a "collection of music videos, short films, video installations and commercials." There is one short film (a 5 minute interview with him and Bjork) and 2 video installations (a video called "Monkey Drummer" which is not all that great, and flex which gets cut off). There are 3 commercials, none of which is all that good, except maybe the "mental wealth" one (if you can understand it which I can't).

Anyway, somebody from Amazon.com should fix that runtime listing.

(Incidentally, it looks like the rest of the Director's Label DVD's don't suffer from this problem, they have a lot of content.)

Amazing videos... where's the rest?.......2005-07-04

I received this DVD with the Director's Label box set that also came with the Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry DVDs. I think if I had bought the Chris Cunningham DVD as a standalone, I would have been disappointed simply because it doesn't come with that much (or as much as it could have)! Sure, it has the videos that he is most famous for (Aphex Twin ones, Bjork) but those are also the ones that you, as a music video buff, have probably already seen a few times. Not to say that it isn't great to watch crisp, clean, high quality DVD versions of them, but I don't know if it will be worth your money.

And the most annoying thing is that they show little millisecond clips of these unincluded videos on the DVD menu! It's like, come on Director's Label people, why flash bits of videos that aren't even included, except as some sort of rude tease? You end up watching everything and thinking, where were the cat-headed dudes I saw in the menu? Did I miss something? And why only a excerpt of Flex?

Okay, besides all that, his work is totally genius and talk about jaw-dropping, absolutely flawless special effects! Better than any special effects you'll see in a Hollywood blockbuster, that's for sure. But overall, I recommend the 3 DVD box set because Jonze and Gondry are great too.

My DVD cracked as soon as I got it!!.......2005-04-28

I had seen this DVD before and liked many of Chris' work. So I bought this. The second time I took it out of the spindal it cracked in half all the way across on one side and had several other cracks starting in the middle. The spindle that hold this is a bad design and the DVD very brittle beware!!!!!!

I would not recomend this DVD for the problems I had reasons and I could not get a refund.

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