Following on from our earlier post on Michel Gondry, the experimental French director, this post will examine the work of Chris Cunningham. He is a British director born in Berkshire during the 1970s. The director has been compared to Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, both of whom have experimental styles. Cunningham first made a name for himself in the 1990s when he was making robots for major motion picture, after his work on the ABC robot for Judge Dredd he was propelled to work more individually.
The first music video that Cunningham directed was Auterchre's 'Second Bad Vibel', after watching it I have found it to reference aliens, technology, the future and the robots he designed. After this he worked on a number of other English rock band videos, which gave him valuable experience in filmmaking.
The 1997 piece 'Come To Daddy' is perhaps the most well known video. Again the video includes themes of supernatural life (or aliens), and has the same dull lighting and less vibrant colours. It is clear just from the two videos mentioned above that Cunningham has got a distinct style, and has very clear ideas that he likes to incorporate into his work. The video for Bjork's "All Is Full of Love" won Cunningham several awards including a MTV Award for Breakthrough Video, this showing it's commercial success.
Friendly Fires music video still
Although I have mentioned music videos in this post, he has also created equally great commercials and short films. One of his more recent commercials was "Gucci Flora" for Gucci, even within short video we can see his desire to include supernatural elements and to have "thriller" themed music. A recent music video was the Friendly Fires 'Kiss of Life', this being his most vibrant and mainstream piece of work. It features a main performance scene, some of the characters have masks which is reminiscent of those used in thrillers such as 'Saw' or 'Scream'.
Chris Cunningham is currently said to be working on one or more feature films, the list of these can be found here.
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