Music Video – Another Body

Colour, BETA SP
United Kingdom, USA, Iceland, Sweden, 2008, 75 min
Section: 2008: A Musical Odyssey

Synopsis

Many musicians on the independent scene today are casting off their clear-cut sexual identity to escape the cage of assigned male and female roles. The thematic compilation of video clips Music Video – Another Body is a testimony to this phenomenon: The band Antony & The Johnsons finds existential themes in transsexual and pangender stylisation; Hercules and Love Affair take up the story of the transsexual community associated with disco culture; Canadian feminist performer Peaches adopts the attributes of male strength and frenzied belligerence; Swedish siblings The Knife conceal their bodies in anonymity and perform in Lynchesque phantasmic masks, and an unusual love trilogy emerges in video clips by Björk (partnership between a woman and a tomcat), Animal Collective (a woman–demon love affair) and Scout Niblett (woman – death). These short films prove that, nowadays, music frequently encourages a broader aesthetic and social outlook which often (sometimes provocatively) breaks down the barrier between men and women, the living and the dead, and human and mythical beings.

About the director

The directors of the video clips in the programme Music Video – Another Body are Spike Jonze, Charles Atlas, Glen Fogel, Saam Farahmand, Judah Switzer & Scout Niblett and Timothy Saccenti, among others.