Jump to content

poll: Favorite video directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino?


geert
 Share

poll: Favorite video directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino?  

72 members voted

  1. 1. Favorite video directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino?

    • Open Your Heart
      13
    • Justify My Love
      30
    • Human Nature
      13
    • Love Don't Live Here Anymore
      2
    • Don't Tell Me
      8
    • Hollywood
      6


Recommended Posts

Soooo difficult!

I could say that my least favourite are Hollywood (I miss a story there, the looks are interesting but some parts are dull imo) and LDLHA.

Open your heart is iconic, provoking, so original.

I really like everything about Human Nature: the concept, the boxes, the choreo, the costumes, the dog, the irony.

But Justify my love is so strong, she is so beautiful (and Tony Ward is too!).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

So difficult to choose, but I think I'd have to go with Open Your Heart. It was quite a groundbreaking video at the time both for its content as well as for technical achievements. I remember being blown away by the cinematography the first time I saw it, since most videos up to that time were so drab looking colour-wise. Up to that point telecining technology tended to produce really washed out visuals during the transfer from film to video...just look at the Like A Virgin video, it's so muted...if the original film rolls exist somewhere, they could do wonders with it! But getting off track here...lol. OYH is one of the first mainstream videos I remember seeing that used really vivid colours and clearly used then-state-of-the-art telecining techniques that managed to fully capture the film prints in such a clean and crisp way. It really jumped out at you. Fincher and later Romanek also made technical advances, but Mondino the first one to really push M's videos into a different realm from a technical perspective. And from a content perspective, in retrospect OYH feels almost more shocking than JML, just because it really came out of nowhere and was not what anyone would have expected her to do at the time. JML was less shocking in that regard, because by that point she had been consistently pushing that particular envelope for awhile, so even though she was pushing it further, it felt like a natural progression. But with OYH, to wear that outfit and play a peep show dancer, I don't think anyone would have predicted it, as it was such a brazen move for an artist that was constantly being labelled a sexpot. Rather than run away from it, she owned it. It was a very bold move.

Plus I just love Mondino's sensibilities as a director in general...every video he makes has some strange thing about it that makes it stand out. It's never the same thing, but there's always something. And it's always one of those ideas that would seem silly on paper and might even seem silly the first time you see it, but then it somehow becomes the essence and the hook of the entire thing. Ususally there's an element of humour or irony there.

He's also done brilliant videos for other artists. Don Henley's The Boys Of Summer is 85 was his breakthrough in North America, and it's no surprise that M would have wanted to work with him because it's a beautiful video, and one of the first to reintroduce black & white in a way that felt current and new.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Write here...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use