perspectives of the two cameras to produce its curious effect. The effect is actu-
ally prefiguring the bullet-time effect used two years later forThe Matrix,
which used many more cameras to getdegrees around its subjects. The
two-camera effect employed by Gondry hardly operates with a range beyond
degrees. The compelling visuals of the video are based on a combination of
this pre-bullet-time effect and an effect created by using“one picture out of five
from a film and...an image warping”between these, as Pierre Buffin, from the
visual-effects company that worked with Gondry, describes it.This warping
produces a“wobbly”effect reminiscent of a concave/convex distorted funhouse
mirror.
The unreal atmosphere effected–curiously situating the video between the
realms of still and moving images–is consistent with the point of view of the
video’s main character, the lost female“rolling stone”played convincingly by
Patricia Arquette. Yet another effect relating to theD model based on two
photographs used by Gondry is the one used in the video to David Bowie’s
song,New Killer Star(Brumby Boylston), where a flickering back and
forth between two perspectives on the same object also involves a rudimentary
animation. The technique is much like in lenticular cards, but the flickering re-
petitions and animation effects also recall some of the works of the experimental
filmmaker and artist Ken Jacobs, who has done much to explore the realm be-
tween still and moving images.
Slow motion pervades music videos in general beyond those discussed here.
It has a compelling power to examine movement, a power that is also celebrated
in Benjamin’s essay on the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. Cit-
ing Rudolf Arnheim, Benjamin talks about how“slow motion not only presents
familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones
‘which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements give the effect of singu-
larly gliding, floating, supernatural motions’.”Expanding on this observation,
Benjamin adds that a“different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to
the naked eye...[The] camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and
liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its en-
largements and reductions.”Some of the fascination with slow motion in Ben-
jamin’s description points to instances of“gliding, floating,”and recalls notions
of weightlessness. Likewise, inThe Rise and Fall, gravity is put on hold, and
various objects are in effect rendered weightless, hanging, as movement is slo-
wed down toward a standstill.
The intimate relationship between weightlessness and slow motion is probed,
as we have seen, in another way in Cunningham’s video toOnly You, where
the weightless unreality of the body is not only produced through the mutable
temporality of post-production, but also induced by means of positioning the
actual profilmic bodies under water, a liquid carrying much the same weight as
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 169