Once again I can't really put into words what is so remarkable about this clip. I guess like the Florence and the Machine video that I wrote about in August, this particular video seems like it's been sent out as a transmission from another world; a world where artists aren't obliged to sell their music, or themselves in order to make a mark, and where the finished product doesn't scream "buy me, buy me, buy me" in an endorsement of its own cultural insignificance. There's no regard for fashion here - but at the same time it looks incredibly fashionable, precisely because it looks like nothing else (or at least nothing else that's being produced right now). In fact, it looks like it could have come from 1968 or 1988, or 1991 for that matter: superficially bringing to mind the Stéphane Sednaoui-directed video for the U2 single Mysterious Ways. The fact that it just happens to comes from this year, a year dominated by theatrically minded young women with synthesisers and a penchant for suggestive stage attire, lazily provocative pop acts, award show invasions and a host of gone-but-then-forgotten flavour of the month R&B groups trying to spice up the usual urban posturing with a touch of Grime, makes it all the more exciting.
Pull My Heart Away directed by Jack Peñate & Cherise Payne, 2009:
The visual associations might be entirely personal, but for me the look of this video and the exotic evocation of ruined temples, figures in the landscape, ecstasy and shadow dancing recall elements of loosely avant-garde filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Kenneth Anger and Philippe Garrel. Though such particular associations are no doubt accidental, put there by my own overactive imagination (because that's just the way my mind registers these images), it nonetheless enlivens this clip with a sense of something greater. A window into something, and not just something designed to sell records or catch the eye of the passing vidiot, but something that works at creating a suggestion of the song's intent. It is after all a fairly twee lyric about the breakup of a relationship and could have quite easily been reduced to the kind of nonsense of Second Minute or Hour, where the video doesn't really offer anything beyond, you know, promoting the song (and the elements of the song that are most saleable). Instead, Peñate and the director have decided to produce a video that interprets the themes behind the song; the emptiness of failure, the loneliness of the post-breakup mindset, the barren wasteland of life beyond that sense of purpose; the exploration of the ancient ruins of existence as viewed through a glass orb that obscures the memory even further, like the lyrics to a pop song.
"It's not like my feet are stuck to the floor –" he sings, and indeed, this is a video full of movement; full of awkward dancing around objects; a half-hearted celebration, to "dance the pain away" as someone once wrote. It's quaint. Peñate may indeed still be a prick, but there's desperation to the movement, to this event, which seems to be perfectly in line with the general tone of the music. In the images there are traces of Fata Morgana, of the climactic dream sequence in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, of the "Falconer" scene in Le Lit de la vierge, or of the general aimless exploration of The Inner Scar. Perhaps these similarities don't register to anyone else; perhaps you disagree with me, or think I'm talking bull-shit, but the reminder of these objects, for me, is as special as the objects themselves. To me, this is a brave piece of music promotion; it's simple to the point of 'let's go to Jordan with a Super 8 camera and film some stuff'-simple; it's not immediately exciting; it's not glamorous; it celebrates the old, the ancient - but these things make it worthy of merit. More importantly though, it's the sense that these images don't immediately spring to mind when you hear the song, but when you see the two put together it works perfectly, and afterwards you can't imagine one existing without the other.
