Michele Gondry’s Whimsical World of Music Videos

 Michele Gondry’s Whimsical World of Music Videos

words by Sofia Escalante

Our Assistant Music Director, Sofia Escalante, takes KCSB on a tour through the wonderful worlds of Michel Gondry’s music videos. Keep reading for Sofia’s insight and commentary on videos featuring artists including Bjork, Daft Punk, and more!

Did video really kill the radio star? Suffering from cabin fever during spring of last year, I found myself marveling at the fantastical and majestic worlds designed by French filmmaker and music video director of the 1990s, Michele Gondry. Before the ‘Golden Age’ of music videos ended around the late 1990s, Gondry was a master of the art. Videos such as Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” Daft Punk’s “Around The World,” and, especially, Björk’s genius “Bachelorette” helped me escape my confinement, as I forced my friends to watch the intricate worlds played out in every video. Many of these music videos toyed around with concepts of time, dreams, and reality. Gondry even established the idea of “bullet time” in Foo Fighters’ music video, Everlong, three years before the film The Matrix was released. Each one of these masterpieces encoded a hidden cosmic architecture intertwining messages of the universe and art alongside visual and auditory media. 

Cibo Matto’s video, “Sugar Water,” for example, is a complete cinematic palindrome. In the video, two sides of the screen tell a story: On the left, one story of a woman in a car crash. On the right side, the exact same story is told in reverse and from a completely different perspective. Every action has a mirror image, all created by one singular continuous take, taking us to the video ending exactly where it began. Gondry created this effect by giving the band an audio track with commands timed to each second. He explains his process in his 2003 director’s series collection, “Cibo Matto  – Sugar Water behind the scenes with Michel Gondry.” One mistake and they would have had to redo the entire shot. It is complex, brilliant, and considered a masterclass in choreography in visual and auditory media. I watched this video over and over while stuck in a hotel with my best friend, Asha, fascinated by the visual engineering Gondry created. I watched probably 30-40 of his music videos in a span of a few weeks, my poor best friend also enduring my obsession. His videos intrigued me because of the intersection of visual and auditory media and how sharply it was executed. Its artistic charm inspired me, especially as a student who wants to go into the film industry. 

Gondry was highly celebrated for the work he did with Björk, specifically the music video for “Bachelorette.” This music video tells the artist vs. commercialization parable, as Gondry uses Björk as the catalyst for a philosophical spiral of madness. It begins with the idea that reality exists in tiered layers, like echoes. The woman, Björk’s character, lives an entire life in black and white. She finds a book in the woods, and the book is about her life as she’s living it; it writes about her future for her. She goes to the city and finds a publisher, becomes a massive best seller, and then that best seller becomes a play that she stars in. The play is then about her finding a book, going to the city, finding a publisher, and creating a play. The play-within-a-play structure spirals into a copy of a copy of a copy of madness and loss of raw creation. Gondry’s story focuses on the commercialization of art and the artist’s struggle for creative control. The characters in Björk’s play sense something is off, resulting in fake copies upon fake copies, narrated through vibrant colors. Dreams within dreams, plays within plays– all in typical Gondry fashion. 

The video is the first in a trilogy which includes “Human Behavior” and “Isobel,” portraying a character’s journey from nature to the city and back to nature. UK film theorist, Warren Buckland, comments on Gondry’s techniques stating “Michel Gondry’s internally complex, unnatural, and impossible storyworlds are consistently and systematically structured according to the following techniques: recursive loops, rhetorical figures such as antithesis and similarity, a series of transformations, including reversal, displacement, duplication/repetition, magnification/reduction, substitution, superimposition, and narrative elements such as embedding and mise en abyme.” (The Unnatural and Impossible Storyworlds of Michel Gondry’s Music Videos: The Mise en Abyme of ‘Bachelorette). The music video for “Bachelorette” is so special because it plays with concepts of philosophy including ideas of metaphysics as they echo patterns of the universe, all tied together by Björk’s haunting and intimate vocals. 

Michele Gondry pushed the boundaries of what it means to make music videos, especially with his abstract and out-of-the-box ideas. Another masterclass in choreography is the famous music video for Daft Punk’s “Around The World.” From working alongside Metropolitan Opera, Pedro Almodóvar and Beyoncé, Blanca Li worked closely with Michele Gondry and choreographed the synchronized, repetitive movements of Daft Punk’s famous video. “Around The World” shows robots dancing to the vocals, mummies matching the drums, the synchronized swimmer girls following the keyboard, and the athletes moving to the bass, orchestrating a harmonized dance of imaginative characters. As blogger Nathan Evans describes, “Behind the dancing, there is a giant wall of lights that, throughout the video, change colour drastically. This is designed to pay homage to the disco era, where flashing lights were commonly used as an aesthetical choice, which indicates that the video and music is inspired by the disco era of music” (Analysis Of Daft Punk’s “Around The World” Music Video). Michele Gondry uses Daft Punk to prove that unique ideas can go a long way in telling a visual story. 

Michele Gondry won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and has 52 award nominations and 33 award wins. He directed the popular surrealist film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a personal favorite of mine, and other films such as The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo. He also just released a documentary about his creative process, titled Michele Gondry: Do it Yourself! This film also premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in the big 2025. I am personally very excited to watch this and to see the innovative process behind his visual media. Michele Gondry’s videos have gotten me through highs, lows, and some especially rainy days. I can’t wait to see what other work he releases, and I especially can’t wait to keep burdening my best friend Asha with my Michele Gondry mania.