You're watching Phoenix performing "JBoy" on a TiAmo Speciale on Televisione Italiana Canale Quatro. Just make sure you stay tuned into the 4x3 majesty so you catch the post-show vino break with the host... that is, until the VCR stopped recording.
Because sometimes a great performance is defined by the audience reaction and not what happens on-stage...
from MoMa.org PopRally, which premiered the video with a lengthy interview with director Sofia Coppola:
Q: Your brother Roman has directed a number of music videos for Phoenix, for which your husband Thomas Mars is the lead singer. Why are you now directing the video for the new song “Chloroform”?
Sofia Coppola: I’ve always loved Phoenix, and the videos Roman did for them. I love the song “Chloroform,” and I had an idea based on a photo, and since I haven’t done many videos, I like trying things that are unfamiliar. The idea came from a photo by Joseph Sterling in his book The Age of Adolescence. Thomas’s sister’s boyfriend, Mateo, who works at the Book Marc store, gave me the book last X-mas.
La Blogoteque's Take Away Shows remains the definitive web music series thanks to a groundbreaking style that placed off-the-cuff performances, sometimes with improvised instruments, but always in non-traditional venues for an effect that captures the elements of spontaneity and discovery that are usually lacking in most filmed music performances.
Phoenix return to the series — a fitting match, with both entities hailing from France, and tying in nicely with the band's previously released Homemade version. This time they're actually at Versailles. And drones are involved.
So it was in the amazing Phoenix video "Trying To Be Cool," directed by CANADA, where both the band and the production team do it entirely live: The band plays live and the crew captures each shot without any breaks.
Imagine a funhouse designed by an acid-eater fan of Rube Goldberg, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. Then imagine precisely plotting out a one-take video filled with delightful nonsense. Then, halfway through, you say fuck it, and the dancers come out for a huge routine that would make Stanley Donen proud (or envious).
But, wait. Throw all that away. What's really going on here is a controlled experiment in chaos. Two cameras taking turns shooting a continous 16 beats for a one take "relay race" of a one-take video.
It's a forever escalating/exhausting war of trying to cool and get attention, with every victory more shortlived than the last. And that is a very beautiful, or scary thing.
If director Patrick Daughters' K-pow extravaganza for "Entertainment" was too over-the-top, you might prefer this lo-fi homemade clip that Phoenix made of themselves casually performing in front of Versailles. Well, more precisely, it's just a greenscreened depiction of Versailles. (And I mean the one in France, not the unbuilt abominination in Florida)
It has been a while away for both Phoenix and director Patrick Daughters, and what better way to come back than with a larger than life ode to Korean cinema. The look mixes genres and eras —employing vernacular images of opening ceremony style choreography, Hong Kong gangster action and a superstar DJ to tell the tale of tragic love(s).
