There are really only three kinds of home movies worth watching: 1) Those featuring your own family; 2) Those featuring somebody extraordinarily famous or interesting; and 3) Those featuring spectacular groin injuries that Bob Saget shows you on lonely evenings. That's the essential problem when bands release music videos that are essentially nothing more than home movies synced up to a song. Unless it propels some already established personality or mystique, the video can come across as nothing more than an exercise in lazy narcissism. Director Alma Har'el and her cohort Zach Condon —frontman of Beirut — take a different tack on the form, elevating it to the level of an art project. "Postcards From Italy" consists of footage with Condon and his girlfriend — shot in and around the Har'el's Los Angeles home — that's doctored to be nearly indistinguishable from clips taken off archival home movie reels that the director has purchased over the years at various yard sales and the like. The activities depicted range from simple and beautiful to exotic and desperate, leaving little doubt which films are personal memory tokens and which were meant to impress an audience. As Pitchfork correctly pointed out in their debut of the clip: It's all kind of sad, especially when you realize that these are literally memories that have been sold on the curbside along with other unwanted goods. --> watch "Postcards From Italy"
Beirut "Postcards From Italy" (Ba Da Bing/4AD/Beggars)
Alma Har'el, director/editor | Justin Benoliel, producer | Partizan, production co | Steve Drypolcher, DP
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