Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires Festivales de Buenos Aires

Patience (After Sebald)

april 20
18:00h
agotadas

Fundación Proa

 

Film information

Director ← [ + info ]

Grant Gee

In the end, having good taste matters. Because it’s more than just something you can brag about at dinner parties. If we consider the case of British director Grant Gee, his good taste as a cultural consumer determines his criteria as an audiovisual creator. The objects of his works have always carried a great bouquet. This means Gee –as a subject of those same works– proves already that he has a well educated pallet. And if it’s not his pallet, it’s his ear. Considering that most of his filmography –his music videos, creative-videos, short films, or documentaries– is related to music, we should celebrate that Grant Gee chose with such fine taste the people he teamed up with: Radiohead, Gorillaz, Joy Division, Scott Walker, John Cale… They’re all sharp bands and artists who usually escape massive preferences and the doubts about their creative validity –although there’s always a spectator willing to discuss it, of course (“Radiohead is not that good!”).

In the end, being a music video director matters. It affects your style. Somehow, you know the language of images has its own musicality. At least Grant Gee’s images usually do. Try and see one of his films without sound: even the more classic ones hint rhythm, harmony, even a tone. Grant Gee’s own career is to blame for this sonorous sense of the images: after starting the 90’s with a participation in the Zoo TV U2 invented for their Achtung Baby tour, the Plymouth-born director has spent most of his life directing music videos for Blur, The Auteurs, Sparklehorse, Badly Drawn Boy, Coldplay and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Some of his work in this format are particularly memorable: Radiohead’s “No Surprises” would probably be at the top (in his 1998 documentary on the band Meeting People Is Easy, you can see the curious shooting process). With such training it’s no surprise than even his films about non-musical issues, like the recent Patience (After Sebald) about the great writer W.G Sebald, have such a precise gait. Although I guess in this specific case The Caretaker’s very proper soundtrack helps…

In the end, hyperactivity matters. Because Grant Gee’s works as a director are not the only relevant ones. He was also involved in the cinematography of two documentaries directed by Stephen Kijak: Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006) and Stones in Exile (2010), as well as in the making-of of the discreet film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, exclusive TV recordings like the one of the 2001 Meltdown festival in London, commissioned by Scott Walker, and DVD works such as the Gorillaz concert at the Manchester Opera House in 2005… Of course, these are all projects with good taste. They all have musicality. In the end, Grant Gee matters.

Joan Pons

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