When I hear the voice of Björk immediately comes to my mind the verse of a helpless wounded bird in the woods.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the word “björk” means in Icelandic “birch” (the full name of the singer is Björk Guðmundsdóttir viz Birch daughter of Gudmund). Everything revolving around the figure of the singer – the vocal line, the physicality, the style, the transformism attitude, the voice’s and sound’s experiments – is strictly Natural.
In the first seconds of this video the singer is lying down in the landscape, as a modern Gulliver, totally carved between the elements of nature. The profile of her nose perfectly overlaps with the mountain ridges. The woman seems to be a lifeless sculpture. Till she starts to cry, slightly, so we realize that she’s alive, maybe she’s sleeping and doing sad dreams. On her face a projector starts to slide different images and lights, and the main one is the screening of a real-Björk singing the ballad and smiling at the camera. But this kind of hologram turns of 360° and falls in the nightmare of the giant. Suddenly on the screen appears a third character: Björk-videogame version from the 80′s. She acts only in the chorus, when the dream took shape: “I go through all this – before you wake up so I can feel happier – to be safe up here with you”. These three levels of reality alternate throughout the video.
“Basically, Hyper-ballad is about having this kind of bag going on and three years have passed and you’re not high anymore” says Björk “you have to make an effort consciously and nature’s not helping you anymore. So you wake up early in the morning and you sneak outside and you do something horrible and destructive, break whatever you can find(…)and come home and be like, ‘Hi honey, how are you?’”
This idea is very simple and strong but not simple to achieve, so she chosed Michel Gondry, the pioneer of the “bullet time” technique adapted in The Matrix. Gondry directed a total of seven music videos for Björk and collaborated with other artists include Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, and Radiohead.
The video was filmed at Telecine Cell in London, using a motion control system and a single 400 ft roll of film.
All the elements fit in the right place.
Impressing work dated 1996.
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