Create your music,“Frenchies” will handle the video clip
One of the first the French directors to make his mark in the music industry was Michael Gondry. With as many as 80 video clips, Gondry is the one who launched the “French touch”. Since 1988, he has been working with artists like The Whites Stripes (“The Denial Twist” and “Fell in love with a girl”), The Rolling Stones (“Gimme Shelter”) and Daft Punk (“Around the World”). But it's with Bjork that Gondry signed his longest collaboration. It started back in 1993 with Human Behavior. It seems that these two artists succeed to combine their different atmospheres. In 2011, he directed Cristalline, their 8th collaboration. The video can be qualified as a work of art with colorful illustrations and a keen work on graphics. Gondry even calls it “scientific musical”.
But, in the last 5 years, an altogether new generation of French video makers has attracted attention. Widely known artists are interested by their technical capacities, imagination, and -sometimes- talent for provocation.
Romain Gavras is one of the pioneers of this generation. His work is often described as containing extremely violent images or seen as gritty. His work received public attention because of the clips he made for M.I.A and Justice. In 2010 he directed the controversial video clip Born Free (for M.I.A), a film that shows US soldiers killing and beating men or even children. The graphic violence and the nudity shocked and were strongly denounced. By The Huffington Post, for instance.
More recently, a new French graphic arts and design collective named Megaforce built its reputation in the industry. Compared to Gavras these four video directors are the nice boys of the class. They have shown their experience in directing a few acclaimed videos. If you don't know them yet, you will soon see them work with Madonna's return to our screens. After a call addressed on the internet by Madonna, they were given the opportunity to direct Give me all your luvin', her new single. It was not their first collaboration with famous international artists. They made a second version of Pursuit of Happiness interpreted by Kid Cudi and created a daydreaming atmosphere that is close to Michael Gondry's world.
Marine Verrine