Video: Beck: "Cell Phone's Dead"
Beck and Michael Gondry haven't worked together since 1996's "Deadweight" video. Since then, Beck's become a little more somber and serious, while Gondry's videos have grown increasingly outrageous. Still, the two somehow seem made for each other. Here, Gondry doesn't use out-of-scale objects or tricky edits to mess with the viewer's sense of space, as in past videos. Instead, he employs good old fashioned CGI to distort your perspective.
Beck's olde-timey suit, the room he occupies, and Gondry's black and white footage lend the video some artificial age; combined with the spotlight lighting and skewed scenes, it almost looks a vintage German expressionist film. All these elements combine to present Beck's inverse, the self-consciously modern faux-rapper framed by a noir-ish hotel and primitive, blocky robots from a future that never quite was.
Video: > Beck: "Cell Phone's Dead" [Windows Media]
[from The Information: Deluxe Edition; due 02/27/07 on Interscope]