Pitchfork

The new Beirut video is for an old song, "Postcards From Italy". Fittingly then, director and Partizan client Alma Har'el-- who also crafted Beirut's wonderful "Elephant Gun" clip-- used some archival clips from her home collection of Super 8 films. Many of these images were purchased from families selling their videos and filmstrips on eBay, and the colors, washed or bleached out, are reminscent of not only thrift-shop postcards, but the cover photo on Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, as well.

The star of the "Elephant Gun" clip was Beirut's Zach Condon himself-- charismatic and mustacheod-- but here its the director. "All the parts with Zach and his girl friend Kristianna were shot while he was staying at my house," says Alma. "On the day he was going to leave for New York we got up really early and shot a lot of Super 8 film around my neighbourhood in Silver Lake, California. I wanted them to match the naive movies that I had on my collection, bitter sweet moments of life lived. Some of them in retrospective can be uncomfortable to watch or cruel but at the time some one found them beautiful and wanted to keep them for ever. Postcards from the dead."

The result is spell-binding but also saddening: The decades' worth of intimate moments, family vacations, and hazy nostalgia are often beautiful and charming. That these, eventually, were discarded memories-- surplus goods to the generations spawned by their subjects-- makes their sentiments even more cutting. Some of today's more transient and technologically inclined Americans would apparently rather make a little coin from their family's past than work to preserve and cherish it. Or maybe that's too cynical, and all those eBay sellers are also busy documenting their own family activities. If so, perhaps in 40 years some young filmmaker will construct a montage of our generation surfing the internet and playing video games. Ahh, the memories.

Psst, Alma, please do one with a Clientele song next.

Download: > Beirut: "Postcards From Italy"