YouTube killed the video star. Yet Toronto director Scott Cudmore has a plan. “They Shoot Videos, Don’t They?,” a bi-monthly music-video screening series debuting July 9 at Trinity-Bellwoods gallery 107 Shaw (107 Shaw), features some of video’s best and brightest auteurs — most of them Canadian — proving that the art form can live on long after Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze take to bigger screens.
“The internet has really changed the way people make music videos,” says Cudmore, whose films for Timber Timbre, The National and Brian Borcherdt boast a wintry melancholia that recalls Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó. “Beyoncé’s video for ‘All The Single Ladies,’ for example, broke out on the internet and made people consciously look for music videos because of its art. The music video is a format that allows for a lot of experimentation, but it’s a very young medium of film that’s disappearing, at least from the mainstream public eye.”
Canada has its own crop of visionary directors, highlighted in Cudmore’s reverent installation series. To preserve the form the way it’s meant to be seen, selected videos will play in a continuous loop on individual televisions as viewers listen in on headphones. Among the filmmakers is “1 2 3 4” man Patrick Daughters, short-film director Graydon Sheppard (his video for Sebastien Grainger’s “Who Do We Care For?” features the musician encountering a great ball of fire) and Toronto’s Jesi The Elder, whose vibrant animated music videos for DD/MM/YY and Katie Stelmanis have made her a known entity amongst Toronto’s independent film community.
Cudmore believes that the music video can live on long past the days of MTV.
“Originally videos were designed as a promotional tool, a commercial for an artist. We want to present the music video in a different context than you would usually see it. This is a celebration of the creators of the videos, where it’s less about the music and more about the product presented as its own creation, the way you would see a painting in a museum.”
As VideoFACT funding competes with MuchMusic’s drive towards reality programming, the music video either transforms itself into an easily digestible spectacle (OK Go dancing on treadmills) or goes experimental. Cudmore’s curated series presents little-known and,
to a relative extent, rarely seen videos that indicate the possibilities of the art.
“Tonight, we want to celebrate the format,” he says. “I’ll always make music videos, even if I do commercials or films, because it’s a medium I believe in. Admittedly it’s a small subculture of film, but the style within it is as vast as any kind of cinema.”