My day before the calcium lights in 2007, playing the "obnoxious villager heckler" in "Now I Lay Thee Down", a music video by metal gurus Machine Head, is now out for the world to see. And I would like this video even if I wasn't in it!
Machine Head's excellent headbanging performance is wrapped around a tragic and operatic play that could be described as "The Elephant Man" meets "Romeo And Juliet"; the former, a shunned and reviled outcast, decides to end it all and asks the latter, the sole person who loves the good-hearted but miserable grotesque, to do him in.
The play was shot at San Francisco's historic Regency Theater (built 1909) in the style of equally operatic silent movies, those from around 1918-1919 - I think of D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms in particular. It closes, appropriately, with the cast taking a bow.
This music video in the style of silent movies premiered on October 4th, the birthday of Buster Keaton, that most visionary of all silent screen artists.
1 comment:
Great to see Paul's animated acting in this intelligent headbanger music video, with its tight editing, searing vocals, and excellent homage to DW Griffith, combined to create a product reminiscent of what Theodore Roszak has described in his 1991 sci fi book, Flicker.
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