The beautiful and ephemeral whispering tune “The One I Love” finds its video counterpart in a hauntingly nihilistic image collage directed by Jem Cohen. After watching the video, it’s hard to imagine the song or video existing without each other.
Wow. This is a powerful video.
It is powerful in its simplicity, and authenticity. Yet it somehow seems as though it is not a video, but a collection of remembered moments, either from one rainy day or from a lifetime of rain, and commuting, and standing, and watching, and living. The sound in the video is used to great effect to enhance this experience of watching something remembered, almost as if you could play back memories on a projector. The tap water running, the rain collecting on the pan in the street, the stillness of everything, the background noises of a subway, they all enhance the song, and take you away from your computer to a world where this song and this video are effortlessly married in a union with no beginning or end.
There are very few moments where the music and the video images actually sync, as is standard practice in the mainstream school of music video production. Jem Cohen, it seems, is encouraged to expel himself from that school, while showing in moments that he is aware of its regulation. One of these moments happens when a man in a car starts rapping his hands upon the dashboard, split seconds before a drumbeat comes in to the song, subtly. Another happens when either Simone or Amedeo Pace, two brothers in the band, turns his head to look directly at the camera when a climax happens in the music.
The film is all about motion and framing. Its beauty lies in awaiting. The anticipation of a subject to turn their head, or to look up or somewhere mingles with shots in which nothing is expected to change, such as the subversive setting and expert framing of the shot of the water tower. We don’t know the setting is New York until the shot of Bleecker and Bowery pops up, but we suspect it is in New York because of the architecture and the taxis. This is another form of anticipation and motion persistent throughout the video. We anticipate a setting establishing shot like the one at the end of the Empire State Building, and the withholding of such a shot increases the anticipation and makes the ultimate realization a more concrete catharsis.
“The One I Love” is on Blonde Redhead’s ninth studio album, out this year, called Barragán, which was released by Kobalt Music Group on September 2nd of 2014. Blonde Redhead have been based in New York City since 1993. They are playing Wednesday night at Bowery Ballroom.
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