Owen Pallet has released a new video for “The Sky Behind The Flag,” a single off of his newest record, In Conflict. The video presents a new challenge for Pallett fans as the rather bizarre imagery leaves one to do some deep digging to find any sort of meaning within the video.
With his latest record, In Conflict, releasing a little over a year ago, Owen Pallett has remained hard at work promoting the record with a tour and, now, a new music video for the single “The Sky Behind The Flag.” The video is at once as sparse and as complex and beautiful as the single that it is meant to promote. Featuring an intriguing style of sketch drawings, “The Sky Behind The Flag” shows a series of sketched images that cut in and out of the video, all the while being partially covered by a white flag. If the title is anything of an indicator, the white flag is not meant to be the focus of the video so much as the images in the background are meant to be the primary focus. Why, then, are the sketches that pepper the background, incapable of being viewed in full? The sketches are cut in and out of the video by a series of splices that obscure the images at varying degrees. Opening with a young woman, and continuing with images of the NASA space program, there’s also a lack of consistency in the images, leaving the viewer scratching their heads wondering where the core idea of the video can be found.
The cutting of the sketched images and the inconsistency in theme seem to point to a blatant desire to belittle folks who seek any sort of meaning in any sort of artistic presentation. The meaning here is not meant to be the true purpose of the video. Whatever the purpose or reason, the video for “The Sky Behind The Flag” is impressive to say the least.
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