Music Videos at Midnight Madness

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1993

“Today”

Is There Any Love in Your Heart?
Mark Romanek
France/USA, 1993,
3’39”
Featuring Lenny Kravitz
Virgin

Sometimes Salvation
Stephane Sednaoui
USA, 1993,
5’04”
Featuring Black Crowes
Def America/Warner

The Witch
Paul Boyd
USA, 1993,
4’22”
Featuring The Cult
Warner

Today
Stephane Sednaoui
USA, 1993
3’30”
Featuring Smashing Pumpkins
Virgin

Time Capsule
Douglas Gau
USA, 1993,
3’55
Featuring Matthew Sweet
Zoo/BMG

Take a Hold
Paul Boyd
USA, 1993
5’01”
Featuring Raging Slab
Warner

Nickel Bag
Nick Egan
USA, 1993
3’18”
Featuring Digable Planets
Pendulum/Warner

Down in a Hole
Nigel Dick
USA, 1993
4’47”
Featuring Alice In Chains
Columbia

Comin’ On
Nico Beyer
Great Britain/France, 1993,
4’26”
Featuring The Shamen
One Little Indian/Sony

Free Your Mind
Mark Romanek
USA, 1993
4°42”
Featuring En Vogue
Atlantic/Warner

Any shrewd cultural observer will agree: MTV, MuchMusic and their global counterparts transmit the hottest, sexiest mass media images around. It’s an addiction for universal vidheads who demand rapid-fire montage and high-octane tunes. Bondage, drugs, great lipstick, fabulous clothes and novelty galore.

In co-operation with industry leader (and über-hipsters) Propaganda and Satellite Films, Midnight Madness presents a special inaugural programme of music videos. There are serious filmmakers at work here, creating art outrageous, political and beautiful.

Stephane Sednaoui’s Sometimes Salvation, a sodden, mesmeric tribute to neo-hippie drug paranoia, features the sublime Sofia Coppola lost in a world of leopard skin and cheap hallucinogens. Sednaoui’s newest work, Today, is a vision of childhood lost, public sex and suicide on the “best day” of a young man’s life.

Paul Boyd jives on a retro groove, cut through with nineties-style attitude. In The Witch, a misty graveyard sees fat cat bankers encounter a little girl with a gun. Take a Hold is a rockumentary trip through the Slab’s crazy house, where rules are only made to be broken and a hint of patchouli oil wafts through every open door.

An underground Paris garage, a chic female vampire emerges from a car trunk, Lenny belts it out and the steam starts to rise. Romanek, after all, is responsible for Free Your Mind, a sensational performance piece from the dynamic En Vogue. With its bad-ass costumes and serious attitude, it stands as a bold, hip tour-de-force, even months after leaving heavy rotation.

Also on the programme are Douglas Gau’s bizarre, beautiful mix of lost-sixties Czech masterpiece and bug-soaked picnic; Nickel Bag sees Nick Egan takes the coolest cats of hip hop on a drive around New York City in an awesome muscle convertible; and Nico Beyer’s indescribably groovalicious rave masterpiece, Comin’ On, is Nancy Reagan’s worst nightmare.

My thanks to Rhea Rupert and Shelle Lippa at Propaganda, Danielle Liekefet at Satellite and Larry Winokur at Baker, Winokur, Ryder for making this happen.
—Noah Cowan