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Gothic Goddess by Mark Dillon In stirring up a bubbling cauldron of otherworldly images, Canadian music video director Floria Sigismondi has helped to define the industry's cutting edge. Broaching the nightmare world of music video maven Floria Sigismondi is somewhat akin to visiting a burlesque sideshow replete with all manner of freakery: bald, androgynous, mannequin-like specters rub shoulders with saggy-fleshed ghosts and two-headed ogres; human figures are imprisoned in cars, watery coffins and transparent cubes; an eyeball floats in a coffee cup; black angels perform a grotesque ballet; minions revel as they are adorned with sadomasochistic orthodontics and fetishistic leg braces. Though somber and sometimes stomach-churning, the vivid visions of the award-winning Canadian director have lured in such varied recording artists as David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Tricky and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Her baroque style may best be described as a marriage of The Bride of Frankenstein and Italian auteur Federico Fellini at his least inhibited. In Sigismondi's own words, the bizarre characters who populate her work "are theater-based, very much like how Fellini uses characters symbolically. If there's a theme or something specific he wants to say, he does it either with dance, motion or a costume -- it's like surreal performance.". The deep influence of Greek mythology and Italian theater on Sigismondi's work can be traced to her origins in Pescara, Italy, where she was born to opera-singing parents (and named after a character in the Puccini opera Tosca who slays the Vatican police chief with a dagger). When Floria was two years old, the Sigismondi family (including sister Antonella, a sculptress) relocated to the Canadian steel city of Hamilton, Ontario. The video artist credits her parents with fostering her artistic aspirations, noting, "They've been very nurturing with the theater and really encouraging in the arts in general. I remember going to every single one of my parents' practices. Those operas are all tragedies, they're all passionate. It's all about drama." With a laugh, she adds, "Just being Italian is all about drama!" In her early years, Sigismondi became obsessed with drawing and painting, which she pursued in her free time while attending an all-girls Catholic school. Later, after graduating from high school, she moved 40 miles northeast to Toronto to study painting and illustration at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCA). Though she retained her painterly sensibility, Sigismondi began veering more toward photography. "I was never obsessed with the technical side of photography, although I learned it well and used it to achieve certain things," she elaborates. "I like to make things more surreal, more like the expressionist painters. I wasn't using the photograph to document reality." After completing her studies at OCA, Sigismondi landed her first professional assignment; a layout for the eponymous magazine published by the nationwide newspaper The Globe and Mail, for which she earned a National Magazine Award at the age of 24. She soon established a thriving career that included fashion shoots, publicity stills for Canadian recording artists such as Jane Siberry and I Mother Earth, and advertisements for Converse and Coca-Cola. Although she made a decent living from her still photography, Sigismondi soon began to find the process artistically stifling. She explains, "Sometimes fashion photography is obsessed with the stitching and the details of clothing -- it was too much about the product for me to be able to push things and bring out a feeling or mood that appealed to me. Painting was more like that for me, and although I went to school to be an illustrator, I couldn't give my paintings away." Fortunately, she was eventually approached by Don Allan, then-owner of Revolver Films (a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Partners Film Company), who was impressed enough with Sigismondi's stills to give her the opportunity to direct a music video. This career change would finally satisfy her need for creative autonomy. Although Sigismondi lacks any formal film training, the transition from still to motion photography proved to be smooth, particularly since her imagery has always had a cinematic quality. "My shoots consisted of more than just one image," she reminisces. "It would be five or six images that would say something by the end of it. and I wasn't rigid --- I didn't use a tripod. I was always moving around the model and doing 360-degree [setups], positioning the lights so I could shoot from many different angles. Those experiences helped me to understand movement, and my photography helped me to understand composition, camera, lighting, and working with talent." Sigismondi soon amassed a portfolio of videos for Canadian bands such as Pure, Victor, The Tea Party and 13 Engines. quite quickly, she "fell in love with the medium, since I could express myself more in terms of moods." Not every musical act, however, meshed with her uncanny aesthetic. "I've done videos for some bands where I knew what I really wanted to do, but the band didn't want to go there, or weren't able to pull it off," she laments. In terms of conjuring up visual concepts, Sigismondi has learned that clever ideas are more likely to occur when she has an affinity for the song in question. When this connection is made, she listens to the given track numerous times. "The project might arrive at a time when I already have little images in mind, like pieces in a puzzle," she offers. "This is when I'm really in sync with a project. If I really love the music, it melds with these images, and I can take my ideas further because they really go with the song. It's like experiencing synchronicity --- I call it being 'plugged in.' When you're plugged in, images appear."A video Sigismondi shot for the Toronto-based heavy metal band Harem Scarem --- entitled "Blue" --- was a key project during her formative years. This stylized spot signaled her first attempt at costuming the musicians and lending the entire piece a unified "look". Sigismondi drew inspiration from Robert Wiene's classic 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. in which a fairground showman uses a somnambulist to commit murder (a tale which, it turns out, may be the mere fantasy of an institutionalized lunatic). In approximating the style of this German expressionist benchmark, Sigismondi teamed for the first time the director of photography Chris Soos. The cinematographer could have simulated the look of the silent-era picture in postproduction, but instead, opted to create the ambiance in camera. Soos suggested shooting on high contrast soundtrack film stock rather than traditional production emulsions. "You can run sound stock through a camera, but it has no latitude whatsoever," the cameraman explains. "It's orthochromatic, blue-sensitive, and has a low ASA --- you have to use very punchy, hard lighting. Basically you're stimulating the circumstances that filmmakers had to deal with while shooting silent movies. [With sound stock] your latitude is maybe three-quarters of a stop over and under, and a slight deviation in exposure means that you'll either get nothing on the negative, or something that's totally washed out. I did gamble, but that choice enabled us to come up with a unique look that set up apart."Sigismondi was so thrilled with the finished piece that she has chosen to collaborate with Soos on nearly every video and commercial she has directed since. This past March, Soos received a Canadian Society of Cinematographers Award for his photography on the Sigismondi-directed Tricky video "She Makes Me Want to Die." In 1997, the cameraman earned the same CSC honor for Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People," another of the pair's collaborations. Many of the experimental techniques the duo used on their early projects have cropped up in more recent, bigger-budget work such as "Little Wonder," a music video in which veteran British rocker David Bowie struts about in an undercranked, Caligari-like manner. Crediting Soos for his creative and technical contributions to her projects, the director says, "We have a really great relationship. He's always thinking of new ways of doing thins and he's always really excited. I love surrounding myself with people who are really excited about their work."To maintain a cache of novel concepts, Sigismondi is adamant about seeking visual cues from art forms other than music videos. "When a certain medium influences itself, it just becomes a dragon chasing its tail --- it doesn't generate anything new," she explains. "Whereas if you are influenced by fine art, photography or music --- something outside of what you're actually doing --- you can bring in new things."One of Sigismondi's primary influences is the work of noted photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose stills feature freakish characters and an irreverence for religion and art history. She has also drawn inspiration from the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose canvases are renowned for fore, biblical allusions and the recurring theme of psychological incarceration. Hints of Bacon's style are apparent in her David Bowie video "Dead Man Walking," a piece notable for its angular sets, brightly tinted palette of green, blue, red and yellow, and the shrouding of the chamelion-like rocker in a face stocking.It was Sigismondi's collaboration with Marilyn Manson on "The Beautiful People" video that brought her international recognition. Though the shocker-rocker's music is definitely an acquired taste, the director found the singer to be a kindred spirit. "Manson and I connected from the very first time we met," she says. "We liked a lot of the same things. When I meet somebody that I really connect with on a creative level, all of the stored-up images come to the surface. Usually, that means I can be darker, moodier, and more dramatic with my concepts." In fact, Manson had enough faith in his synergy with Sigismondi to allow her virtually complete creative control. "His input was mostly in terms of mood; he would say things like 'I want it dark,'" she expounds."The Beautiful People" presents Manson as a ghostly, 13'-tall dictator in Fascist garb, flanked by equally tall obsidian angels as he rules over saluting citizens who gaze upon him with blank, hollow-eyed stares. Intercut with these shots are equally disturbing scenes of Manson strapped to a sadomasochistic orthodontic contraption that recalls the horrifically macabre milieus of Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein. This project resulted in Soos' experimentation with Clairmont Camera's SwingShift lenses (built by Century Precision Optics), which have bellows-like extensions which allow for greater flexibility in controlling focus and depth of field. He credits director/cameraman Samual Bayer for bringing the equipment into the music video milieu, recalling, "I first saw a SwingShift [lens] used in the video for the Blind Melon son 'No Rain,' in which Bayer did these beautiful shots of the band in a field of flowers. I picked up on it a year or two later. It was already an established look, but I really wanted to energize the technique, and I needed a song to motivate this dynamic approach."In "The Beautiful People," Soos created an effect with the SwingShift lenses which he describes as "in-camera vignettes and vertical shifting of the image, as if a projector had lost its loop." While shooting, he and his crew deployed follow-focus gear to remotely manipulate the lens, lending the imagery its jumpy, blurry, quality. Soos' intention was to make artful use of "mistakes that most cinematographers try to avoid."The Manson video was also the cameraman's first application of mixed color temperatures. In blending a tungsten key source with ambient daylight-balanced bounce from an HMI fixture, Soos was thinking ahead to the postproduction process. "We had a lot of room to play within the telecine," he explains. "The daylight/tungsten mix on the negative is usually enough to give the telecine artist enough chromatic separation within the scene to push and pull the contrast, colors, mids, blacks, and highlights in almost any direction. Lighting with color temperature in mind ultimately provides the most latitude for photographic printing." The powerful subject matter of the "Beautiful People" piece contributed to an outcry against Marilyn Manson by conservative groups, and while Sigismondi accepts her role in the controversy, she remains somewhat uncertain as to what all the fuss is about. "It's far beyond my comprehension," she says with a sigh. "When I hear things or read articles about people going crazy [over Manson], I wonder how they can be so blind to the irony --- it sounds as if they're fanatics." She does concede, however, that she may have disrupted the slumber of some viewers "who have said that the tall figures in 'The Beautiful People' are like characters from their nightmares." With a smile, Sigismondi adds, "But I think they're the most beautiful creatures."If the director's imaginings are grist for the nightmare mill, it's because these bizarre icons literally spring forth from her dreams. "It comes from the creative anxiety of having to come up with something in three or four days --- I'm constantly thinking about it. I fall asleep at three or four a.m., sometimes five, and I like to lie in bed when it's dark and really quiet --- sometimes I have music on. I choose the early morning because, for me, the rest of the world has to be asleep. When waking or sleeping, you're closes to the dream state, and that's the state in which I get images that are completely finished. I keep a notebook next to my bed, and a lot of times I write in the dark, because if I turn the lights on everything disappears. I do little sketches [next to my writing] because I don't know if I'll be able to read my writing when I wake up. A lot of the Manson images came from that process." Sigismondi's association with Manson led to the David Bowie "Little Wonder" video, which features oddly colored frames sped up to match the song's rhythms. In the piece, an alien resembling a younger version of the Thin White Duke peruses the streets of New York to discover a throng of baroque visions, all of which remain oblivious to passerby. Riding the subway, our protagonist encounters another alien creature accompanied by a grotesque baby which has a detachable head (which was actually Sigismondi herself in a cameo appearance). Our hero scoops up the newborn's noggin in a box only to later deposit it in a mailbox. Although Sigismondi insists that such an incident never happened to her, she maintains that she can relate to the wandering extraterrestrial. Although Sigismondi and Soos pride themselves on putting in many hours of prep time, on-set spontaneity still factors into their visual mix. At one point during their shoot for "She Makes Me Wanna Die," a track by British trip-hop artist Tricky, the cinematographer got carried away with a last-minute idea and failed to make his call time. "We needed a 'distorted' quality," he recalls. "I was inspired to use pieces of beveled glass in front of the lens, which fractures the image, depending on the focal length. Going against the grain of lenses being too good --- too sharp and too contrasty --- and breaking those qualities down are the kind of thoughts that would kill Carl Zeiss. In redefining what the glass sees, you sometimes have to make your own glass." On the morning of the Tricky shoot, the cameraman dropped by a stained-glass store. Arriving on set some 10 minutes late, he declared, "Floria, I've got an idea!" and proceeded to detail his proposed process. The resulting fissured photography enhanced the outlandish quality of the clip, which played up the writhing shapes of lizards, snakes, and Greek gorgons. For "She Makes Me Wanna Die," Soos employed an Arriflex 435 ES. The cinematographer is effusive in his praise for the camera, noting its compact size, wide latitude in speed (1 to 150 fps), variable shutter (which ranges from 11.2 to 180 degrees), extremely bright viewfinder, and well-crafted balance for handheld shooting. Soos sum it up as "the camera that does everything." Soos also took advantage of Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 emulsion. "I occasionally rate the Vision 500 at 250 ASA, and sometimes at 120 ASA," he explains. "It handles overexposure extremely well, specifically for telecine transfers. It also complements contrasty lighting extremely well; it leaves the blacks very black, the highlights really start to bloom, and the grain structure looks like a 50 ASA film when you deliver the telecine people a very 'fat' or overexposed negative." Since Soos favored high contrast and very sculpted lighting with no fill for the Tricky clip, the high-speed Vision 500T proved particularly suitable. This brooding video also involved some rather imaginative exploitation of fluorescent fixtures. The cameraman used fixtures fitted with Chimera soft boxes for his key, adding fluorescents as practical elements in the frame. "Just like other cinematographers would use a light bulb behind a lampshade in a corner of a room, I clustered a bunch of fluorescent tubes on a wall and had the wiring exposed," he recollects. "It was lighting, but it was also art direction." Fluorescents can be so bright on camera that their illumination sometimes blows out, so Soos sprayed his units with a light coat of black paint. Once the tubes were lit up, the paint covering their surface "knocked the level down so it would become photographically friendly, and also created this really cool, corroded effect." Sigismondi and Soos most recently collaborated on "Can't Get Loose," a video featuring British composer/multi-instrumentalist Barry Adamson, whose swanky style encompasses jazz, hip-hop, gospel, big band, funk and samples from the scores of Sixties spy thrillers. Adamson's albums play like soundtracks to imaginary films, which suites Sigismondi just fine, since her work is becoming more narrative-based. "Can't Get Loose" is the director's most linear concept to date; it was inspired by one of her favorite films, Roman Polanski's The Tenant. "It has a little bit of that psychological thriller [edge] to it," she explains. "You don't know whether people are driving [the main character] crazy or if he really is crazy, which is a great subject that I'm always drawn to. I wanted to come up with something that was more filmic than stylized." Sigismondi is hoping that "Can't Get Loose" will help her to land a feature film assignment in the coming year. Though tight-lipped about a current writing endeavor, she expects that her approach to cinema will be similar to her video work. She plans on developing ideas on her own and then collaborating with a screenwriter who will develop dialogue and structure. "I use all of the elements [of filmmaking] --- body movement, camera movement, and lighting --- to express an emotion. I think my work will always have those kinds of elements --- little symbolic images that take you deeper." Even though Sigismondi's videos may have viewers anticipating a particular type of movie from her, she plans to confound expectations. Not surprisingly, she mentionsSeven and Edward Scissorhands as two films that she admires, but maintains, "I wouldn't want to do a feature that would pigeonhole me into a certain category that would be hard for me to get out of. I'm interested in a lot of things, and I want to keep my options open. [Potential subjects and genres] could range from female issues to psychological thrillers." No matter which topics she tackles in the next phase of her career, it is certain that Sigismondi won't be the only one losing sleep over them. |
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