While the “critics” have been “lauding” the “visionary” effort by Kanye West in his directorial debut film that serves as an accompaniment to his upcoming new record, Runaway, the film, when treated as either a short or an extended music video—leaves much to be desired. Being a decidedly arthouse film, Kanye West takes poetic license and shows us some of the twisted images coming from the mind of a self-named genius, a creative polymath capable of combining disparate elements like those exemplified by the cunning of a Picasso, the deconstruction of a Derrida, the creativity of a Warhol, or the glam avant-garde of David Bowie. Kanye is, at the moment, none of these (my apologies).
The Phoenix in the film is played by Selite Ebanks, a light-skinned Black actress. While this isn’t a problem per se, Kanye West’s interesting racial juxtapositions of “different hues of Blackness” creates a tension which he seeks to reconcile and complicate through the mythological story of “rebirth” as prompted by the figure of the phoenix. While he doesn’t achieve it, it’s a point of admiration. It’s not everyday that a mainstream artist attempts to deal with the important issues that affect the everyday experience of some of his consumers. To his credit, as a rapper in the mainstream, it definitely takes some guts to point out the contradictions of life experience today. Sadly, he does a limited job in dealing with the loaded issues he boldly raises. For example, there’s a part in the film where a ballerina dance occurs in an abstract heart-shaped formation while Kanye sings and plays along on a piano. Aesthetically, it’s compositionally astute and the colors are vibrant and sharp. However, going back to Kanye’s presentation of race, the ballerina troupe is composed of all, but one, Caucasian women (again, of a lighter complexion). Perhaps it’s unfair for me to be so hard on Kanye. I don’t really think so as most have been largely star-struck by anything with his name on it, I think it’s rather healthy to pose the critique. The film, when considered as a whole, is nothing but a collection of empty connections and half-developed ideas couched in extravagant and non-narrative explosions with the addition of out-of-style Hollywood clichés.
As of publishing time, Runaway has premiered on MTV and on YouTube/VEVO (over the weekend). For those of you dying to see a film that can be only described as “ambitious” and “daring,” you can do so at those sites. While at the event in Hollywood where Kanye haphazardly introduced his own film, he described this project as putting his music to video–clearly this is something’s he’s always wanted to do. For me, however, the movie and the music couldn’t be any more incongruous. There are many points in 35-minute film I could cite, but I’ll leave those humorous discoveries up to you.
The film flier I received at the venue read:
Kanye West has always dreamed of bringing his music to life in the form of film. Runaway. the short film accompaniment to the new album, is the realization of that dream. Created and directed by Kanye West, Runaway is a tale of loss and renewal. Through West’s ambitious new film, we are able to glimpse his artistic vision as never before. It is with great pride and pleasure that Kanye is finally able to present one of his dreams made real.
This description, while simple and generic, frames Kanye West’s work as a monumental contribution to both his artistic ouevre but perhaps more importantly, to our understanding of the greatness of his genius (cue South Park jokes). While it has been my experience that sometimes the sonic environment can hide some of the imperfections and irregularities of an artistic piece, in the narrative visual world, it’s a little more difficult. Kanye struggles in this one when one considers it a “film.” If you take the project as more of an extra-long music video, then it kind of works. It’s undoubtedly visually stunning and inspired by some equally visually-stunning material (Purple Rain, Thriller, maybe even Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555). I’ll give him points for having a pleasing color palette, but it lacks severely at the narrative-musical intersections which seem to me to be the whole point of the piece. Without the visual lining up to the sonic, the film becomes a melange of nonsensical tangents and vectors which serve as our roadmap to an idiosyncratic, incoherent and incomprehensible world. I suggest you watch it simply because it’s there and it’s free—however, it might not be worth your time. It’s another hyped project that’s probably going to be big whether or not people legitimately enjoy it. To end on a positive note: it was really nice to see all of those colors projected up onto the big screen.
Websites you should visit…
[...]below you’ll find the link to some sites that we think you should visit[...]……
mirror, mirror in the heavens…
the story we like to tell ourselves about the size of kanye’s ego might not be entirely sound. whatever the ego might turn out to be, it has been pushed to the backseat in a manner so welcome that it seems to have already hired a decorator. we live in an age where the cult of personality (others’ and one’s own) has been replaced by the cult of the fan. but the fan has no face, name, pulse or ego. the fan is an impure abstraction and one that refuses to be concretized. take the case of kanye– with so many infractions (of art and decorum) setting the blogosphere abuzz it is increasingly hard to imagine whose face his work sets aglow. it is easy, of course, to imagine a mass of bland, texted out, ethically and aesthetically challenged youth bowing down to the ones that purportedly serve them. and yes, it is not in imagination only that kanye has sold so many records, graced so many stages and magazine covers. but there is a twist here to the old story of bread and spectacle: while in the not-so-distant past our stars were tutoring us how to become stars, nowadays people like kanye west are teaching us how to be fans. this reversal is due to what could be called “the internet exemption,” or in a nutshell, the belief that everything has already been done and it is out there and the true artist is just a fine editor. this belief is the last thing you will hear confessed to by any “artist,” but is implicit in the new ethics of creation and appropriation.
kanye is a special case because he comes from the world of hip hop, a culture whose early beginnings were gleefully, and ingeniously, disrespectful of copyright restrictions. on the other hand, however, his method of appropriation is voraciously ecumenical– no area of creativity is spared the scissors of this particular regurgitator. this may be almost as offensive to our pre-internet idea of original art as it sure is to our pre-internet idea of original editorial work. riding on the internet exemption is this new brand of artist, the producer-turned-blogger-turned-designer-turned-musician-turned-singer(?)-turned-director-while-all-the-while-having-at-all-times-been-a-pain. such branding is useful and significant in that it lays bare the simplistic fantasy that exposure (to others and to information) equals accomplishment.
and this is how kanye gets to make “runaway,” a short film or a half-hour-too-long music video to accompany a new record release. in it, one is invited to gorge on a sleek color aesthetic, a naggingly discrepant soundtrack ostensibly quilted from the future release, and a haphazard non-story about inter-species love, interstellar collisions and interpersonal discord. everything the viewer registers owes its claim to our attention to other things we have already been exposed to. at best, the film is a superb work of indiscriminate derivation. there is so much to enjoy visually (a feather-clad lingerie model being one of the lesser joys amongst extravagant ballerina formations, empty high-modernist spaces and domesticated does) that it is made difficult to care about coherence, story-telling or musical background. and that is only a part of the problem–not realizing the primacy of sight over all other senses suggests a missed connection of a larger kind, i.e. between operatic ambition and opera. kanye obviously likes all things in his film but he seems to even more strongly like us to like them. the loop of fragmentary gestures of thumbs up or no thumbs at all closely resembles the alternations of zeroes and ones onto the tape of a turing machine. the more likes the better. kanye is really his own best fan not because of egomaniacal artistic confidence but because he can’t help embracing the culture that birthed him. ultimately, his only available shot at stardom is by being a loyal fan.