Following "Licorice Pizza", I have decided that the time is right for a PTA retrospective. I'm not going to watch all the music videos, but I am going to try for some, if not all, of the short films - starting with the most recent, and easiest to find "Anima" a collaboration with Radiohead's Thom Yorke, that is readily available on Netflix.
The short is a choreographed expressive dance piece, linked to three songs from Yorke's solo album "Anima" so the narrative is a little open to interpretation, but it concerns Thom (Thom Yorke) who meets a girl (Dajana Roncione) on the train. He attempts to return her forgotten lunch pail to her but is caught in a cycle of systems and routines that keep them apart. Though he catches glimpses across his day, he's unable to get close to her. The routines and oppression are expressed by brutalist concrete architecture, singular black outfits and the dances.
I think your tolerance for this is probably going to depend very much on how much you enjoy Radiohead's later work, as Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich provide the score and it's the sort of electronic soundscape that we've come to expect from those albums, and from Yorke solo work.
I don't have much of an interest in dance in any form, particularly this form of expressive work, but still I think even I could tell that the chorography was clever and helped to tell the love story that the short was providing. Having initially though that Yorke might, because of his character in this, rebel against the systems and plough through but he actually participates in it at times, and in some of the more complex dance aspects too, it also was quite impressive. If you consider the short against what has happened in Thom Yorke's life in the last few years, and the casting, it adds another, deeper, level of meaning to the film.
I can't pretend that this is the sort of thing that I'm really into, but in general terms I could appreciate the skill and effort that went into making it.
The short is a choreographed expressive dance piece, linked to three songs from Yorke's solo album "Anima" so the narrative is a little open to interpretation, but it concerns Thom (Thom Yorke) who meets a girl (Dajana Roncione) on the train. He attempts to return her forgotten lunch pail to her but is caught in a cycle of systems and routines that keep them apart. Though he catches glimpses across his day, he's unable to get close to her. The routines and oppression are expressed by brutalist concrete architecture, singular black outfits and the dances.
I think your tolerance for this is probably going to depend very much on how much you enjoy Radiohead's later work, as Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich provide the score and it's the sort of electronic soundscape that we've come to expect from those albums, and from Yorke solo work.
I don't have much of an interest in dance in any form, particularly this form of expressive work, but still I think even I could tell that the chorography was clever and helped to tell the love story that the short was providing. Having initially though that Yorke might, because of his character in this, rebel against the systems and plough through but he actually participates in it at times, and in some of the more complex dance aspects too, it also was quite impressive. If you consider the short against what has happened in Thom Yorke's life in the last few years, and the casting, it adds another, deeper, level of meaning to the film.
I can't pretend that this is the sort of thing that I'm really into, but in general terms I could appreciate the skill and effort that went into making it.