Friday, 5 July 2013

Auteur Theory - Tyler, The Creator and Chris Cunningham

Tyler, The Creator:

Tyler aka Wolf Haley is a 22 year old American rapper and music producer. Tyler is a very successful rapper with both of his albums receiving generally positive reviews. Tyler is the a member and the founder of the hip hop collective Odd Future. Tyler likes to design all of the artwork for releases by all of the Odd Future members a long with arranging their costume for videos. Despite his age Tyler is a prominent music director. He directs all of his own music videos and has directed one of Earl Sweatshirt's videos as well.

You can definitely tell that Tyler is an auteur. He has a trademark eye edit in almost all of his videos, that makes him seem very cartoon like and makes his eyes big and all black. His music videos generally  have weird and dark themes.

In his video Yonkers, it is all in black and white and on screen he eats a cockroach and throws up. You can clearly tell a Tyler video from anything else as he uses very original ideas that would not have been seen before.

Tyler is usually the main focus of all the videos he directs unless he is directing someone else's song then he makes them the focus. In this Earl Sweatshirt video, WHOA, Tyler displays lots of signature elements. His video is very surreal. He uses eye edits in almost all of his videos. He has similar costume running through his videos. This has the weird/dark theme of the artist waking up in a very unpleasant looking trailer. The video is surreal in the sense of using an old ballerina dancer dancing on top of cars which is not what you would expect. Running through a lot of his videos he promotes the buzzword 'GOLF' on caps he wears. This is to promote his persona.



Chris Cunningham:

Chris Cunningham is a British director who has directed commercials for Playstation and Nissan. He is very well known and successful. He has directed music videos for Aphex Twin which perhaps are his best known work as well as directing a video for Bjork. He also directed Frozen by Madonna which is a very popular video.

Chris Cunningham is clearly an example of auteur due to the weird nature of his videos. An example of this would be his commercial, 'Mental Wealth' for Playstation. In this video it is just a girl alone in a room. She seems pretty isolated and looks like she is being watched on a security camera. The room looks pretty cold and a horrible place to be in which creates creepy vibes. This creepy mood is heightened by the creepy nature of the girl in the video. Her head looks very alien like and she has a very creepy laugh at the end.

In Madonnas video Frozen, the dark nature of his videos continues, this video is very dark on a very broad bare landscape with the artist in all black clothing with black hair. Her head is tilted down as her eyes are looking up at the camera which makes her seem very scary. In this video his technical skills with cameras and editing is shown by the artist falling over and turning in to flying birds. This again promotes the creepy nature of his videos.

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