Mark Romanek's award-winning reputation as a video director rests on the swooning surrealism of Madonna's "Rain" and k.d. lang's "Constant Craving," the high-voltage zap of Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" and En Vogue's "Free Your Mind." But for Nine Inch Nails's "Closer," he wanted something different - a seductive ugliness. "Film hasn't looked really soulful to me for a long time," he says. "It was getting finer-grained and more contrasty. I felt angry, like, Just because everyone else likes it, why should I use this technology?" So Romanek shot the video by daylight with hand-cranked 1920s cameras and vintage lenses on grainy film stock.
The antique tech lent a jaundiced cast to fleeting, dreamlike glimpses of medical memorabilia from the 19th century: an infant's skeleton, laboratory glassware crawling with beetles, moldy tomes in an aging cabinet.
"Closer" may someday become available through commercial outlets, but for now it can be seen only on MTV, where an expurgated version - sans nudity and most of the sacrilegious imagery - is in regular rotation.
ELECTRIC WORD
Will Your 1040 Soon Be Too EZ?
Hand-Cranked Video
