“We Can Change the Whole Narrative”: Crafting Play and Nostalgia in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo

This chapter by Danica van de Welde focuses on a “craft aesthetic” of Gondry’s surrealist visual aesthetic. This craft aesthetic features handmade objects as a tool to construct a space of magical realism that complicates boundaries between dreams, nostalgia, fantasy, and real life in The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo. The Science of Sleep is about the romance between dreamer Stéphane and his neighbor Stéphanie, while Mood Indigo, a surreal romantic tragedy in which a man tries to save his beloved from dying of a flower growing in her lung, is Gondry’s cinematic adaptation of French author Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours (1947). This chapter considers how although craft is often treated as lowly within fine arts frameworks, in these two films, craft and handmade objects take on new value as vehicles of nostalgia and romance.

Playing with Superheroes: Genre, Aesthetics, and Deconstruction in The Green Hornet

In this chapter, Jennifer Kirby analyses Michel Gondry’s big-budget superhero film The Green Hornet (2011). The film generally provoked a negative critical response due to its seemingly insignificant subject matter. However, Kirby here argues that the vitriolic criticism fails to acknowledge the extent to which this film can be read as a deconstruction of the generic codes and aesthetics of the predominantly American superhero genre from an outsider’s perspective. She demonstrates how, just as The Green Hornet’s incompetent playboy, Britt Reid (Seth Rogen), plays at his childhood ambition of being a super-hero in the film, Gondry plays with the conventions of the superhero movie through both humorous revisionism and, more successfully, the use of analogue visual effects rather than using predominantly digital visual effects as is typical in most Hollywood superhero films.

Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur

In the introduction to this volume, “Michel Gondry as Transcultural Auteur,” editors Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby present an overview of Gondry’s career as well as this volume’s approaches to Gondry’s oeuvre. Born in Versailles, France in 1963, Gondry is an Academy Award-winning transnational (France-USA) and transcultural (French-American) auteur whose body of work as a writer, director, and producer spans multiple genres—including feature film, short film, television, documentary, music video, big budget superhero film, romantic comedy, the road movie, advertisements—and languages (English, French, Japanese). In this respect, Gondry can be considered a contemporary globalized auteur whose films and other works display continuities and eclecticism. In addition, this introduction presents an overview of each of this volume’s sections and chapters in terms of how they identify connections and continuities between Gondry’s films while placing Gondry’s oeuvre in dialogue with French and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural contexts. The introduction puts forth this volume’s main contention, namely that “Gondry is emblematic of transnational auteur filmmaking…crossing aesthetic and cultural borders between national film industries as well as between art and popular cinema and between media” and how Gondry’s oeuvre defies classification according to traditional conceptions of European art cinema.

Memory à la Americana: From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Be Kind Rewind

This chapter analyses Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Be Kind Rewind (2008). In the former, Joel has his memory of his ex-lover Clementine erased before deciding to try to reverse the process by hiding her in memories where she does not belong. In the latter, two bumbling video-store clerks in Passaic, New Jersey produce “sweded” versions of popular films after the VHS tapes of these films are accidentally erased. When the clerks are forced to stop their productions due to copyright infringement, they decide instead to enlist the whole town in the making of a film about the legendary jazz musician Fats Waller (1904–43), who in the film is erroneously believed to have been from Passaic, when in reality Waller was born in New York City. Author Yu-Yun Hsieh compares the exploration of personal memory in Eternal Sunshine with the production of collective memory in Be Kind, noting that in both cases “fictional” or “inauthentic” memories are created to preserve a relationship, whether between Joel and Clementine in the former or between the inhabitants of Passaic in the latter. In both films, memories are open to revision but preserve an essence of truth.

I Am Collecting Beautiful Objects: Michel Gondry’s Taxidermy of Emotions

Continuing both the examination of the materiality of objects and the employment of frameworks from contemporary art, this chapter by Jenny Pyke uses a comparison with taxidermy as an art form to explore the way that Gondry creates objects infused with affect, not because of what they represent but because of how they are constructed. Like examples of taxidermy, these objects both contain a material history and generate sensation through their feeling of hapticity. This chapter explains how objects in The Science of Sleep function not only as containers of emotion but also as points of connection between the lovers Stéphane and Stéphanie, who communicate and share their way of seeing and imagining the world through objects and build relationships in tandem with their construction.

On the Road to Adulthood: Michel Gondry’s Microbe & Gasoline and the French Road Movie

In their chapter, Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby consider cinematic lineage and influence. This chapter argues that Gondry’s most recent feature, Microbe & Gasoline, a picaresque narrative, draws from the conventions of the road movie through its focus on social outsiders, light-hearted depiction of run-ins with the police, and emphasis on male bonding. This film also provides commentary on the notion and definition of “home” in France. Microbe & Gasoline, which follows two teenage boys taking a 250-mile-long journey through France in a makeshift house on wheels, links a coming-of-age narrative to a growing awareness of the complexities and divisions within France. In this film, Gondry depicts his trademark childhood play and whimsy alongside a sobering adult realization of injustices in the world. Representing yet another form of border crossing, the film blends conventions from the American road movie with the French road movie’s potential for what Gott calls “elaborating flexible, transnational and multicultural alternatives to a monolithic version of France.” It serves to reinforce Gondry’s status as an auteur whose work is frequently transnational in character, recalling Hill’s claim that Gondry is the spiritual heir to Jean Cocteau and Georges Méliès, as well as Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg.

“It Would Not Be Just visual, It Could Have Words and a Story”: Performance and Narrative in the Music Video Oeuvre of Michel Gondry

In this chapter, Daniel Klug emphasizes how film and music video director Michel Gondry’s influential and highly acclaimed work in music video crosses boundaries even within the sub-forms of the music video. First, the chapter discusses the general characteristics of music video audio-vision and its relation to film. Secondly, the chapter examines how Gondry’s performance-based videos incorporate heterogeneous narrative elements and examples of audio-visual surplus, such as morphing and multiplication. The chapter identifies stylistic trends in Gondry’s music video work, mentioning several of Gondry’s most well-known videos, including those for Daft Punk’s song “All Around the World” as well as for Kylie Minogue, The Chemical Brothers and The White Stripes. Third, in contrast to performance, it looks at Gondry’s narrative music videos offering an extended analysis of Gondry’s narrative music video for the Foo Fighters’ track “Everlong” (1997). In this analysis, the chapter examines the complex visual storytelling concerning lyrics and musical structures in the music video.

Rethinking Romantic Comedy through the Art Film: Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In this chapter, Rafaele Ariano examines Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014) as a hybrid of the art film and the romantic comedy. Ariano conceptualizes the “art romantic comedy” as a sub-genre that targets audiences that would typically reject the romantic comedy based upon conventions of taste and cultural hierarchy. The chapter places Gondry in a cohort of contemporary auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola and Alexander Payne, whose romantic comedies are characterized by qualities drawn from art and indie cinema. These characteristics include the expressive use of film style and implementation of metafictional devices, complex “sensitive” protagonists, and endings that are ambiguous and thus only partially “happy.” Ariano applies this genre framework to an analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but also places the film within wider trends in the genre of romantic comedy.

L’Amour fou Revisited: The Surrealist Poetics of Michel Gondry

Sian Mitchell’s chapter traces the legacy of Frenchpoetic realist director Jean Vigo (1905–34) in Gondry’s work. Drawing on the surrealist theories of André Breton, this chapter argues that early surrealism has influenced not only Gondry’s visual style, but also his thematic interests. This chapter notes how Gondry aesthetically explores the surrealist concept of l’amour fou (mad love), which appears in the way he depicts the intimate relationships of his protagonists as transforming the ontological and temporal qualities of their environments. This chapter examines Gondry’s films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Mood Indigo for traces of this influence and draws connections to Vigo’s iconic L’Atalante (1934), positioning these works in the lineage of cinematic depictions of mad love. This chapter argues that in both Gondry’s and Vigo’s films, l’amour fou is embodied through a love that also challenges normative conceptions of space and time.

Apocalypse Ever After: Lifted Veils and Transcendent Time in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In this chapter Sheheryah B. Sheikh examines the narrative organization of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014)’s love story through the lenses of apocalyptic literary theory and eschatology. Drawing from the writing of Frank Kermode, the chapter argues that the film’s primary narrative problem, the disappearance of Clementine from Joel’s memories, constitutes an eschatological occurrence on a personal scale. However, the film is “apocalyptic” in another sense: while Joel is trying to prevent this cataclysmic event, he revisits his memories and uncovers greater meaning in them, simultaneously revealing these details to the audience, and thus the film “lifts veils from” Joel’s memories, which is the etymological meaning of the apocalypse. Sheikh argues that, through the film, Gondry advocates strongly for the need to revisit and re-assess memory, rather than rejecting memories, even if they are painful.