Films of Innocence: another of U2's misplaced grandiose gestures?

You might have thought that U2 would have had enough of springing internet-related surprises on people, following the unfortunate events surrounding the release of their 13th album, Songs Of Innocence. And yet, here we are again, three months on, with the unexpected announcement of 11 “art films” – one for each of the album’s tracks – being simultaneously premiered across a series of music and art websites.
Among the problems with the release of Songs Of Innocence was the fact that the conversation around the album became almost entirely about the means of transmission. The actual contents – what Bono called “their most personal album ever” – got drowned out by people debating the rights and wrongs of effectively sticking an album in 500m people’s inbox without asking them first: one of a number of things you rather got the impression that U2 hadn’t quite thought through before green-lighting the “digital release strategy”. The 11 films are pretty clearly an attempt to redress the balance slightly. Here are the personal responses to the album’s contents from what the press release calls “the world’s most acclaimed urban visual artists”, which is certainly one way of describing children’s author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, best known for his – admittedly great – kids books about penguins, crayons and little boys flying aeroplanes to the moon.
The Miracle (of Joey Ramone).
In fact, Jeffers’ film, for The Miracle (of Joey Ramone), is one of the more interesting ones on offer: a series of animations interspersed with the processes used to create them, it’s also the film that addresses most directly U2’s instruction that the filmmakers should be inspired by Belfast’s political murals. DaLeast’s film for This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now is also pretty engaging – the artist as a homeless figure, struggling to survive on the detritus of a city – as is Ganzeer’s stop-frame animation for Volcano. At the other extreme, there are films that are either a little clichéd – ROA’s images of environmental destruction and an Ouroborous snake lays it on a bit thick – or a little too prosaic to capture your attention: the video by Portugese street artist Vhils for Raised By Wolves features a lot of slow motion footage of wolves roaming urban landscapes, and Song For Someone is a straightforward documentary film of graffiti artist Mode 2 creating a mural in Omagh.
Iris (Hold Me Close).
You occasionally wonder if the whole process was slightly rushed, and not merely because one of the artists involved, Chole Early, mentions something about the tightness of the deadline involved in making her film, for Iris (Hold Me Close): had Todd James had had more time, he might have spotted that, despite its title, the track The Troubles isn’t actually about the Troubles, and chose not to interpret it via a series of animated images of balaclava-clad petrol bomb throwers, riot police, guns etc.
The Troubles.
As rock videos they’re perfectly fine. You wouldn’t be struck by the particular brilliance of any of them if you saw them on TV, and you wouldn’t go out of your way to share the links to them on YouTube – certainly none of them do anything like radically recontextualise the songs they’re based on – but nor would you be horrified by how awful they are. You could argue that the problem is that the artists involved haven’t done enough to differentiate their work from something that a regular video director might come up with, although in fairness, a regular video director might have insisted that a little more actually happened than does in D*Face’s graphic novel/video game inspired film for California (There Is No End To Love).
Advertisement
But the real problem is that, unlike plenty of other rock videos made by visual artists from Wolfgang Tilmans to David LaChapelle to Derek Jarman to Sam Taylor-Wood, they’re not being presented as rock videos, but as something rather more important: “art films”, complete with a portentous white-on-black title sequence that gives the artist’s name before the words “inspired by U2”, as if they’re something that really belongs not on YouTube or MTV but in the more rarefied environs of a gallery. What the band have done in commissioning a film for every track of their latest release would once have been called a video album and bunged out on VHS for the edification of die-hard fans: this is labeled a “global multidisciplinary group project”, not a title even the most high-minded 80s video album would have bothered appending to its contents, on the grounds that it sounds a bit pretentious. As it turns out, the Songs Of Innocence films are not unlike the album they’re based on: neither terrible nor incredible, and ultimately undone by U2’s apparently unquenchable desire to make a grandiose statement.