In stirring up a bubbling cauldron of otherwordly images, Canadian music video director Floria Sigismondi has helped to define the industry’s cutting edge.
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Though somber and sometimes stomach-churning, the vivid visions of the award-winning Canadian director have lured in such varied recording artists as David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Tricky and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Her baroque style may best be described as a marriage of The Bride of Frankenstein and Italian auteur Federico Fellini at his least inhibited. In Sigismondi’s own words, the bizarre characters who populate her work "are theater-based, very much like how Fellini uses characters symbolically. If there’s a theme or something specific he wants to say, he does it either with dance, motion or a costume it’s like surreal performance."
The deep influence of Greek mythology and Italian theater on Sigismondi’s work can be traced to her origins in Pescara, Italy, where she was born to opera-singing parents (and named after a character in the Puccini opera Tosca who slays GVatican police chief with a dagger). When Floria was two years old, the Sigismondi family (including sister Antonella, a sculptress) relocated to the Canadian steel city of Hamilton, Ontario. The video artist credits her parents with fostering her artistic aspirations, noting, "They’ve been very nurturing with the theater and really encouraging in the arts in general. I remember going to every single one of my parents’ practices. Those operas are all tragedies, they’re all passionate. It’s all about drama." With a laugh, she adds, "Just being Italian is all about drama!"
In her early years, Sigismondi became obsessed with drawing and painting, which she pursued in her free time while attending an all-girl Catholic school. Later, after graduating from high school, she moved 40 miles northeast to Toronto to study painting and illustration at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCA). Though she retained her painterly sensibility, Sigismondi began veering more toward photography. "I was never obsessed with the technical side of photography, although I learned it well and used it to achieve certain things," she elaborates. "I like to make things more surreal, more like the expressionist painters. I wasn’t using the photograph to document reality."
After completing her studies at OCA, Sigismondi landed her first professional assignment: a layout for the eponymous magazine published by the nationwide newspaper The Globe and Mail, for which she earned a National Magazine Award at the age of 24. She soon established a thriving career that included fashion shoots, publicity stills for Canadian recording artists such as Jane Siberry and I Mother Earth, and advertisements for Converse and Coca-Cola.
Although she made a decent living from her still photography, Sigismondi soon began to find the process artistically stifling. She explains, "Sometimes fashion photography is obsessed with the stitching and the details of clothing it was too much about the product for me to be able to push things and bring out a feeling or mood that appealed to me. Painting was more like that for me, and although I went to school to be an illustrator, I couldn’t give my paintings away."
Fortunately, she was eventually approached by Don Allan, then-owner of Revolver Films (a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Partners Film Company), who was impressed enough with Sigismondi’s stills to give her the opportunity to direct a music video. This career change would finally satisfy her need for creative autonomy.
Although Sigismondi lacks any formal film training, the transition from still to motion photography proved to be smooth, particularly since her imagery has always had a cinematic quality. "My shoots consisted of more than just one image," she reminisces. "It would be five or six images that would say something by the end of it. And I wasn’t rigid I didn’t use a tripod. I was always moving around the model and doing 360-degree [setups], positioning the lights so I could shoot from many different angles. Those experiences helped me to understand movement, and my photography helped me to understand composition, camera, lighting, and working with talent."
Sigismondi soon amassed a portfolio of videos for Canadian bands such as Pure, Victor, The Tea Party and 13 Engines. Quite quickly, she "fell in love with the medium, since I could express myself more in terms of moods." Not every musical act, however, meshed with her uncanny aesthetic. "I’ve done videos for some bands where I knew what I really wanted to do, but the band didn’t want to go there, or weren’t able to pull it off," she laments.
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