Sigismondi’s association with Manson led to the David Bowie "Little Wonder" video, which features oddly colored frames sped up to match the song’s rhythms. In the piece, an alien resembling a younger version of the Thin White Duke peruses the streets of New York to discover a throng of baroque visions, all of which remain oblivious to passerby. Riding the subway, our protagonist encounters another alien creature accompanied by a grotesque baby which has a detachable head (which was actually Sigismondi herself in a cameo appearance). Our hero scoops up the newborn’s noggin in a box only to later deposit it in a mailbox. Although Sigismondi insists that such an incident never happened to her, she maintains that she can relate to the wandering extraterrestrial.
Although Sigismondi and Soos pride themselves on putting in many hours of prep time, on-set spontaneity still factors into their visual mix. At one point during their shoot for "She Makes Me Wanna Die," a track by British trip-hop artist Tricky, the cinematographer got carried away with a last-minute idea and failed to make his call time. "We needed a ’distorted’ quality," he recalls. "I was inspired to use pieces of beveled glass in front of the lens, which fractures the image, depending on the focal length. Going against the grain of lenses being too good too sharp and too contrasty and breaking those qualities down are the kind of thoughts that would kill Carl Zeiss. In redefining what the glass sees, you sometimes have to make your own glass."
On the morning of the Tricky shoot, the cameraman dropped by a stained-glass store. Arriving on set some 10 minutes late, he declared, "Floria, I’ve got an idea!" and proceeded to detail his proposed process. The resulting fissured photography enhanced the outlandish quality of the clip, which played up the writhing shapes of lizards, snakes, and Greek gorgons.
For "She Makes Me Wanna Die," Soos employed an Arriflex 435 ES. The cinematographer is effusive in his praise for the camera, noting its compact size, wide latitude in speed (1 to 150 fps), variable shutter (which ranges from 11.2 to 180 degrees), extremely bright viewfinder, and well-crafted balance for handheld shooting. Soos sums it up as "the camera that does everything."
Soos also took advantage of Kodak’s Vision 500T 5279 emulsion. "I occasionally rate the Vision 500 at 250 ASA, and sometimes at 120 ASA," he explains. "It handles overexposure extremely well, specifically for telecine transfers. It also complements contrasty lighting extremely well; it leaves the blacks very black, the highlights really start to bloom, and the grain structure looks like a 50 ASA film when you deliver the telecine people a very ’fat’ or overexposed negative." Since Soos favored high contrast and very sculpted lighting with no fill for the Tricky clip, the high-speed Vision 500T proved particularly suitable.
This brooding video also involved some rather imaginative exploitation of fluorescent fixtures. The camerman used fixtures fitted with Chimera soft boxes for his key, adding fluorescents as practical elements in the frame. "Just like other cinematographers would use a light bulb behind a lampshade in a corner of a room, I clustered a bunch of fluorescent tubes on a wall and had the wiring exposed," he recollects. "It was lighting, but it was also art direction."
Fluorescents can be so bright on camera that their illumination sometimes blows out, so Soos sprayed his units with a light coat of black paint. Once the tubes were lit up, the paint covering their surface "knocked the level down so it would become photographically friendly, and also created this really cool, corroded effect."
Sigismondi and Soos most recently collaborated on "Can’t Get Loose," a video featuring British composer/multi-instrumentalist Barry Adamson, whose swanky style encompasses jazz, hip-hop, gospel, big band, funk and samples from the scores of Sixties spy thrillers. Adamson’s albums play like soundtracks to imaginary films, which suits Sigismondi just fine, since her work is becoming more narrative-based. "Can’t Get Loose" is the director’s most linear concept to date; it was inspired by one of her favorite films, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. "It has a little bit of that psychological thriller [edge] to it," she explains. "You don’t know whether people are driving [the main character] crazy or if he really is crazy, which is a great subject that I’m always drawn to. I wanted to come up with something that was more filmic than stylized."
Sigismondi is hoping that "Can’t Get Loose" will help her to land a feature film assignment in the coming year. Though tight-lipped about a current writing endeavor, she expects that her approach to cinema will be similar to her video work. She plans on developing ideas on her own and then collaborating with a screenwriter who will develop dialogue and structure. "I use all of the elements [of filmmaking] — body movement, camera movement and lighting — to express an emotion. I think my work will always have those kinds of elements — little symbolic images that take you deeper."
Even though Sigismondi’s videos may have viewers anticipating a particular type of movie from her, she plans to confound expectations. Not surprisingly, she mentions Seven and Edward Scissorhands as two films that she admires, but maintains, "I wouldn’t want to do a feature that would pigeonhole me into a certain category that would be hard for me to get out of. I’m interested in a lot of things, and I want to keep my options open. [Potential subjects and genres] could range from female issues to psychological thrillers."
No matter which topics she tackles in the next phase of her career, it is certain that Sigismondi won’t be the only one losing sleep over them.
