The band Elysian Fields collaborates with artist and videographer Jonathon Rosen to create dizzying magic.
editor, animator, director & writer JONATHON ROSEN
music band ELYSIAN FIELDS
co-composer, vocals, instruments JENNIFER CHARLES
co-composer, guitar OREN BLOEDOW
music video DISPOSSESSED
album “PINK AIR”
Video’s title sequence are from the film Les Primevères (1910), Director: unknown, courtesy of the collection of the EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam.
In classical Greek mythology, Elysian Fields was known as the final resting place for the souls of the virtuous and heroic. Founded in 1995 by co-composers Jennifer Charles (vocals, instruments) and Oren Bloedow (guitar), Elysian Fields is an American art rock or “noir rock” band from Brooklyn, New York. Elysian Fields is “as sensual as a sleepwalker’s wet dream” writes Nick Kent, author of The Dark Stuff.
After being recommended by a mutual friend, Jennifer Charles approached me via Instagram about making a video for Elysian Field’s song Dispossessed. I was immediately attracted to vocal delivery and overall musical derangement. The hysterically sublime lyrics opened up a multitude of visual possibilities for me, swinging between inertia, vertigo, confidence, despondence…
The Dispossessed video does not specifically refer to a reality that exists outside of the video. Delivering a non-rational opening in the viewer’s consciousness by animating the ineffable seemed closer to the original spirit of the song. In Dispossessed, vertigo reigns supreme. As buildings rise and fall, the singer/protagonist/acrobat descends into a dissolute nightmare described by disembodied lips, a thief with a hammer and one lunar eye.
Circus aerialist Betty Rich, Queen of the Air, performs a repetitive stunt on the trapeze extracted from Here Comes The Circus (1942). This action defines the rhythmic and conceptual drive of the Dispossessed video which swings between domestic eros and pathos.
Thank you to Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow for giving me the trust, freedom, and space to be able to generate this highly personal take on Dispossessed.
