The documentary maker opens event to mark publication of the book celebrating Academy’s work over four decades – and shows how music videos mirror society in ways that journalism and other media cannot. Report by Albie Fay.

On Tuesday, 18th November, the ICA in London was the venue for an event that brought together filmmakers across generations to reflect on the evolution of the music video.

Organised in tandem with the publication of Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images – a book recently published by MACK Books devoted to work produced by leading London production company Academy Films over the past four decades – it brought together two of the company’s most eminent directors, Jonathan Glazer and Walter Stern, with emerging directing talent Iris Luz, on stage for a discussion that focussed largely upon the importance of music videos in their careers.

The evening began with the documentary maker Adam Curtis - renowned for his iconoclastic docs including The Power Of Nightmares, Hypernormalisation and Shifty – offering his own views on the medium. He did so in the characteristic personalised style of his films, giving an illustrated lecture that moved through a selection of videos from early iterations of K-Pop (then called dance pop), to Eminem’s Stan and early 2000s MTV.

Above: Adam Curtis (left) with panel moderator Simran Hans at Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images event at the ICA on 18th November.  

Curtis’s theme was how music videos uniquely capture the “underlying mood of a society” in ways journalism – or any other medium, for that matter – cannot. He argued that the form transmits across a language of “light, feeling, and emotion” that allows it to act as a more immediate social and political barometer. To illustrate this, he highlighted videos like Walter Stern’s work for Audiobully’s with We Don’t Care, to show how the form captured the "dislocation and confusion" of the early Noughties.

Later, he connected the emergence of early K-Pop videos to the complex political and economic dilemmas in South Korea at the time, arguing that their visual output channeled a desire for solidarity that formal political systems had failed to provide.

Following Curtis’ talk, film critic Simran Hans led a panel of Glazer, Stern and Luz, through a discussion that spanned the highs of MTV through to today’s more DIY and digital filmmaking.

Both Glazer and Stern reflected on the 1990s shift from label-controlled performance clips to directors starting to create miniature films of their own, like Stern’s direction of the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, or Glazer’s video for Radiohead’s Karma Police.

Above: Walter Stern (left) and Jonathan Glazer on the panel at the Short Form event at the ICA. 

Jonathan Glazer spoke about the DVD boom era, in the late Nineties, where readily available and obscure films were influencing the creativity of music videos. He added he can still see “the influence that the music videos have had” on his feature films – a  subtle reminder that the medium’s experimentation itself bleeds into wider visual culture.

Walter Stern explained that for him, the artistic process is about “finding one image that holds the emotional weight of a track and following that image wherever it leads”.

Curtis argued that the form transmits across a language of 'light, feeling, and emotion' that allows it to act as a more immediate social and political barometer.

He also noted that music videos offered a unique form of experimentation. “You can do something in a music video that you can’t do in a feature or a commercial, where formats are more rigid,” said Stern, adding: “It helps that the videos are only three and a half minutes long. They don’t demand as much from the audience either.”

Iris Luz brought a more contemporary perspective than the two Academy Films veterans. She spoke about smaller crews, iPhone footage, and the importance of intimacy, where immediacy is a way of enforcing a togetherness between artist and audience.

Above: Iris Luz (right) with panel moderator Simran Hans 

Referencing the DIY approaches of new wave artists like Fred Again and FakeMink, Luz described how reality and low-tech aesthetics now shape the emotion of music videos, and therefore their reception, something increasingly filtered through YouTube algorithms and clips on TikTok. "The main trait that I see in their visual output is an immediacy which tries to enforce a feeling of intimacy with the music that they're putting out," she said.

However, all four speakers were in alignment in their shared view that the music video sits at the centre of our visual culture, not at its edges, due to the fact that the form reacts quickly to shifts in technology and taste, recording the underlying political and emotional feelings of its moment.

Jonathan Glazer closed the discussion with the observation that the algorithm may influence what we see, “but it doesn’t change how we view the work”, and he declared that the role of the director has remained unchanged through the decades.

“To make powerful work, radical work, no matter the reach,” he said.

• Academy Films’ new book, Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images (MACK Books), is on sale now at the MACK website and good bookshops.