On YouTube - Mike Retter presents his award-winning music video NIGHT RITES

 This piece was first posted on Bill Mousoulis’website Pure Shit: Australian Cinema a wonderful site devoted to Australian Independent cinema. The Director of a new and award-winning music video Mike Retter asked that the piece below be republished on Filmalert101.

 

Adelaide band "Night Rites" have a new music video that has won best

experimental short and best director of a short at the Melbourne Underground

Film Festival. We spoke to director Mike Retter about creating this clip, his

interest in music videos while growing up and his unfinished feature film "Clair de

Lune".

 

Mike Retter: In my early twenties I was at a mate's house, a British guy named Stuart ..

He put on a CD with a blurry pink cover and the oval boombox started vibrating with a

harmonic noise. I felt it was a sound I had always been searching for. It was the Irish band

My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album and from that moment onwards I was a changed

person. Layered droney atmospheric rock was something I had delved into with the live

recordings of Nick Cave's early group The Birthday Party, but Loveless had an introverted

nature and sweetness in its studio perfection, where the noise was tamed for an entirely

different emotional purpose.

 

The pink cover of Loveless was actually a blurry hand in motion captured over the strings of

a guitar. To be specific, it's actually a hand holding the tremolo pedal while at the same

time grazing the strings on the guitar, something Kevin Shields did to physically bend the

notes of the music as he played. That pink photograph would colour every experience of the

album, it summed up the sound so perfectly, the layered and diffused image mimicked the

guitar distortion and the colour was the warmth of the record.

 

My Bloody Valentine's influential "Loveless" album (1991)

 

How did you want to visually interpret Night Rite's track "DEN"?

With "DEN", the band Night Rites are working in a similar way to My Bloody Valentine in

terms of thick atmospheric and spatial sound but it doesn't sound pink .. like their name,

It's much darker. So when interpreting this song visually, everything was darkly lit and

desaturated. But I still wanted visual layers, visual distortion and an authentic depiction of

the sound like MBV achieved with that Loveless album cover.

 

I have probably had to listen to DEN a thousand times while shooting and editing the clip

and I still don’t get sick of it. There's so much going on in the music production, such a

density... I challenge you to give it multiple listens and see what you get out of it each

time. So I have tried to do this justice visually. Give it as much idiosyncrasy as I can..

Create visual delays .. The track has a hum to it and so the visuals needed to reverberate ..

I shot it in such a way where grain was baked into the footage and camera movement,

sometimes shaky with stabilisation turned off, would mimic the pulsating sound. Lots of

imagery is buried underneath, some you will see, some you may not - but perhaps you will

feel it.

 

I also shot a series of still photos with an old Yashica Mat 124g film camera. The film stock

was Fuji Provia 100, a slide film, which means the negative is actually a positive and thus

looks like a normal full colour image when you hold it up to the light. It's also a larger film

and so I put the developed celluloid strip in front of the video camera lens (like a crude

telecine) and shot the band playing on a monitor behind the strip of film that's being

rubbed past the lens. Essentially using the developed film that had images on it like a filter

to create layered imagery. Glitchy film negative shots tend to evoke feelings of memory.

Tony Scott used hand-cranked cameras to create jerky, expressionistic visual layers in Man

On Fire (2004), which is a very modern film and that was a strong influence here with the

use of the slide film strips. Digital effects are very minimal in this music video. It’s mostly

analogue techniques such as using smoke machines, dry ice, specific lighting, camera

movement, some VHS and other archaic processing by Matthew Gray, which was a cool

collaboration. And of course the use of splashing water in the ocean as the music gets

heavier.

 

Music group "Night Rites" from Adelaide

Did you watch much Rage on the ABC while growing up?

Music Videos, specifically in the pre-internet ABC Rage era, are fundamental to many

Australian cultural upbringings (for better or worse). They form the background ambience

to many social gatherings but also an entry-point to experimental film before we go deeper

into things like SBS's Eat Carpet (R.I.P).

 

I don’t take drugs and rarely drink alcohol these days, but many years ago when I was a

teenager on magic mushrooms, I specifically remember watching Nine Inch Nails "Head

Like A Hole'' video and was struck by its use of rapid editing and overlapping of images.

There was a head being rotated with a strobing voodoo ceremony over the top where a

man was rotating sticks. The rapid editing back and forth between the shots does such a

number on the brain it feels illegal. This cinematic technique was very effective and

probably amplified by the drugged state I was in so it always stayed with me. Later on I

would discover the origins of this style in early Soviet cinema.

 

The nihilistic content and point of view of Nine Inch Nails music videos is something that no

longer interests me. The argument could be made that this kind of depressing stuff, which

was soaked in heroin-use and nihilism, helped destroy a generation, continuing a decline

since the baby-boomers stopped listening to their parents, instead embracing instant

gratification and consumerism. It sort of predates or preempts the current opioid and crank

(crystal meth) epidemics in the deindustrialised American "rust belt" (Indiana, Michigan,

Pennsylvania, etc) and now many parts of Australia. But it's undeniable that this period of

alternative music videos had very clever artistic technique and aesthetic. Part of my

cinephilic journey has been finding this kind of visual experimentation and style in work

that doesn't destroy the soul. Something that can actually be found in the rich

contemporary meme video culture such as the "hyperborean" genre found on telegram.

 

Rapid editing is something I have used quite a bit in the 3rd act of the music video, to

evoke something in the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey uses flashing coloured lights in

its "stargate sequence".. An archetypal structure for experimental film where climax can be

created purely through expressionist film-form and technique rather than literal narrative

alone. And like 2001, you will notice a calm directly following this sequence, which creates

a kind of relief. I think a lot of filmmakers independently channel a similar structure,

regardless of how abstract things may be, because there's something true to life about it,

like a Platonic form, a statue found in a block of stone, a 3-act structure is natural and

instinctive for creators and audiences.

 

What sort of production and editing went into this?

We tried to create very atmospheric and evocative footage but this music video was really

made in the edit and that took a long time. Splicing, manipulating and collaging the

images. The genesis of this film clip was actually a phone call or text from Ryder Grindle,

the projectionist at the Mercury Cinema.. They had some event at the Fringe Festival where

a dozen bands and a dozen filmmaking groups made music videos within a seven day

deadline. But they were missing one filmmaking team.. I thought this would be perfect for

a screenwriter friend, Jeremy Roberts, who wanted to start making films himself, but

because I had to end up shooting and editing the clip, it was simpler if I just directed it as

well. So Jeremy did lighting and co-produced with me. Having not actually met the band,

we just rocked-up and run-and-gunned the whole thing quickly with a basic visual concept

based on the sound. Ned Bajic helped with some backlit dry ice shots in the ocean and

practical water FX.

 

We met that seven day deadline and what I would describe as a roughcut was shown at the

Mercury Cinema event. Feedback was quite positive, but I'm glad I was unavailable for that

screening because I was never happy with only a few days to edit the clip. The track is six

minutes long, we had an option of going with a shorter "radio edit" version (4mins), but

this removed what I felt were some of the best passages of music. Apart from more editing

time post-screening, we also went and shot one more evening with the band and did some

specific high-framerate shots with Jeremy in the ocean at night with water directly hitting

the camera lens.

 

The finished clip would eventually premiere at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival on

closing night where it won best experimental short and best director of a short. 2 days later

we showed it in Adelaide at the Sam Hyde Film Festival, Palace Nova Cinema. That's where

I got to see it on the big screen for the first time and we had a great crowd reaction. It's

probably my most satisfying public exhibition of work. The third act, which consists mostly

of splashing water, looked great on the big cinema screen. The song I had heard more than

a thousand times felt new because of the high fidelity sound presentation in the theatre. I

think the clip succeeds in depicting the music visually, the two things become one. We then

had another screening at Adelaide University organised by the Cinematic Cultural Research

Unit (CCRU) along with other experimental shorts and a sprawling discussion about the

future of cinema.

 

Sony XV-5000CE Video Colour Corrector used by Matthew Gray
to process and grade the footage along with various tape formats.

 

After Youth On The March, you said you were to make one more vertical film to

complete a trilogy, the erotic thriller Clair de Lune.. Where is this project at?

Clair de Lune is a feature project that was derailed by Covid and perhaps my own hubris.

It's like my own Apocalypse Now. The press wrote articles about Apocalypse Now's delayed

release entitled "Apocalypse When?" Around 90% of Clair de Lune is already shot but

there are some key scenes, which are artistically and technically challenging that I still have

to complete. With the passage of time, there is some melancholy that I haven't finished,

but strangely there is also some ecstasy ... Because as I learn new things about editing,

film form and analogue photography, they are incorporated into the vision and it will be a

better film for it.

 

I have one shoot coming up soon for Clair de Lune that involves a wall of TV monitors.

That's something I'm doing with the CCRU. This was not in the original script, but the

luxury of time allows you to evolve and develop things. if you think of a new idea, it can

make it into the film. But you obviously don’t want a film to remain unfinished forever.

Soon I'm going to release an experimental short, which is basically a TV show that exists in

the universe of Clair de Lune and gives a glimpse of that film in a different context. It's like

releasing something with an abstract or conceptual trailer inside it. I've taken one

supporting character of Clair de Lune, a real-life martial artist, and made an entire

magazine-style TV show revolving around him. Like going on an irrational tangent. It's

called Kolesnikov's World and will be released later this year. In real life he was actually the

bodyguard for an eastern-European head of state and so he's depicted as a solitary warrior.

 

I therefore consider this a stylised documentary.

 

Part of the reason Clair de Lune has not been completed is that I genuinely want to impact

cinema with this low-budget film and much of that will come down to an advanced film-

form and style achieved by various editing techniques and image processing. I'm not so

arrogant to say that it will impact cinema, but that is the ambition. There are some great

acting performances in this film and I look forward to how it’s all sculpted together.

I feel like my life in the interim has been spent studying cinema, both historically (the

1980s Simpson/Bruckheimer films that incorporated MTV video and commercial aesthetics)

and the absolute latest contemporary work like YouTube/memes. This has meant collecting

lots of physical media to aid my study. Like the 1980s incorporation of new forms like MTV

into cinema, I wish to also combine online filmmaking styles (particularly editing) with my

feature narrative. This project has become far more postmodern than I first intended. So

this Night Rites music video, other short work I have done like Kolesnikov's World and the

exhibition of other people's contemporary film in the Sam Hyde Film Festival all constitute

practical study in style and aesthetics. Which will in-turn inform the finished product of

Clair de Lune. It's all connected. Even when I'm not working on Clair de Lune, I'm still

really working on it.

 

Hebe Sayce in the upcoming feature film Clair de Lune

 

Will you make more music videos?

Yes, I think I will make more music videos. This was really my first one and I liked doing it.

10 years ago I made my own version of Eat Carpet or Liquid Television for Channel 44

called "Bandwidth", much of which involved image and music. But this Night Rites music

video was my first built from the ground-up to depict a band and their sound. Music videos

are a great artistic opportunity. There is no shortage of good local music to make a clip for

and I encourage people to do it. If you are out of the loop, just get in contact with 3D

Radio, Radio Adelaide, Fresh FM (or your own local community Stations) and you will be put in touch with some of the latest music to hopefully inspire making a clip. Get out of your

bubble. Make contact with some of these bands.

 

There is also some talk about a physical media (DVD) release of various music videos and

experimental shorts in Adelaide. If that happens, it will be packed with weird material and

lots of extra features.. There's also a proposed distribution model that is insane and would

allow the DVD to be discovered by the public in a very odd way. I think it's time to do

irrational things like that.

 

What do you mean exactly, where will the DVD be distributed and what will be

"odd" or "insane" about it?

I can't get into that yet. But it should be interesting.