Fugitive Flights: Nick Cave and Wings of Desire
While perhaps a somewhat dubious honour to the Australian musician, when I first heard Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds I was struck by how effectively he seemed to have tapped into a particularly “American Gothic” sense of sin and felony. At any rate, his appreciation for the work of Johnny Cash is certainly evident in his collected discography, narrating, as it does, dark scenes of love, death, crime and condemnation with classic goth rock wedded to country tunes and ersatz organs that scream out of a religion in which the Devil is everywhere, and salvation so very, very fleeting.
These themes are very well brought out by Pernille L.G.’s accompaniment for “Up Jumped the Devil”, which is an excellent example of an artistically sophisticated fan-created music video, and speaks to the positive effect of YouTube in exhibiting these kinds of projects to a much broader audience than they might have otherwise enjoyed. The use of stop motion animation for the bones, the manipulation (and incineration) of paper characters and the skillful setting of the action to the rhythm of Nick Cave’s music set this out from the bulk of similar videos.
Speaking of artistically inclined movies, I was also quite enthused to learn of Nick Cave’s appearance in the film Der Himmel Über Berlin – Wings of Desire, in the English release. A meditative romantic fantasy starring Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as the weary and world-curious angels Damiel and Cassiel, and also featuring Peter Falk (of Columbo fame), Wings of Desire is a worthwhile and important film, and a poignant snapshot of Berlin in the 1980s, before the fall of the wall.
So I suppose the theme of this post has been the way in which art begets art, and speaks to its diverse globe-spanning influence, from America, to Australia, Germany and Denmark, Pernille’s base of operations. Indeed, I can think of few things more fugitive, or fulfilling.
For More Information:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLovelyCreature (Pernille’s Youtube channel)
http://www.nickcaveandthebadseeds.com/home
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_desire
