Harry Staut / To have a big heart or be heavy-hearted…
Blog Philosophy
Because, moreover, for other publications, I am working on some of Philippe André's short films, I come back to this short article, published almost 10 years ago. And if the music of Roger Sanchez may have taken a little bit of old, the clip has retained all its melancholy power, daring to stage the overflow of the void of love. There is a link between percept, affect and concept. We can therefore watch clips as we would do a "lesson of things".
I would add that with hindsight, and glancing from time to time at Philippe André's personal page, I realize that he is one of the rare directors who, from project to project (music videos, advertising, films…) manages to keep a unity of style. Like what one could imagine that in this world extremely constrained by the commercial requirements, there could be, also, a "policy of the authors".
Suddenly, I am making this article go back 10 years later than itself.
Philippe André is one of those music video directors who manage, in the short time that a standard-sized piece of music offers, to install a mental landscape. No doubt this short film, produced on the cover of Roger Sanchez's song "Another chance", is a particularly successful experience on this point, showing in passing how much contemporary popular music can often be conceived as a piece in a larger device that integrates and integrates with the whole world in turn, whose music ends up being the soundtrack. Here, it is the heart of our lives disturbed by our loneliness that constitutes the territory on which Sanchez's music will unfold, and obviously the clip wins over its soundtrack.
For those who are reviewing this part of the program that is "desire", there is a formatting that allows us to permanently fix elements of reflection. It is a constant in art to be able to modify the representation of reality in such a way that what is usually invisible ends up being out of sight; but the materializations of the invisible as proposed in this clip, if they are frequent, also often fall into the ridiculous. Here, the fact that we assume from start to finish the somewhat cutesy character of this young girl's amorous quest (who is so thirsty for love that she worries those who might love her, to the point of to flee) allows us to accept without reluctance this enormous image, which seems against all expectations particularly realistic and ends up forming a completely coherent landscape, including when we leave the universe of the clip, and we plunge back into our own wanderings, in our cities also populated by wandering souls, waiting more or less desperately for another soul in pain to approach them, arms loaded with the encumbering emptiness of their lack. Miraculously, in this clip, everything works, including the moments when the heart disappears, giving way to the worried and tired expression, on that face, of the tearing of feelings and vacancy of the heart.