Wednesday 11 September 2013

Arcade Fire, David Bowie and those mirrors


Arcade Fire released their "Reflektor" video just a couple of days ago, on September 9 at 9 p.m. E.T. (yes, it's all nines, how cute in a cheesy-weddingy kinda way).

The video had all this hype surrounding it right from the start, being the first single out of the much awaited same-name album and having its own undercover instagram account. But it seems that wasn't enough, because then David effing Bowie was added to the mix.



I have 3 observations:

1) The song is rather good.
It's probably the hipsters that are gonna tell you it sucks, because now Arcade Fire have gone mainstream, therefore now they're no longer worthy of their attention. This is getting old.

2) This has to be artist Gustav Troger.


The mirrored man in the Reflektor video and the MirrorMan "living scuplture" by Austrian artist Gustav Troger are identical. You can see more on this photoset by Flickr user SilverSky (where I found the artist's pic above) but don't tell me it's not him. And, if it is indeed him, why won't the video's director Anton Corbijn credit him? Expect some finger-pointing, name-calling and plagiarism-shaming any time soon.


3) The video hit a personal memory.
It strongly reminded me of something I was professionally involved in back in 2011, while I was working at film and TV production company Filmiki. I wasn't usually part of the actual creative process, but I did manage to get my ass involved in a couple of interesting projects. One of them was the making of music video "Time is all mine" by Greek musician Sillyboy, shot by director Stathis Mourdoukoutas. The first pic of this post is from the day of the shooting.



It shows a person covered in little pieces of mirrored glass, while the chorus says:
I often listen to Ziggy and get undressed 
This is my humble confess

See the connection here? Both music videos feature a mirrored person and a Bowie reference.

I'm most certainly no David Bowie geek myself. There must be tons of trivia out there, that I never heard about. So, if you know what's the deal here, please tell: Is there a reason mirror-covered people and David Bowie seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly in music videos? Or is this just a plain coincidence?

1 comment:

bee and jay said...

Hi, I asked a friend who is a Bowie freak about your questions, and although he didn't know what the link might be to Bowie & sparkly things, he did have this to offer on the Troger connection:

"According to this article (in German) it is indeed Gustav Troger. Apparently he was flown to Canada to film the video and was contractually sworn to secrecy about his involvement. Hence no credit.

The whole project seems to have had an air of secrecy to it."

http://www.kleinezeitung.at/steiermark/graz/graz/3404545/geheimnisvolle-spiegel.story

cheers!