Fever Dream

Brittany passed along a link to a pretty amazing animated music video, posted below (though it's worth it to click through to youtube, and watch the thing in HD).



It's for the Ramona Falls tune "I Say Fever," and it was directed by Stefan Nadelman, through his company Tourist Pictures (his site is full of stuff worth looking at). It plays like an expansion of some sequences from Max Ernst's collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté, with its splicing of an unruly bestiary into corsetted Victoriana, and its sinister birds. The video starts out well enough, but when the chorus kicks in, it really jumps to a higher level. The stroboscopic outbreak of color, and the way the stride of the characters syncs up to the suddenly-implacable beat, makes for some genuinely thrilling moments.

A nice selection of images from Une Semaine de Bonté can be found at helloooooo.com. Several pages from the Dover Edition of the book can also be found at Google Books. Of Ernst's collage-novels, I've always preferred La Femme 100 Têtes; Bonté has a thread of misogyny to it that I found of-putting last time I read it. There's some terror of womanly wiles in the "I Say Fever" video, but I end up being intrigued by the perfumed lady, with her expression of combined malice and rapture.