On July 30 Kate Bush celebrated her 60th birthday. An
extraordinary musician and performer.
Willow Mackay calls her “ a wizard of merging artistic
interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could
offer as an artist.”
The Guardian published 60 unbelievable facts about her. The Guardian, July 28, 2018.
Moving: On the Cinema of Kate Bush by Willow Maclay. Oscilloscope, June 5, 2018.
Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters
one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection.
In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema
into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could
truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials,
in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic
terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, François
Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.
There are numerous videos for the “Wuthering Heights”
single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bush’s
oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different
formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection
to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound
stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bush’s body as she does her
interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs
and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections
to create one fluid image—one a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to
the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures she’s making
to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse
photography is used to give off the illusion that Bush’s body is splitting into
parts as she moves like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” Cinematically, this video
shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the
Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how
images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be
more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were
used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images,
like in Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking video for “Breakaway,” starring Toni
Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for
“Wuthering Heights,” but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red
dress.
The red dress video is overwhelming, shot in 4:3 and
comprised almost entirely of medium shots to accentuate the visual language
coming from the entirety of Bush’s body. Where the white dress video uses
flashier techniques to evoke a very specific luminescent feeling, here the
cinema is coming completely from her interpretive dance, as she uses the
entirety of her body as sign language to emphasize the lyrical and tonal
content of the song. The dance is note for note the same as the one in the
white dress video, but the camera almost never pulls away here beyond the
occasional close-up shot of Bush’s own facial acting, which in and of itself is
also presenting the narrative of the song through her expressive, maximalist
acting. The video evokes an almost mythic, idealized England of deep greens,
where ghosts and ghouls roamed the land alongside the living. It’s a land of
beautiful old gardens, and cottages (much like the one she grew up in), but the
beauty is unnerved by a cerebral pull towards death, and in “Wuthering
Heights,” that very nature is in the soul of the video. It’s set in an old
forest, intensely green, but beset with fog, and Bush breaks the image with her
stark, loud crimson dress. The wider framing allows us to see exactly what
she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of
Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically
enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always
presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the
characters. In this video, the red dress is worn as a means of seduction. “Let
me into your window,” Bush beckons, pulling her arms in closer. She’s speaking
for the ghost of Kathy, begging to get out from the cold, but in addition to
the narrative conceit of the song, it also works as a device of temptation for
an introductory single. “Let me into
your window” could just as easily be “Let me into your lives,” and after
“Wuthering Heights,” England and the rest of the world obliged.
It was around this time, 1980, when Kate Bush started
shifting her ideas of what she wanted to convey in music videos into something
more traditionally narrative-based, with a less heavy reliance on interpretive
dance and pantomime. In this period, she made “The Wedding List,” as an homage
to the Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black, about a wronged bride who sought
revenge for the desecration of her romantic life. Additionally, there was the
Jean-Luc Godard-influenced experimental video for “Another Day,” with Peter
Gabriel, which showed the unravelling of a couple by using frame-within-a-frame
imagery to convey two separate stories of past and present simultaneously.
Bush’s best video of this time period, however—and one that births a new period
of her music video career—is her apocalyptic science fiction short for the song
“Breathing.” The song saw a shift in Bush’s interests from her pop-inflected,
piano-based dance music to something harder and altogether more experimental.
It was a shift that would characterize her career for the next 30 years.
In the video for “Breathing,” Bush represents a fetus,
begging and pleading to be given a chance to live and be with her mother in the
outside world in the wake of nuclear annihilation. It’s a song that has deep
ties to maternity, childbirth, and pregnancy, and when compared with the
majority macho considerations of science fiction, it becomes something complex
and unique within the genre. The video is matter-of-fact in its simplicity, but
deeply moving in what the images convey about the lyrics. Once again, it’s
mostly shot on a soundstage, where Bush is inside of a plastic orb, with deep
amber lighting underneath her frail frame. She’s wearing a sheer outfit with
white trim to portray the relative innocence of the fetus, and she spends the
majority of the video either in the fetal position or pushing the orb back and
forth to represent the kicking or pushing a mother may feel while pregnant. The
words “Breathing my mother in” are a gently affecting and deeply harrowing
sentiment when set against the context of nuclear war, and the video becomes a
barrage of dissonant images. Our greatest possibility for love (giving someone
life) and our greatest possible evil (the nuclear weapon) collide to create a
pure statement on the human condition. When the mother’s water eventually
breaks and Bush leaves the womb, what follows is a slow-motion dip into
experimental imagery of one girl, bathed in shadow, peaking out from underneath
a cloudy image reaching towards the reds, oranges, and bright lights of what
she hopes will be a welcoming world. Only here she’s greeted with an atomic
explosion that sinks into the earth in the shape of Kate Bush’s silhouette.
This is a woman’s story of creation caught in the crossfire of what man creates
and mourning the death of a world she knows will inevitably fall. It’s a
complicated, resonant question for any time, but made even more evocative by
the terror of a supposedly inevitable nuclear war between the United States and
Russia in the 1980s. In terms of cinema, it’s probably the greatest exhibition
of pregnancy and childbirth this side of Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby
Moving.”
In an interview for British Television series, Egos and
Icons, Kate Bush stated that her music video for “Running Up that Hill” was her
way of saying goodbye to the pantomimed, interpretative dance of her earlier
music career in favor of dancing that was more serious and elegant. The
choreography of the video would be a pure dance, stripped of theatricality,
with its footing in a bolder narrative sophistication. For this video, she
brought in choreographer Diane Grey to take the reigns in constructing a dance
around the narrative of the song, about a woman who wishes her partner could
see things through her eyes, because it would fix their problems. Bush’s work
has always been heavily gendered in a feminine context, but there’s a
deliberate decision here to present two bodies working in jarring competition
with one another while being punctuated with bursts of synchronicity, as Bush
and her male partner move in and out of one another’s grasp and bodies with a
fluid grace. The dance is the most complicated and daring of her music video
work, while still gravitating toward a narrative interest in reflecting the
lyrics of the song. But what follows in all of its beautiful lifts, cradles,
and slides is a dance of two people starkly different from one another finding
occasional momentary symbiosis. It’s a melding of both the masculine and the
feminine into one perfect image, only for it to slip away.
Bush’s work has always highlighted the female form, with real emphasis on
her body as it relates to its present state in the world of the song. It’s
reminiscent of the work of Maya Deren, whose work frequently foregrounded
womanhood in the deep waters of experimental cinema. Deren’s “At Land” bears
stark similarities to “Running Up that Hill” in this regard, where Deren’s body
is more like a curving liquid at one with an elemental earth rather than in
man’s creation. In the Deren short, the ocean moves in and out, which is a
dance in and of itself, and the woman (played by Deren) enters into a chess game
that’s representative of her own push-and-pull conflict with being a woman in a
man’s world. Her body, ever present and always in frame, sometimes looking
toward the sea as if the murky deep would offer a tranquility, and in Bush’s
video, she reaches toward a sun, maybe even to God, to bring her closer to
understanding the conflict within her own life. Fittingly, Deren’s short ends
with her running up a hill.
Kate Bush’s music video library is epochal, constantly rewarding in its
zealous fusion of artistic forms, and her fundamental understanding that
cinema, movement and dance are intertwined. When watching feature films, we
tend to point out whenever a scene has great music accompanying it, whether
it’s Claire Denis’ use of “The Rhythm of the Night” in the disco denouement of
Beau Travail or the montage set to “Layla” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but
why are music videos so vastly ignored when we canonize movies? If there’s to
be a music video canon, then it’s important to understand what makes a music
video cinema in the first place. Through dance, rhythm, and movement, music
videos truly find their identity in the lexicon of cinema, and with Kate Bush
in particular, she immerses her entire body into that very idea. Stop Making
Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film of all time, thanks in
part to Jonathan Demme’s understanding of rhythm and how he captured the
jittery quality of David Byrne’s dancing. If the same can be extended to the
work of music videos, then the entire world of images bursting out of Bush’s
body time and time again must be holy and it must be considered cinema.
The opening of Hounds of Love – “It’s in the trees!
It’s coming!” – is a sample of a line from the 1957 British horror film Night
of the Demon.
More videos of Kate Bush official website
One of my favorite Kate Bush tracks:
Many fans ask why Bush isn't bigger in the U.S.,
simply because her albums deserve to be heard by a wider audience. However, her
influence has permeated modern music for decades. In the '90s, Tori Amos was
inundated with Bush comparisons; when Joanna Newsom and Amanda Palmer emerged
in the '00s, they received the same treatment. These connections tended to be
facile and based on surface musical attributes; however, Bush's career
blueprint — encompassing the way she steered her own musical ship, for example,
or the crisp, ornate details underscoring every song — has inspired countless
other iconoclasts.
This fluidity came into focus thanks to the '00s indie
scene, which spawned a surprising number of Bush covers, including the
Futureheads' yelping take on "Hounds of Love," Ra Ra Riot's delicate
"Suspended in Gaffa" and Wild Nothing's moody version of "Cloudbusting."
Today, her spiritual descendants are even more popular; Florence and the
Machine, Years & Years, and Christine and the Queens all bear Bush's
imprint.
Annie Zaleski looks back on her music and legacy.
Kate Bush at 60: An exquisite pop genius whose
influence endures. Salon, July 27, 2018.
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