ICONS: Floria Sigismondi

The creative process is such an mysterious phenomenon, equally elusive to scientists as it is to artists. While the human experience demands that we strive to understand it, our own inner workings will forever remain a gray space, an unknown method of connections with or without resolution. In my blog series ICONS, I will attempt to examine my creative process as I divulge my greatest sources of inspiration, my biggest influences, and what drives me the most as an artist.

© Floria Sigismondi

The photographer and director Floria Sigismondi has a unique style that continues to develop throughout her career. Her dark contrast-driven imagery has a nouveau-surrealist feel to it that makes it intoxicating to experience. Each viewing is an opportunity to step into an alternate reality forcing you to reinterpret your own. Her work often contains political undertones, a challenge to question authority, and the social mores that define our culture.

Looking at some of her earliest work, the elements of her style were all present even if they hadn’t yet fully coalesced. Through the use of selective focusing and playing with time-scale, she not only created alternate universes, she created unique ways to experience these surrealist environments.

In 1997, she was nominated for Best Rock Video at the MTV Music Awards for Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People” (1996), an almost abstract composition that juxtaposes the images of a rock performance, strange medical devices, and totalitarian orations. Her hard-hitting visuals are just as striking as the metal anthem that they support. The music video’s uncomfortable imagery rallied the conservative base and ignited much of the debate that helped to fuel Marilyn Manson’s shock-star rise in popular culture.

Her next major critical success was with Sigur Ros and their “Untitled” (2003), for which she won the Audio/Visual Award at the New York Underground Film Festival and Best International Video Award at the MTV European Awards. In this short film, we are sent to a post-nuclear-holocaust world where the children play in the ashes of the dead. Our perceptions are challenged not only by the environment but also her presentation, with quick cuts that contrast against the use of mixed frame rates, tilt-shifted focus, and the occasional slowing or reversal of time. All of these visual tools seem to perfectly complement the rich ambiance of the lush vocals and instrumentation, yet you are gutturally aware of the conflict in the time-scale being presented to your eyes in comparison to the rhythms gently pulsing in your ears.

2010 brings the opportunity to experience her second feature length film, The Runaways. Inspired by the 1970’s female rockband of the same name, the film follows two friends on their rise to stardom as they navigate the lessons shelled out by the streets of Los Angeles. This film has the potential to be a classic retelling of the “making and breaking of the band” theme.

I would love the opportunity to collaborate with such a gifted visionary. Her photographic works have inspired me as much as her films! I look forward to her continued progression as an artist.

If you’d like to see more of Floria’s work, I suggest you visit her website:

http://www.floriasigismondi.com

You can also visit her Wikipedia Article to see her full filmography.