There are multiple points of entry for discovering the work of filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. Perhaps you were seduced by the darkly comedic hijinks of his feature debut, Sexy Beast, or the sensuous, alien beauty of his comeback film after nearly a decade, 2013’s Under the Skin. Perhaps it was The Zone of Interest, his horrifying, Auschwitz-set masterpiece—or the powerful, widely praised speech he gave upon receiving an Oscar for the film, in which he condemned the war in Gaza.
For writer and editor Claire Marie Healy, it was the eerie, psychologically charged Birth—in which Nicole Kidman plays an affluent Manhattanite who begins a love affair with a 10-year-old boy she believes is a reincarnation of her late husband—that affected her most powerfully. “It’s one of my favorite films, so the pain of not including it in this book was pretty major,” Healy says.
The book she’s referring to is the newly released Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images, published by Mack. But, as Healy proves across the book’s 320 lavishly illustrated pages, many of Glazer’s most potent statements lie not in his feature films but in his decades-long career as a boundary-pushing director of music videos and advertisements. Under the umbrella of Academy Films—the London production house that is also a home to filmmakers like Walter Stern, Kim Gehrig, and Peter Cattaneo, all of whom are also featured in the book—Glazer produced numerous iconic videos for artists like Jamiroquai, Radiohead, and Massive Attack, as well as memorable ads for brands ranging from Barclays to Alexander McQueen.
So, in honor of Academy Films’ 40th anniversary, Healy set out to survey some of the most groundbreaking moments in the production company’s history—and explore the impact of those shorts on visual culture and cinema more broadly. “It’s an amazing back catalog of projects, and it could have ended up as essentially a chronological account of Academy Films over the years,” says Healy. But what really became exciting was examining “the artistry that is possible within these forms when you push the limits.”
Established by the visionary producer Lizie Gower in 1985, Academy Films served as an early example of a production company that grouped all of its work—creative and commercial—under the same umbrella, refusing to discriminate between the two. It was this, and the company’s knack for “talent nurturing,” as Healy puts it, that helped to grow its tight-knit creative community. “One of the most interesting parts of making the book was discovering how it really does take a village to make these films,” says Healy, citing, in particular, the storyboard artist Adrian Marler, whose work can be seen in a section of the book about Glazer’s memorable late-’90s ad for Stella Artois featuring ice-skating priests.
Equally, the book suggests a new way of looking at the commonly perceived hierarchies of filmmaking: that you might start out with shorts and music videos but then “graduate” to making features—as if the latter is inherently more prestigious. “I think this book is a bit of a riposte to that idea,” says Healy. “Something that Jon said to me during the making of this is, ‘Yes, that may be for brands, yes, that work may be for a musician, but these are all my films.’ He really does see them as his films. And I think that approach is something that you can see across many of the directors in this book.”
Most of all, however, Healy and the Academy Films team are keen for Short Form to inspire a new generation of aspiring filmmakers—and to serve as a kind of tool kit for anyone seeking to create work in that vein. “The audience we had in mind was not only the people who might have been there at the time but also anyone creative trying to make work in our current economic climate. I think there are a lot of lessons to be drawn for them too.”
Given the high barriers to entry for aspiring filmmakers today, in many ways the book couldn’t come at a better time. “Who can make pure artistic work that is self-funded right now? Just people with generational wealth,” Healy notes. “We’re also talking in this book about a time when rent in London was much cheaper. The circumstances were quite different. It’s only getting harder and harder now.”
Perhaps Short Form could inspire a production company or two to begin nurturing their own next-generation talents—and who knows? In two decades, they could end up standing in front of a podium in Los Angeles, collecting an Oscar like Glazer.
Here, Healy shares five excerpts from the book illustrating the role of Academy’s filmmakers behind some of the most iconic music videos of the past few decades.
“Doo Wop (That Thing),” Lauryn Hill, dir. Big T.V.
Filmed in Washington Heights, Manhattan, the video is a deceptively simple split screen in which two Lauryn Hills sing side by side at a block party in the two time periods. Interspersed with her performance are photograph-style stills of scenes in the neighborhood—couples embracing, kids playing, crowds dancing. And, as seamless as the blending and blurring of time periods from left to right looks today, as the directors reveal, that result involved a lot more technical work than simply drawing a smudged line right down the middle. —Claire Marie Healy, writer and editor
“Virtual Insanity,” Jamiroquai, dir. Jonathan Glazer
No computer trickery was used in the making of “Virtual Insanity.” After the production team’s estimate for a hydraulics-based system came in at nearly double the production budget, Glazer’s team had to come up with an alternative. The answer wasn’t to move the floor as originally envisaged, but to move the set itself: The set walls were on wheels, and 10 grips on either side of the walls would move them depending on what direction was being shouted. Similarly, the furniture was bolted or unbolted depending on the shot, creating the same effect. It took one day’s choreography and one day’s shooting. The floor never moved. —Healy
“M3LL155X,” FKA Twigs, dir. FKA Twigs
In 2015, FKA Twigs unveiled what remains, to this day, one of her most ambitious projects in a career filled with challenging, sometimes confounding, pop art. “M3LL155X” feels like the apotheosis of the British singer, songwriter, dancer, producer, and director’s work: a sensuous and disturbing self-directed short film whose emotional and conceptual stakes are nothing less than life and death. Taking her cues from David Lynch, Jonathan Glazer, and Lars von Trier—and imbuing those directors’ ideas of death and self with a distinctly feminine point of view—Twigs’s multipart music video follows its own nightmare logic, a vision of pregnancy and birth that’s both unnervingly clinical and shudderingly close to the skin. —Shaad D’Souza, writer
“Bitter Sweet Symphony,” The Verve, dir. Walter Stern
A document of Hoxton Street’s original character—or, at least, one of its final forms before succumbing to the forces of gentrification—exists in an unlikely place: the iconic video for The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony.’ Directed by Walter Stern, the 1997 clip depicts the group’s frontman, Richard Ashcroft, walking along the pavement towards the camera, accosting locals and pushing past people violently with a laddish sneer slicked across his face. The clip is a heightened, nightmare-scenario version of what might have happened if a rich celebrity took a stroll down a working-class street in the late ’90s, and in that way it also functions as a kind of love letter to a world that was unencumbered by, and uninterested in, the new-money glitz of ’90s London and Cool Britannia. —D’Souza
“Street Spirit (Fade Out),” Radiohead, dir. Jonathan Glazer
“Street Spirit (Fade Out)” was one of the first music videos Academy made, and its success boosted the reputation of our fledgling video division. Jonathan designed the images in slow motion to create a dark, dreamlike effect. But during the shooting the action didn’t look dark or dreamlike at all. It looked banal or even silly, which caused some less-than-encouraging comments from onlookers. Besides, 30 years ago there was no technology to view what we were shooting in slow motion. Jonathan had to wait until he saw his processed film the next day to see if his idea was working. Even he started to have doubts. But the band were uncomplaining and supportive throughout—especially Thom Yorke, who bravely embraced his inner stuntman. —Nick Morris, producer
