chris Cunningham auteur

1. AUTEUR THEORY
R O S S H E M M I N G S

2. INTRODUCTION – CHRIS CUNNINGHAM
• British video artist born in Reading in 1970 and grew up in Suffolk
• Director of ambient and electronica music videos for artists such as
Autechre and Aphex Twin
• Also created art installations and short movies
• Mainly worked in music and commercial videos as well as video art
• Established in early 90’s designing robots for Clive Baker and David
Fincher

3. ‘COME TO DADDY’ VIDEO
• 1997 – directed the well known video to ‘come to daddy’ by Aphex Twin
which got him noticed for his talents in directing music videos
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-9UvrLyj3k

4. VIDEO
SIGNATURES/CHARACTERISTICS
• Cunningham challenges the stereotypical portrayal of women, he does
so by blurring the faces of men onto women’s body’s
• There is also an arrow signature at the beginning of most of his videos
• Within his videos he experiments with different genders and ages of
people. Often including abnormal looking characters that offend some
audiences
• He also explores the idea of human deformity which separates his visual
style from that of other auteurs.

5. ‘RUBBER JOHNNY’ VIDEO
• 2005 – Cunningham produced the video for another Aphex Twin song
‘rubber johnny’, this shows how disturbing his vision was becoming
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSMYy4X5xRo

6. SUMMARY
• Cunningham is an auteur artist with a very abstract way of looking at
things which makes him stand out as a very unique director
• Electric and ambient music fits his disturbing videos very well and
amplifies the nature of his videos
• Along with music videos, his talent has been noticed in the commercial
world with big names asking him to direct advertisement videos