The White Stripes - Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground

What this video is

Released in the summer of 2002, this video arrived at the apex of The White Stripes' international breakthrough, coinciding with the garage rock revival that saw stripped-down, blues-rooted rock displace the polished production values of late-1990s mainstream pop and nu-metal. The collaboration with Michel Gondry — by then already an auteur of experimental music video — elevated the band's visual language beyond…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of the 2000s garage rock revival, the video pairs one of the White Stripes' most celebrated album openers with Gondry's characteristically analog storytelling. Its use of projection superimposition as a narrative device — rather than digital compositing — aligns formally with…

The director

Michel Gondry (born 1963/1964, Versailles, France) is a French film, music video, and commercial director known for inventive visual style and in-camera trickery. He began directing music videos for the French band Oui Oui before a long-running collaboration…