Grizzly Bear - Knife

What this video is

Released in early 2007, 'Knife' arrived in the wake of Yellow House (September 2006), Grizzly Bear's critically lauded second album on Warp Records — a release the New York Times named among the best albums of 2006 and Pitchfork ranked No. 8 on their year-end list. The video reflects a broader cultural moment in which Brooklyn-based indie acts were pushing music video aesthetics toward handmade surrealism,…

Why it matters

A canonical example of the mid-2000s art-folk / indie baroque music video, 'Knife' demonstrates how Warp Records-affiliated acts and their visual collaborators reframed the music video as a site of handcrafted surrealist world-building. Encyclopedia Pictura's work here prefigures their even more…

The director

Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch are co-founders of the visual collective Encyclopedia Pictura, known for boundary-defying music video work in the mid-to-late 2000s. The collective's other major credits include Björk's 'Wanderlust' (2008), directed under…