Devendra Banhart - Carmensita

What this video is

Released in 2008 as a single from Devendra Banhart's 2007 album 'Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon' (XL Recordings), 'Carmensita' is a Spanish-language song by a Venezuelan-American artist set to a Bollywood-pastiche visual framework. The video sits at the apex of the mid-2000s freak-folk/New Weird America movement's crossover into mainstream cultural visibility. It represents a self-aware hybrid of Latin, South…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of the freak-folk/New Weird America movement's visual language, 'Carmensita' demonstrates the genre's appetite for maximalist, cross-cultural theatrical spectacle as an antidote to mainstream music video minimalism. Its Bollywood pastiche framework was unusual in the 2008 indie…

The director

SKINNY is a Los Angeles-based directing collective. At the time of this video, the trio comprised director Dori Oskowitz, journalist/director Marc-Edouard Leon, and director David Hache (1982–2024). In 2008 they signed to Partizan, the acclaimed music video…