JUNIOR ET SA VOIX D'OR - short film - Michel Gondry (1987)

What this video is

Produced at the outermost fringe of the nascent music video industry, this short predates MTV's international expansion into France and was made entirely outside commercial infrastructure — a self-financed art-school band document. It belongs to a micro-tradition of French alternative pop self-representation, adjacent to the cassette-culture and Super 8 home-movie movements of the 1980s. As the chronological origin…

Why it matters

Represents the proto-auteur music video: a director's first creative laboratory before genre conventions of the form were codified. As the earliest entry in Gondry's oeuvre, it documents the visual DNA — rapid montage, practical in-camera invention, warm handmade aesthetics — that would scale from…

The director

Michel Gondry (born May 8, 1964, Versailles, France) is a French filmmaker, music video director, and producer. He attended art school in Paris, where he formed and drummed for the band Oui Oui. His Oui Oui videos launched his directing career, leading to a…