The White Stripes - The Hardest Button To Button

What this video is

Released in 2003 as the third single from Elephant, 'The Hardest Button to Button' arrived at the apex of the early-2000s garage rock revival. The video exemplifies the era's valorization of analog craft and in-camera ingenuity over digital CGI — a philosophical alignment between Gondry's handmade aesthetic and The White Stripes' blues-rooted, two-piece minimalism. Shot entirely on the streets and in the subway…

Why it matters

A landmark document of the garage rock revival and of auteur music video practice simultaneously. The video's pixilation technique — a direct descendant of early cinema and stop-motion traditions — was applied with rigorous beat-synchronization, fusing musicological form with visual grammar in a…

The director

Michel Gondry (born May 8, 1963, Versailles, France) is a French film director, screenwriter, and musician. He began directing music videos for his Paris art-school rock band Oui Oui, which brought him to Björk's attention for her 1993 'Human Behaviour'…