UPDATED OCT 3RD - KALEIDOSCOPIC IMAGES MOVED CEILING-TO-FLOOR AS U2 PERFORMED "EVEN BETTER THAN THE REAL THING"
The frame above from Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise made a prominent appearance within a kaleidoscopic montage of moving images behind the band U2 (see video below), as they performed their song Even Better Than The Real Thing Friday night to launch their 25-show residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. The frame from Phantom, a motion gif which has Philbin (George Memmoli) saying the words "'til death" in the film's wedding climax, is a sort of split-screen in the shades, as Swan can be seen reflected in one shade, while Phoenix can be seen in the other. It appears directly above a motion-gif of Lula and Sailor from David Lynch's Wild At Heart, as they dance and kiss each other in front of a jukebox. Underneath the Lynch characters are three rings of stages - the middle ring has The Undead from Phantom Of The Paradise rising from the center of the ring.
An article posted by Vulture's Jen Chaney on October 3rd notes that the kaleidoscopic collage is an art installation by Marco Brambilla, titled King Size:
Many of the people in the heavily Gen-X crowd responded to all the techy pageantry the way everyone responds to concerts in 2023: by whipping out their phones to film it. “I don’t record music at concerts,” Haygood told me. “I recorded two minutes and 33 seconds of that.” He’s referring to the Achtung Baby rollicker “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” a song accompanied by the art installation King Size, a kaleidoscopic collage of images of Vegas and clips of Elvis Presley created by artist Marco Brambilla that scrolls from the back of Sphere to its front. The movement of the video creates the optical illusion that the stage and the standing general-admission crowd around it are rising upward, a sensation unlike anything I have ever experienced. (In one video posted on YouTube, you can hear a guy in the crowd shouting incredulously, “Oh my God, we’re moving!”)But this isn’t just eye-candy gimmickry. The King Size segment, a callback of sorts to the rolling camerawork in the music video for “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” also functions, like so much of what U2 was doing during their Achtung Baby period — where Bono routinely used a remote control onstage to channel-surf through the muck of 1990s broadcast television — as a commentary on oversaturation. “It’s exactly what some of my work is about, which is this idea of the seduction of the spectacle,” Brambilla told me prior to Sphere’s opening. “Is it going to destroy us? Is it going to make us better or worse?”
A second motion-gif frame from Phantom Of The Paradise included in the montage shows who I believe is Nancy Moses as one of Beef's back-up singers, reacting to Beef being struck by lightning on stage.
Updated: Thursday, October 5, 2023 10:47 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post