Music Videos Vol. 1

Fabulous Artist and excellent video collection

Amazing collection of first video clips - up to 19 minutes long! Mylène, the great provocatrice, appears naked in several. In Libertine, she is nude front and back and reacted to the moral outrage by asking: "What's the fuss about two buttocks and little bit of nudity?" This was 1986 - Miley Cyrus, eat your heart out!

Some of the most provocative, beautifully cinematic collection of music videos ever. The songs themselves are not half bad either, if you like francophone music.

good quality dvd must have for Mylene Farmer fan

Actually, zero stars. It never arrived no

Thanks ;)

This DVD includes the first 12 of Mylène Farmer’s videos from the mid 1980s into the early 1990s. All are directed by her longtime collaborator Laurent Boutonnat, who also writes the music. The films are, frankly, astonishing. I remember some of the videos appearing late night on VH-1 and the like in the 1990s, when I’d leave VH-1 or the old MTV on more out of boredom than anything else. Back then, I had an ambition to become a video editor (which I succeeded in doing) and at that time, music videos were big business.Farmer’s videos were strikingly different from anything else on there. She indulged in little on-camera lip sync work, the videos included diegetic sound and dialogue, obviously not present on the CD versions, and each told a story. Plus Grandir is a tale of sexual lust, religious guilt, lost innocence and refusing to grow old, shot through with fears of death and bodily violation - all frequent themes in Farmer’s songs. With its gothic trappings, it sets the scene for the second video, Libertine. This is the video where Mylène really becomes ‘Mylène.’ For the first time, we see her with the shock of red hair, wearing men’s clothes (some of the time!) as a buccaneering bad girl somewhere in France in the era of England’s George II (that’s important later on.) The video is shot almost as a series of tableaux, it’s atmospheric, funny, sexy, violent, bloody and ultimately very bleak: an epic packed into about 12 minutes. It has a sequel called Pourvu Qu’elles Soient Douces. The song is about a man who’s obsessed with his girlfriend’s buttocks (no comment!) while the film is a 17-minute epic continuation of the bad girl’s adventures, again fabulously shot with a huge cast, sword, gun and cannon battles, explosions, cavalry riders, cavorting prostitutes, Death riding a black horse... and there are buttocks! It’s utterly insane and utterly brilliant. It’s astonishing Boutonnat never made it big time as a film director. Other tales include the stunning Tristana - a clever, witty blend of the Snow White fairytale and the October 1917 Russian Revolution; Sans Contrefaçon - an spooky, sepia tale of a man and his love for his tomboyish ventriloquist’s doll... with a shock of red hair; the supremely creepy Sans Logique, which gets more sinister each time you watch it... the elegiac à Quoi Je Sers, which reunites characters from the previous videos at the River Styx… And I can't forget to mention Désenchantée, which is a signature track - a tale of rebellion against authority, that also serves as a warning about the dangers of messiahs.There’s no point listing everything on here. Suffice to say the videos have a uniform feel and characters (or their souls) drift in and out of the different videos, giving a sense of a narrative consisting of many abstract chapters. You get two and a half hours of great videos including extras (a video for Maman a Tort, two live performances and two ‘making of’ featurettes.) The picture quality is pretty darn good: the prints appear to be different from the rather poor quality ones used on VEVO’s YouTube channel (which I suspect are taken from letterboxed 4:3 video tapes used in the 1990s on music TV stations) and the encoding is far better. The picture is anamorphically enhanced, so no zooming for widescreen, but bear in mind this is a 20 year old DVD and encoding technology has improved vastly even for standard definition in that time. Supposedly, these represent a remastering from the negatives, but I'm dubious about that. At least one video has been converted from anamorphic 16:9 to 4:3 letterbox and back again (the thin black borders on all sides of the video is a dead giveaway. In order to keep the music at the correct speed, the conversion process used for these 24 frames per second films has been to repeat one frame a second. This only really is an issue on panning shots which become juddery. The output can ultimately only reflect the condition of the source materials, though. Sound is decently compressed stereo, if a little hissy, as a result of the analogue source. I would dearly love to see these productions given an HD restoration and Blu-ray upgrade. They absolutely deserve it: these films created an icon who can fill stadiums of something like 20,000 people night after night, after all.It seems silly to point out to anyone reading this that the videos include full frontal nudity, sex scenes, strong violence, gore and reasonably strong language and subject matter, if you know your French, but hey! life’s silly! And for all the discussion of the videos, I haven’t even mentioned the music. Well, you’re unlikely to be reading this if you don’t like the music. These videos made me a fan back in the day.A great package that I actually picked up for a tenner, all in, on Amazon’s French site. Highly recommended.