As a fan of both their respective bands — Japan and King Crimson — I was certainly aware of David Sylvian and Robert Fripp’s collaboration in the early 90’s, which resulted in two albums, The First Day and the live Damage, but didn’t really give it a lot of thought until discovering the title track off the latter several years later.
As a brooding slice of acute melancholy, “Damage” could be construed as slavishly overwrought, but still imbued with a stirring beauty, if you’re in the right mood. To my ears, it owed more to Sylvian’s post-Japan project, Rain Tree Crow than to Fripp’s exhaustive body of work.
In any case, some years after that, I stumbled upon the clip below, which I assumed was an official video for the song — its stark visuals seamlessly meshing with the sound and sentiment of the track in question.
Again, one might consider it a tad heavy-handed but also pretty compelling, should you be in the right frame of mind.
Well, as it turned out, that wasn’t an official video at all, but rather the result of someone’s inventive splicing, the finished product working remarkably well, considering the complete disparity of the source material.
The visuals come from "Le Révélateur,” an experimental — and ostensibly silent — film from 1968 by French director Philippe Garrel. Cinema website MUBI synopsizes the film….
In the words of Bernadette Lafont, who stars in the film with Laurent Terzieff, “a couple and their child flee in the face of an unknown but still considerable menace… In a desolate landscape, full of humidity and humiliation, we see the weakest of beings stage his revolt: a child.”
Here’s a fragment of the original…
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