You gotta hand it to Arcade Fire. The hard-working indie rockers pretty much write their own playbook and their growing success has allowed them to work on their own terms with likeminded collaborators. Earlier this year they tapped Terry Gilliam to direct a webcast of their Madison Square Garden gig, but long before that, they were hard at work with Spike Jonze on a secretive short film based around the loose themes of their latest album “The Suburbs.”
The band’s frontman Win Butler told Pitchfork in August that the clip was “a short film” rather than a video, “a science-fiction B-movie companion piece for the record. Basically we played Spike some music from the album and the first images that came to his mind had the same feeling as this idea for a science fiction film I had when I was younger. My brother and I and Spike wrote it together, which was really fun—it was like total amateur hour. We shot it in Austin and a lot of kids are in the film, and it was great just hanging out with these 15-year-olds for a week.” While a shortened version of the film/music video cut from the footage was released back in November, it looks like the full short film is now headed to the festival circuit and will make its debut at the Berlin Film Festival next month.
According to the press release the short, titled “Scenes From The Suburbs,” “expands the music video into a film without abandoning the structure of a clip. The future has become reality. And the threat lies in the proximity of the military. Memories of a past summer.” Sounds pretty exciting and if the full short is anywhere in the ballpark of Jonze’s beautifully haunting robot love story “I’m Here” we’re sure to be bowled over. No word yet on what kind of release the Arcade Fire and Spike Jonze plan for the piece, but we’re sure they’re cooking up something. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to be patient. We used to wait, amirite? Check out the music video version below.
