David Bowie in Music Video

The first in-depth study of David Bowie’s music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie’s videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space.

By charting Bowie’s creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie’s collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Programme Convener of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of Navigating with the Blackstar: The Mediality of David Bowie (special issue of Celebrity Studies, 2019) and David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom (2019). Her publications include Time Is Out of Joint: The Transmedial Hauntology of David Bowie (2019) and Music Video’s Performing Bodies: Floria Sigismondi as Gestural Animator and Puppeteer (2015). Her interests include animation, cultural studies and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between audio and visual media, popular music, music video and the avant-garde.