The relationship between the Thin White Duke and video

Of all the members of rock's aristocracy, David Bowie was the one most keenly aware of the value of image, and the most skilled at exploiting it, to the point that fashion, video and acting were as much an integral part of his artistic vision as the music itself. Here's a guide to decoding the relationship between the Thin White Duke and video, from A to Z.

A as in “Ashes To Ashes“. The concept of the video clip as we understand it today was born precisely with the four minutes of footage David Mallet shot in 1980 for "Ashes To Ashes". The editing of surreal images with a distinctly unsettling subtext, the considerable budget, the experimentation with optical effects like chromakey, and the fact that the film was built on a storyboard meticulously designed by the singer together with the director, all make "Ashes To Ashes" the first music video to go beyond the simple task of promoting a song. It effectively becomes a new medium in which a distinctive visual language can be developed to communicate something. In this video Bowie is a wounded Pierrot (surrounded by extras drawn from the new romantic scene), an astronaut trapped in an environment straight out of Ridley Scott's "Alien", a prisoner in an exploding kitchen, then in a padded room.

The video doesn't illustrate the song; rather, it amplifies and enriches its already complex web of intertextual references. There are self-quotations (the return of the Major Tom character from the old hit "Space Oddity"), references to childhood fantasy (in the melody, which echoes certain nursery rhymes, but also in the beach scene reminiscent of "The Wizard of Oz"), and psychoanalytic confessions (the oppressive mother figure, also mentioned in the lyrics, the umbilical cord linking the astronaut to his ship). The Bowie character is constantly surrounded by figures pestering him, yet he's always hopelessly alone, reflecting the cynical ideas about fame and fashion contained on the album. The unsettling nature of the images is further underscored by the cinematography and the acidic, antinaturalistic colours, as abrasive as in few other videos of the Eighties.

B as in BBC. That is, the legendary British state broadcaster which, in acknowledgment of the fact that music is part of the country's culture, deigns to devote dedicated programmes to it. On "Top of the Pops", musicians riding the sales charts perform live, and it's thanks to this that on 14 April 1972 David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars were able to enter the homes of a still-puritanical England, bringing with them a gust of revolution that was as much sexual as it was rock 'n' roll. At one point, indeed, the androgynous singer drapes his arm suggestively over guitarist Mick Ronson's shoulder. Today it looks almost quaint, but from the following day onward, the lives of British teenagers, gay or not, would never be the same again.

C as in change. An utter truism, but watching all of Bowie's promo clips back to back on the "The Best Of" DVD, one can't help but notice that what makes these films meaningful, first and foremost, is always the singer's ability to transform himself, like a mirror reflecting his own era back at us time and again. From the misfit punk of "Jean Genie" (five years ahead of Sid Vicious) to the platinum-plated entertainer of "Serious Moonlight", it's like watching a visual history of our society and of rock alongside it.

D as in “D.J.“. Along with the other two singles taken from "Lodger" (1979), this is one of the first tracks to be given a truly elaborate visual accompaniment. Credit goes to director David Mallet, whom Bowie met on the set of "The Kenny Everett Show", where Mallet was already experimenting with techniques such as chromakey, capable of overlaying images and shifting colours in blatantly artificial ways.

In "D.J." Bowie plays the song's neurotic protagonist. Shots of him smashing up his equipment are intercut with footage of an actual walk through London, surrounded by people embracing him, a simple but effective idea for a prophetic track that calls out the DJ as the new "artist of modern life".

"Boys Keep Swinging", on the other hand, shows him singing backed by a trio of "girls" who are actually nothing more than three images of Bowie in drag. Before the end, Bowie takes off his wig and wipes off his make-up by running his hand over his face, just as he had seen drag performers do in Berlin cabarets. The older figure, meanwhile, is a good-natured parody of Marlene Dietrich, his co-star in David Hemmings' film "Just A Gigolo" (1979).

In "Look Back In Anger" he plays a painter watching his own face decay as he strokes the perfect face of a painted angel. From the same period comes Bowie's most remarkable TV performance, on "Saturday Night Live" on December 15, 1979, where the singer performs in costumes drawn from Dada theatre, in particular those designed by Hugo Ball for the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

The partnership with Mallet marks the whole pioneering phase of Bowie's videos, right up to the famous promos for the "Let's Dance" album and the video-concert "Serious Moonlight".

E as in Eighties. The decade in which Bowie expresses himself most fully through images is, inevitably, the Eighties, the video era he himself inaugurated with "Ashes To Ashes". By then Bowie is a superstar, and the quality of his music is, by common consent, in free fall. Nonetheless the videos are remarkable and, contrary to the received wisdom about the era, far from devoid of "meaning". Just consider the musings on cultural imperialism in "Let's Dance" (starring two young Aboriginal Australians tempted by Western civilisation) and "China Girl" (both directed by Mallet), the satire on religion in "Loving The Alien" (stuffed, among other things, with art references, from De Chirico to Gilbert and George to Laurie Anderson), right through to the anti-American social commentary of "Day In Day Out" (centred on a homeless single mother), at times quite raw and shocking. In short, even back then Bowie had plenty to say.

F as in Fashion. Another key concept in Bowie's world, fashion is critically examined as a social phenomenon, showing the surreal relationship between the star and the audience mimicking his every move (there are two scenes of parodic choreography, in both "Fashion" and "Blue Jean"), with Bowie split into the roles of the rocker and the Man in the Street (see in particular the second video mentioned, directed by Julian Temple).

G as in Glass Spider. But fashion is also what drags the superstar into his most notorious debacle: the infamous tour with a giant glowing spider, over-the-top choreography, and nightmarish costumes and hairstyles. The proof is in the video concert of the same name: the scene from "Time", with our man dressed in gold lamé, winged boots à la Mercury, messenger of the gods, and (brace yourselves) little blue plastic wings on his shoulders, is simply hilarious. But these are the Eighties, and camp aesthetics are a package deal, take it or leave it. That said, the attention to cutting-edge modern dance running through all his late-Eighties videos (see "Fame '90" by Gus Van Sant) deserves reappraisal: Glass Spider is one of the very few concert videos that isn't boring — there's always something to look at...

As early as 1990, the superstar makes amends for such excesses with the Sound+Vision tour (a mission statement right from the title), where for the first time he uses a giant screen to project new and old videos, to strongly nostalgic effect.

H as in "Heroes". That is, the signature song of the singer's Berlin years. The dramatic contrast of light and shadow in the song's promo reflects Bowie's fascination with Expressionism, both in art and in cinema. From the "Metropolis"-style sets of the "Diamond Dogs" tour, to the futuristic use of lighting on the '76 and '83 tours, to the nod to Heckel on the cover of "Idiot" (co-written with Iggy Pop), this is without doubt a long and meaningful relationship. This passion for Expressionist cinema also shows up in the nods to Murnau's Nosferatu in Mallet's clip for "Under Pressure", which also closes with a montage of kisses taken from various silent films — an idea very close to the one later used by Tornatore in "Cinema Paradiso".

Also dating from the "Berlin" period are his appearance in the harrowing "Christiane F. - We Children from Bahnhof Zoo", where Bowie plays himself and sings "Station To Station", and his performance in the BBC production of Brecht's "Baal".

I as in "I'm Deranged". That is, the Bowie track that opens the famous opening sequence of David Lynch's 1997 "Lost Highway", the one with the centre line of the road wavering in the dark. Bowie himself doesn't appear in the film (though he had a cameo in the same director's "Fire Walk with Me"), but this is by far the finest use of Bowie's music in cinema.

J as in Julian Temple. The director of the notorious "The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle" brings Bowie into the Fifties revival driven by the film "Absolute Beginners" (1986), in which David plays a "shark" of the advertising world (a business he had genuinely worked in as a young man) and performs an ambitious musical number. Temple also directs the video for the song written for the film's soundtrack.

K as in Kemp, Lindsay. At twenty, Bowie studies mime with the great Lindsay Kemp, who teaches him how to act and apply make-up, casting him in the piece "Pierrot in Turquoise", in which the young man also performs some of his own songs. The influence of this experience is undeniable: the true secret of Bowie's charisma on stage and on screen always comes first and foremost from his flawless command of gesture and expression, only secondarily from staging or choreography. It's precisely thanks to this theatrical approach that the Ziggy Stardust persona, though starting out with nothing more than an ostrich boa and an improbable haircut (make-up and tailor-made outfits from Japan would only come later), proves revolutionary — and anyone who has seen Don Pennebaker's film (see Z) will remember the long mime sequence during "The Width Of A Circle". Even as late as "Earthling", at fifty years old, he was still performing his Saint Sebastian routine, pulling arrows from his body in front of an ecstatic crowd.

The relationship with Kemp continues for two more concerts, at the Rainbow Theatre in '72, where Bowie experiments for the first time with a "multimedia" approach, using projections and drawing on inspiration from kabuki theatre. Kemp oversees the staging and sets, and his dance company performs alongside the singer in a series of avant-garde ballets: during "Starman", the maestro dangles from the ceiling dressed as an angel, and it's safe to say no English rocker had ever seen anything like it before. A faint echo of the event survives in Mick Rock's video for "John I'm Only Dancing", which shows rehearsals for the show.

L as in "Little Wonder". The finest video of Bowie's Nineties, directed by Italian-Canadian filmmaker Floria Sigismondi, notable for its hyperkinetic editing, with constant shifts in rhythm and focus, and characters moving in jerky or staggered fashion against their surroundings. The clip stars a series of Ziggy Stardust clones wandering through a cyberpunk London, but the most unsettling touch comes from zoomorphic puppets and other objects (giant eyeballs) onto which flickering, agitated faces are projected. These elements, which add yet another layer to the dichotomy between stillness and hyperkinesis running through the video, are the work of artist Tony Oursler, who would go on to collaborate with Bowie on several performances, as well as on the staging of the "Earthling" tour (as seen in the clip for "Seven Years In Tibet"). Sigismondi gives Bowie another masterpiece with "Dead Man Walking", where, at the same infernal pace, references to painter Francis Bacon (who died in '92) pile up — cages, oblique perspectives, sides of beef, deformed or erased faces — in a riot of blood red, with bassist Gail Ann Dorsey transformed into a grotesque satyr figure.

Far more subdued is the video for "I'm Afraid Of Americans", directed by Dom and Nic in the same period, in which Bowie nonetheless allows himself the pleasure of being chased by none other than Trent Reznor (his Nineties equivalent in more ways than one), playing a De Niro-esque character straight out of "Taxi Driver". Also notable is the scene where Reznor mimes shouldering a rifle, and the machine-gun drum fill in the song turns into a barrage of real gunfire tearing into the taxi, in front of a terrified Bowie.

In short, the creative season that began with "Outside" reaches its fulfillment with the videos made for the following album ("Earthling", precisely), delivering some of the finest work of a decade that can rightly be considered the golden age of the music video. In the 2000s, there would no longer be budgets for Sigismondi's phantasmagorias.

M for "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence". The 1983 film by the great Nagisa Oshima, in which Bowie co-stars alongside another musician and composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The film is set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, and its narrative core is the homosexual attraction between the two enemies. It's the finest film of Bowie's acting career, even if the scene is often stolen by the other lead, Tom Conti, and by a legendary Takeshi Kitano, especially in the unforgettable finale. Worth noting too: screenwriter Meyersberg, the same one behind "The Man Who Fell to Earth", weaves unsettling hints of Bowie's real biography into the story, particularly regarding his relationship with his brother (see letter J).

One could also mention here Tony Scott's "The Hunger" (1982), but of this glossy vampire tale (in which Bowie acts alongside Deneuve, turning in a more than respectable performance) what really survives are the first two minutes, where Bauhaus perform "Bela Lugosi's Dead" — on Bowie's suggestion to the director, of course.

It seems there was once a plan for Bowie to collaborate with Tony Scott's far more celebrated brother, Ridley, but sadly nothing came of it. It would have been a perfect pairing between two of the great aesthetes of 1980s England.

N for nude. Yes indeed, Bowie sacrificed himself so thoroughly for his art that he agreed to appear nude, entwined with his beautiful co-star on a beach, in the video for "China Girl". At the time (it was '83!) it caused quite a scandal, and — believe it or not — my copy of the DVD "The Best Of David Bowie 1980/1987" still contains the censored version. Such is the power of a pair of buttocks.

O for "Outside". The album of Bowie's Nineties rebirth, in which he pursues a concept borrowed partly from cyberpunk aesthetics and partly from contemporary art. Renewing his interest in painting (which also led him to take part in a few exhibitions and to become a publisher of "Modern Painters"), Bowie became drawn to ritual themes tied to death, present both in the "Vienna Actionists" and in the most extreme performance art of the Seventies (already referenced by him in "Joe The Lion" back in '77), as well as in the work of his new friend Damien Hirst. Together with Brian Eno, he also visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, where he admired the pavilion housing the patients' artworks, and took a liking to a wall inscription reading "This is hell". This extreme inspiration is reflected in the videos too, particularly Sam Bayer's "The Heart's Filthy Lesson": a ritual orgy of dismembered and reassembled mannequins, set in the warehouse-studio of Bowie-the-artist, who leads his boys through junk, dust, buckets of paint, smashed objects and piercings, all the way to the construction of a minotaur-shaped totem, symbol of the album's neo-pagan aesthetic. Keeping time is a puppet-drummer who looks ready to step into one of the videos (very similar to this one) with which Marilyn Manson would try to scandalize America just a few years later. That all this was in step with the spirit of the times is confirmed by the use of tracks from the album in the soundtracks of similarly themed films, such as David Fincher's grim "Seven" (1995).

For the far more harmless "Hallo Spaceboy", finally, it's worth noting the return of David Mallet, with a piece similar to the one he made for "Under Pressure": an analogue montage of old 1950s horror films and other archival footage, cut together with the faces of Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys (who collaborate on the track), this time driven by the urgent rhythm of the new decade.

P for puppets. Namely, Bowie's co-stars in Jim Henson's 1986 film "Labyrinth", alongside a young Jennifer Connelly (the one from "Phenomena", for Dario Argento devotees). Thanks to his ease in the role of Jareth, King of the Goblins, and his duets with hordes of demented muppets, Bowie became the fantasy friend of every child of the Eighties. Him, and that flying dog from "The Never Ending Story".

Q for "Almost Famous", the 2000 film in which former journalist Cameron Crowe recounts his teenage years spent tagging along with rock stars. There's even a brief moment where the boy meets a fictionalized Bowie. In reality, Crowe made his name by landing some of his most sensational interviews with a Bowie exiled in Los Angeles and wired on cocaine. Go dig them up: between mentions of UFO sightings and tales of black magic, they're a genuine anti-drug PSA. That same dark period is documented in Alan Yentob's rare film "Cracked Actor" and in the chilling clip from the "Dick Cavett Show" interview included with the latest reissue of "Young Americans".

It's hard to say how he managed to transform from the sickly alien of those clips into the sex symbol of just a few years later — that's a matter for body artists.

R for Romanek, Mark. The young director behind one of Bowie's finest clips, "Jump They Say" (1993), and later "Black Tie White Noise". "Jump They Say", in particular, is the "Ashes To Ashes" of the Nineties: a video in which Bowie plays a suit-and-tie office worker wandering through livid grey-blue corridors, leaning out from a building's ledge silhouetted against a hyperrealistic sky, then plunging onto a car in the street below, echoing the pose from the cover of "Lodger" many years earlier — gone are the glossy dreams and pop colours, replaced by harshness and violence; the aesthetic of the new decade is set. It's unsettling how, once again, Bowie's face appears disfigured, with the images of the fall in the street building to an anguished crescendo, underscored by rapid editing. What's more, all of this seems to echo Bowie's own biography, having recently lost his half-brother to suicide. The figure of the elderly woman mourning the fallen Bowie seems to mirror the mother figure who haunted him along the beach in the hallucinatory finale of "Ashes To Ashes".

The pop artifice of the Eighties gives way to a more naturalistic look in "Black Tie White Noise" too, which addresses racism by borrowing the fresh colours and expressive close-ups of Benetton-style advertising, set however against a backdrop of urban-ghetto decay (the Los Angeles riots were a recent memory).

In the same years, the singer contributed the entire soundtrack to the BBC TV drama "The Buddha Of Suburbia", based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi — something that must have carried particular resonance for a former suburban London boy like Bowie.

S for "Space Oddity". The 1969 song where it all began. The video was shot years later, once fame had arrived with the Ziggy Stardust album, by photographer Mick Rock. He is the true visual biographer of the early Bowie and, despite never having significant budgets to work with (as this film also attests), he managed to forge an iconography of rock that contributed hugely to building the glam star, also directing the promos for "Jean Genie" and "John I'm Only Dancing". His finest video is perhaps the one for "Life On Mars?", with Bowie transformed into an ethereal figure, almost dissolving into the painterly colours of his suit and the white of the backdrop. Rock's masterpiece, though, is the famous photograph of Bowie, live on stage, bending down to bite the strings of Mick Ronson's guitar, miming fellatio.

T for "Thursday's Child". This is Bowie's last great music video, after which he would step away from the medium, sensing that "internet kills the video stars". The clip contains one of the fundamental themes in Bowie's visual gallery, namely Time and the decay of the body, already tackled in the video for "Look Back In Anger", where the star was a kind of Dorian Gray in reverse, or in "The Hunger", where he aged horrifically within a matter of minutes.

Here we see a fifty-something Bowie staring at his reflection in a bathroom mirror, while his partner changes her contact lenses beside him. Little by little, the reflected images of the two are replaced by those of two young people, including an uncannily accurate alter ego of Ziggy Stardust, until the older Bowie turns to kiss the girl, only to find his indifferent partner in her place instead. The slowness of the editing has something both poignant and unsettling about it, as in certain Lynch films: it's a sign that an era has ended, both for the world of music video and for Bowie as a person. From then on he would appear less and less, especially considering his film career had already grown sparse during the Nineties. His last significant role is that of the scientist Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's unsettling "The Prestige" (2006).

M as in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicholas Roeg's 1976 film in which David Bowie makes his acting debut, playing an alien stranded on our planet who can only communicate through music. In short, Bowie plays himself.

The film is a bit dated, but with its excess of alienation, loneliness and fragility, it's an essential part of Bowie's body of work, going well beyond science fiction to become a precise portrait of the man at the height of his existential despair.

Roeg chose Bowie for the role after watching Alan Yentob's documentary "Cracked Actor", in which the London singer appears in the grip of cocaine, during his darkest period, in Los Angeles.

V as in "Velvet Goldmine". That is, Todd Haynes's 1998 film about glam rock and, in particular, about... David Bowie. The character portraying him looks more like an 1980s Dorian Gray than Ziggy Stardust.

The film is enjoyable and well shot, but it feels less like an exploration of David Bowie's own subtle approach to homosexuality in rock, and more like a reflection of the director's own biography.

W as in Warhol, Andy. The true mentor, the model for the approach through which Bowie declares himself empty, devoid of feeling, a mere mirror reflecting the outside world. The singer dedicates a song to the artist that is a genuine manifesto of intent, without which his persona can't truly be understood. Warhol takes Oscar Wilde's idea that the artist should be a work of art, turning one's own life into an artwork, to its most extreme — and even tragic — conclusions. This is exactly what Bowie tries to replicate in rock: to be a blank screen onto which society's theatre can be painted, which is why music alone isn't enough to give his art full meaning, and video is perhaps its most authentic documentation instead. In 1996, Bowie pays tribute again by playing Warhol in the film "Basquiat", and it's no coincidence that he delivers perhaps his best acting performance since "The Man Who Fell to Earth". The two had met in '71, in New York, and on that occasion David had played the artist the song dedicated to him: Warhol reportedly hated it, though he did praise the canary-yellow shoes the singer was wearing.

X as in xenophobia. Which is absent in Bowie — in fact, if the opposite word existed (xeno-philia?), it would suit him perfectly. His interest in the Other ("Loving The Alien") goes well beyond progressive political correctness, which he himself mocked in "Black Tie White Noise". The chameleon's talent lies in absorbing what is different and becoming it: "I'd like to put you all inside my show", as he sang in "Andy Warhol".

Y as in "Young Americans". This is the album that led Bowie, in 1975, to become the first white singer to perform on the US TV show "Soul Train" — in its own way, this too is a historic appearance, breaking down certain racial barriers just as "Starman" had done with homophobia. The title track is also the second great appearance of Bowie's music on the big screen: when the song plays over the ending of Lars Von Trier's "Dogville", it feels like the meeting of two kindred minds. For the record, in third place in my personal ranking, I'd put the scene in which the Jewish Shoshanna prepares for the slaughter of the Nazis to the strains of "Cat People", in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds". Worth noting here is the American director's stroke of genius: he takes a song written for another film (Paul Schrader's dreadful 1981 "Cat People", itself a remake of a legendary Jacques Tourneur picture) and completely shifts its context and meaning: "Putting out fire with gasoline" this time foreshadows major trouble for Hitler and co...

Z as in Ziggy Stardust. The adorable, hyper-English alien with whom the Bowie persona will forever remain associated, captured in Don Pennebaker's documentary "Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture" (filmed in '73 but released only ten years later). The film documents the last performance of glam-era Bowie, the one in which he announces his retirement from the stage (in reality, only the end of the Ziggy persona) to a crowd of devastated teenagers and, it seems, to his own band, unaware they were about to be fired.

Dark and at times grainy as it may be, the film captures the innocence and tenderness of an unrepeatable moment, when rock was magic, sexual liberation, a celebration of youth and of everything beautiful precisely because it is fleeting.

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