Philippe Gautier produces video clips, advertising commercials, and occasionally, television programmes. Brought up in the context of commercial music, he has retained an interest in the music world, where he plays a role through images. His father, Jacques Gautier, known professionally as Philippe Gautier, was a clarinettist, singer, and conductor. His mother, Monique Gautier, was also a singer and television presenter.
Philippe Gautier oriented his foreign language studies towards cinema through his English master's dissertation entitled: “Origins and description of underground films” (1979). This was followed by a Diploma of Advanced Studies in Cinematography at the Université de Paris I, where Jean Rouch and Eric Rohmer, in particular, were among the teaching staff.
In 1977, Philippe Gautier was a film assistant, before he embarked on the direction and production of a short film, La Poudre aux Yeux [Smoke and Mirrors] (1983). While carrying out this work, he had to turn his hand to many different roles, which for someone whose cinematographic background was mainly theoretical, proved to be an experience that would lay the foundations for his future work.
In 1985, his fourth video clip Marcia Baila, which he wrote and produced for the music group Les Rita Mitsouko, was an immediate success and made him an obvious choice as clip producer for music companies, as well as for advertising agencies who commissioned him to create many of their advertising commercials (Peppies, Bolino, Vittel, Télécom, etc).
“To create a clip is to turn the idea we have of a song into one fixed version, because each person who listens to a song makes up their own story and has their own images. So you have to find a version [...] that will determine the song and yet at the same time can be played several times without everything being obvious because it is being multicast.”1 Philippe Gautier creates music videos whose images don't reveal everything the first time you see them. Overcutting, changes in the shooting angle and framing, the varying duration of shots, the wealth of visual information in different registers (advertising pages, original dance steps and different historical periods, detailed sets or simple sets that are distorted by variously angled shots and so on) are all factors that contribute to the visual complexity.
The techniques used are determined by the subject and the work conditions imposed by the budget, the production company, and by one aspect that is specific to the music clip: “A clip is an ephemeral product: it has to be made quickly. You have to come up with the idea, film it and deliver it, and the lifespan of the song will determine how long it will last. Generally music companies give the go-ahead at the last minute, so we have to create the product at top speed.”2
Philippe Gautier mostly films in 16 mm or in Super 16; 35 mm is generally used for films with many special effects (split screens, in-lays, etc.) produced with Flame [a kind of “synthesizer”, or post-production video tool]. Etienne Daho's music video Au Commencement, with its combination of video special effects and synthesised images, was produced with computer graphics designer Eve Ramboz. “The idea was that if God created the world today, he would be a fan of modern art, and so the Earth would be like a huge Land Art exhibition. We recreated everything. We painted the rocks in Klein blue; we wrapped up cliffs – following the approach of some of the most well-known contemporary artists. We painted lines onto mountains, we put fish into an aquarium, [...] everything was drawn and then recomposed [...]. When we filmed, we put out markers, for example four pieces of wood for the position of the aquarium, so that we would have the right axes when we moved the camera. Then we recreated each wall with reflections and inserted the fish and the people.”3
Philippe Gautier does not only borrow from processes and languages created originally in cinema, photography, fine arts, music, and dance, but he also commissions artists' work that he then places in his sets. For Marcia Baila, seven artists from the Figuration Libre movement were introduced. Their paintings are visible in the music clip – either as a full screen or in the background.
Philippe Gautier occasionally produces series and television programmes related to advertising, music clips, and art. For the series C'est comme ça (1986), he worked with critic Brigitte Cornand to produce portraits of fifteen contemporary artists that lasted three minutes each. For Christian Boltanski, he shot a short film on the shadows that the artist projected through mobiles made with objects found in the courtyard of his apartment building (cigarette butts, bottle tops, etc.). Bertrand Lavier's installation of a fridge onto a safe was filmed in a supermarket's refrigerated aisle.
Philippe Gautier directed filmed interviews (Moravia, etc.) and a series of music videos (Vanessa Paradis, etc.) for “L'égoïste” (1990), a promotional television programme produced by Chanel for the launch of their perfume of the same name.
Marcia Baila was presented in Video Music, a retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art on clips from 1960 to 1985. And so the video clip came to be included in collections of national museums of modern art in the 1980s, even though the debate on this subject replaced the notion of “video art” with “video creation”.

Thérèse Beyler

1 Interview with Philippe Gautier, conducted by Thérèse Beyler, unpublished, July 2000.
2 Id.
3 Id.