Directing
A mythic narrative inspired by the common threads of Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography and biographical trajectory.
Baby Birds provides an intimate look at Yeh's body and the physiological production of sound. Five views of the artist's throat appear on screen, the camera looking down each one in illuminated close-up. The mouths open and close, exposing quivering tongues and uvula, and produce a layered soundtrack of scratchy, wheezing, squeaking laments. Visceral and visually captivating, Baby Birds addresses the dilemma that auditory experiences are more abstract than visual ones, and thus more difficult to "articulate" and to share.
2002 is a "concert film" that documents approximately forty bands and artists Yeh videotaped during the year 2002, including Deerhoof, Sightings, Sudden Infant, Cock ESP, Double Leopards, Caroliner Rainbow, Comets on Fire, Animal Collective, and others.
of The One Minutes Series Healing Tool curated by Shana Moulton in 2015. ⠀ "Take some video and sound. And make a healing tool out of it!"
Referencing gaming culture in form and content as both an aesthetic device and point of nostalgia, Yeh's video for the band Xiu Xiu's "This Too Shall Pass (For Freddy)" portrays young twentysomething life in the style of overhead "dungeon crawler" video games. The digital sprites flutter throughout each other's daily lives and dramas in a manner that evokes a cross between The Legend of Zelda and MTV's The Real World. At night the characters escape into digital dreams that eventually collide, via partying, into a surrealistic, psychedelic episode blurring the line between reality and oblivion.
C. Spencer Yeh's music video for Deerhoof interprets the simple lyrics of the band's song to place its protagonists on a colorful, psychedelic odyssey through videogame-inspired visuals. Animated with sprites that evoke 8-bit graphics, Buck and Judy encounter sundry items like bananas and strawberries, which are often associated with bonus powers in games such as Pac Man. Epic battles on ground and in airship conclude with the heroes in dueling monster outfits. The effect is unbridled pop and digital nostalgia.
A video by C. Spencer Yeh
Fictitious subtitles from imagined non-English language films are synchronized to landscape videos shot by the artist on consumer equipment, often using existing structures, such as bus windows, as makeshift dollies or tripods.
Jason Lescalleet had asked me to work on a video for his SONGS ABOUT NOTHING record, to be a part of a larger series of videos to accompany each track on the album. I had originally submitted a version which wasn't quite what he was envisioning (his request was 'I know that you'll know what to do with the hints of pop and blue-eyed soul in this track'), so I dug into a collection of VHS stock footage samples I had sitting around. That vibe, along with some video I had gathered, was topped off with a discrete sample of a popular and known experimental filmwork as suggested by my then-studiomate, artist Justin Lieberman. Suddenly a new story was written that we were both happy with.
A beautiful actress struggles to connect with her disfigured co-star on the set of a European auteur's English-language debut.
