Monitor: Watch
Psychedelics Plus Politics = Beletic
Words: Sandy Hunter
A child of the '80s, music video director Brian Beletic's style clashes analog roots with Chomsky inspired misgivings. The eye behind videos for El-P, Cee-Lo, Black Eyed Peas and Dead Prez, as well as a heap of award-winning commercials, Beletic's influences are diverse. He lists off his library, military conquest, Dan Eldon and questionable fashion choices like lesbian rat tails, candy-striped slut socks, unnecessary camo and kamikaze French Canadian ski suits as some of the cultural forces fueling his creativity. And his parents (or at least their gear).
Beletic encountered his dad's VHS camera in 1984, the same time that he began mixing music on his mother's jam box (Miami Vice versus Huey Lewis, for example). "Soon I figured out how to put my stupid music mixes on top of video I had shot," Beletic says. "The results were retarded, and from there I have been making more retarded stuff that over the years has been inspired by how filmmaking works."
Beletic's flare for special ed executions is seen in videos for Atlanta soul man Cee-Lo. "Getting Grown" dwells on ghetto Teletubbies while "Closet Freak" draws on the old-school funk films and costumes of acts like Earth, Wind and Fire; it's part performance piece and part psychedelic spectacle, featuring the After Effects stylings of New York's PanOptic.
Much of Beletic's work is far more politicized. "Red Alert" for Basement Jaxx is a Cops parody of the NYPD busting musicians, from DJs to school bands. "Eye Dollar Tree" is a black-and-white short with a surveillance cam bent on "introducing paranoia to combat complacency."
In "Deep Space 9mm" for Company Flow's El-P (shot on a one-chip miniDV camera for just $10,000), the rapper spends a typical night passing through NYC; everyone he encounters, including a scout troop, holds a hand gun (with animated overlay) to his head as he rhymes. Phil Crowe of London's The Mill layered on texture and animation.
"It's an expression of how we impose self-oppression onto others by actively being a part of the dumbing-down of the masses," says Beletic of the video and song. "Caring about the world and calling it for what it is, is becoming an increasingly dangerous job."
