Auteur Theory

Chris Cunningham is a renowned music video, film director and video artist. He had come to prominence through various landmarks within his intricate career. He is independently recognised for being one of the most unique and unusual characters when it comes to his work. This is what has made him standout from other directors as nobody produces such masterpieces effortlessly as Cunningham.
One of his landmark videos produced for leftfield was called Afrika shox. This video had been recognised for its semantic magnitude presented through the narrative and concept of the video. Any analyst will notice that within many of Cunningham’s works, the video is not prescribed to revolve around the music; in fact the video has its own autonomous status.


Afrika shox follows a tramp around a city centre during peak hours, who appears to be horribly anguished; he is barely physically competent as he hops/staggers around throughout the video looking almost like the un-dead. As the character established in the video struggles around a busy city (supposedly New York) full of wealthy, healthy people and literally begs for help and is completely disregarded. This had been shown by Cunningham through the literal, physical breaking down of the character which had been an indication to the consistent theme of decay and breakage established in the video. The character is symbolic of a greater principle, and infliction upon society. The idea that the ‘rich get richer’ and poor are left to rot is commonly regarded to be a misconception. However this music video picks up on this concept and exploits it in the most explicit way possible, not only does Cunningham produce a visual display of the sadistic side to humanity it draws upon the deterioration of society.


For this empathy Chris Cunningham creates within his specified audience he is renowned for being one of the best video directors. Critics have acclaimed Cunningham to work fearlessly as he combines his unique quality as a director with a controversy that is related to by a vast majority. It was through this his name spread and more and more famous musical artists such as Madonna had signed Cunningham up to direct their videos. The video done for Madonna “frozen” then went on to win music awards with MTV in many categories including best video.











Chris Cunningham’s consistent choices of style, in a range of his videos have a common ominous and contemporary theme linking his work. He achieves this by deviating from most other video directors. The dark gloomy visual style that is established has been achieved by weird or supernatural occurrences within the videos, for example in apex twins video window licker where the prostitutes working the block mutate into monster like creatures.


This had also been created in another aphex twin videos directed by Cunningham called come to daddy. This video initiated with an elderly woman walking her dog, who then gets tormented by this voice making her abandon her dog and attempt an escape whilst these little school girls in uniform, who all have the same mutated face shown in window licker, rampage the estate. On many occasions Cunningham has been approached with the question of what was cunning hams drive for doing this?


When approached with this question Cunningham replied, "I remembered being chased through the woods by a nine-year- old child when i was about 16. I was on a pushbike and he had a hammer. It was humiliating and i was shitting it. " he went on to describe the humiliation of the situation as girls were also present and whitening the incident. Within production of the video Cunningham had also revealed that in the group of 'children' running through the estate only two were actually children the rest where fully developed midgets adults. This had not been by lack of children to feature within the video. This had been done intentionally so that it could be shown as many of the 'little girls' had facial and body hair, this greatly supplemented the enigmatic style in Cunninghams work.




Some of the work of Chris Cunningham