Music Video
As "XXL", the video was directed by Marcus Nispel who also wrote the screenplay. This Requiem Publishing production was film in Los Angeles and New York for three days — one for Farmer, the two others for the extras — and cost about 80,000 euros. In addition to the version broadcast on television, there was another video of "Instant X" that was the first editing which contains only Farmer's unpublished shots. The producer Anouk Nora explained: "We shot in February with -10 degrees in New York. Mylène was completely frozen and took a bath in foam as if she was under the Tropics". Some video's photos were touched up by American rock group The Third Eye Foundation that used them on the cover of its album I Poo Poo on Your Juju. The small towel worn by Farmer was made by French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. Farmer explained that she liked the idea of the foam pouring as it reminded her parties in Ibiza.
In this video, Farmer, heavy make-up and lying on a cloud, plays in the foam. Under the cloud, the city of New York, the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers and all the buildings are in turn covered with foam, as sign of the apocalypse. The singer, who is outside of the disaster, seems to delight of this situation. However, the video ends by showing survivors who go off into the sunset.
This video, which symbolizes the end of the world, premiered on television on 17 December 1995 in the French show Déjà le retour; the but in a different version in which only the singer appears. It was not much appreciated by the Farmer's fans and Rigal considered the video "disappointing". The foam in which Farmer rolls has been viewed as a symbol of the orgasm, as it does in the French literature, and more frequently as a major clean up before a new start. About the video, Farmer said: "I wanted to retrace one day we can have, where everything goes wrong. It is a concentration of events as soon as we get up... and everything goes wrong again! And we expect that time and it often happens that in a day or, or in a month, at a time when all things come to concentrate a bit like a puzzle, and this is when all this time redounds upwards rather than downwards".
Read more about this topic: L'Instant X
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)