Notes On Pictures: Vincent Moon

Vincent Moon isn’t particularly comfortable with being called a filmmaker. “It’s sort of pretend,” he says, “like a joke. I’m not a filmmaker. I just use film to let me travel around the world.”

And yet Moon – aka Mathieu Saura – is renowned for his unique music videos that create intimate, improvised portraits of musicians in action. These ‘Take Away Shows’ are the answer to everything Moon found missing in traditional attempts to capture concerts on film. “Even great films like Gimme Shelter aren’t really music films. They’re films about music, just following the story. My goal wasn’t to look at what was happening on stage. It was to reach that same energy – to be one with the band. How could I represent the music in the way I was feeling the music?”

It was photography that taught Moon how to “frame the world”. He worries that despite the overwhelming saturation of images in popular culture, we’re not taught how to comprehend them in the same way we are words. This language of images, he says, is “a very complex thing to acquire. But I was lucky while I was in my 20s to spend enough time seeing and making images. I didn’t learn it at school; I don’t believe in that at all. I learned by myself over many years. Working on photography and then switching to moving images, little by little.”

The key to his videos? Refusing to see the musicians as more important than the film. (He fully admits this sounds both “ambitious and pretentious”.) Pretending to lecture a hypothetical band, he says: “I’m not making a film about you! We’re going to make something together!” As well as his Take Away Shows, this approach has resulted in longer cinematic pieces with bands like The National and Arcade Fire, as well as an epic series of collaborations with REM.

Moon’s been living on the road for the last three years, collecting material for upcoming projects. (This conversation actually took place while he was in Hong Kong and raving about the city’s light. “It’s one of my favourite places in the world,” he says. “It has an incredible energy to it.”) When asked if this nomadic lifestyle is a necessary sacrifice for his art, he just laughs.

“I would never sacrifice my life for art. I think that’s the completely wrong approach. If you feel like your art is more important than your life, you’re fucked. It’s an amazing life! I own almost nothing in terms of material things and I like it. I have a big backpack with a few clothes, a camera, a computer, sound equipment... and that’s it. It really opened my mind and my spirit. It’s such a cliché to say that, but it’s true.”

An Evening with Vincent Moon will be held at Roofop Cinema as part of the Sugar Mountain Festival on Wed 18 Jan at 9.30pm. Vincent will give a Q&A at ACMI on Sun 15 Jan, 2012. He will also be exhibiting at the Sugar Mountain Festival, The Forum, on Sat 14 Jan.