Top 10 Michel Gondry Movies That Are Not “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind”

According to the renowned pschotherapist Carl Jung, man is universally divided between his personal and collective unconscious. According to a Frenchman with a videocamera and an insomniac imagination named Michel Gondry, he’s also permanently divided between man and boy.

Best known as director of such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and, um, that White Stripes video comprised of animated Legos, Gondry has crafted a unique philosophy around the also-Jungean idea of the inner child, whose surfacing can be tied to the indelible images of Lego-brick Jack White, Thom Yorke’s Operation-game-board ladyfriend, and, of course, an unsettlingly-serious Jim Carrey’s brief transformation back into his natural state of impish dissident as “Baby Joel” in Gondry’s iconic Academy Award winning drama.

One explanation for Gondry’s frequent lapse into childhood is his permanently tangled French and American roots – where the surrealists looked to the unconscious for their automatic writings, Gondry looks no further than casual conversations in which his misinterpretation of language translates to bizarrely filmable ideas explored in surprising depth (for a very un-workshopped 89 minutes of such conversations, take note of list item #7).

Exploiting this jejune incertitude as intentional artistry, it’s unclear as to whether Michel’s surrealist storytelling experiments are a result of his making excuses for being lost in translation, or if his mistranslations of being lost are an excuse for his surrealism.

Though it’s certainly believable that Sofia Coppola wrote her own Academy Award winning drama as a dissertation on its thought-provoking titular idiom, Michel’s name is always first to come up when discussing this infantile-deconstruction-of-language-as-source-of-infinite-originality method of filmmaking.

So what has the duality-of-Michel been up to for the past twelve years? There was some buzz a few years back about the Dune-like studio fiasco known as The Green “Not-My-Movie” Hornet alongside Seth Rogen (co-screenwriter and film’s continue…

From:: Taste Of Cinema