Turning Brown and Torn in Two

Chris Knox's grungy collage-style clip suits this mournful Tall Dwarfs song perfectly. The video offers varied images of what “turning brown” might mean — from a deep tan to race-swapping. The shot of Knox's daughter Leisha as a toddler, with the scratched in message "there is always hope" gives the clip a surprisingly poignant ending. In the second part of his ScreenTalk interview for NZ On Screen, Knox recalled that a technical problem led to one of the clip's most distinctive features: he scratched directly onto the film, in the style of his hero Len Lye.

My concept for that one was just to get a whole lot of single images, and have a couple of frames of each image so there would just be a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of images . . . [I decided to] go back to Len Lye, and take a feather out of his cloak, and draw on it and scratch on it — on the frames that are a bit mucked up. So I did that, and that made the clip so much better.  

– Chris Knox on this music video, in part two of his ScreenTalk interview

Key Cast & Crew

Chris Knox

Director