FKA Twigs - Cellophane
2019 · 3m · GB
Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang
Genres: experimental, fantasy
Tones: provocative, sensual, surreal
FKA Twigs ascends a pole toward a sphinx wearing her own face, descends through hell, and is reconstituted from clay — a visual allegory of vulnerability, heartbreak, and the male gaze.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The finest music video of 2019 — Huang builds a genuine cosmology around Twigs' body and grief that transcends the format entirely.
Andrew Thomas Huang turns a pole into a cosmological axis — Twigs ascending toward a sphinx wearing her own face is one of the most fully-realized music-video allegories of the last decade, somewhere between Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle and a Greek descent myth. It earns every frame.
Andrew Thomas Huang directing Twigs ascending a pole toward a sphinx wearing her own face and descending through hell — making the body both subject and landscape. This is one of the most singular music videos of the era; the formal ambition is total.