In 1991, a young African-American director who had just broken into Cannes and the Oscars as a miura in Estafeta, appeared in a Levis advertisement: he was Spike Lee running the Sanfermines. The filmmaker’s vision in this unexpected and “our” context caused a kind of cognitive short circuit in Spain. Something like watching the steps of Holy Week burn like a failure in ‘Mission Impossible 2’.
Something similar happens when Travis Scott appears in the ‘Sirens’ video. Seeing a Texan rapper dressed as a human tower from Vilafranca or painting graffiti around Ciutat Meridiana while a shirtless dad waters the plants on his terrace is a visual impact that must be assimilated little by little.
Recovered from print, ‘Sirens’, a fragment directed by Canada taken from the musical feature film ‘Circus Maximus’, works quite well as an exotic illustration of a song that belongs to an album with a title as significant as ‘Utopia’. The demonstration of camaraderie and fraternity that the raising of a human tower represents fits very well with the semantic resonance of the word “utopia” that the rapper writes in a scene in the clip.
The staging of the video emphasizes this concept. Many shots of people running, in groups, supporting each other, almost like ants working together to achieve a goal, a “utopia”: getting out of the hole, escaping the darkness in which they find themselves.
