TO KILL A DEAD MAN
A black & white
short film Alexander Hemming shot for
Portishead in 1994. An espionage takeoff, the
10-minute short starred the band members and
featured the song "Theme From To Kill A
Dead Man". Scenes from the film
eventually became the video for "Sour Times".
A shifty-looking loner
in a trench coat (Barrow) is hired to
assassinate a dignitary while the dignitary's
wife (Gibbons) looks on. A shot is fired, the
dignitary goes down, and the wife becomes
hysterical. Carted off to an asylum, she is
sedated and forced to watch replays of the
assassination. After her discharge, she
engages in a symbolic game of chess. She then
hires the same assassin to kill the
dignitary, since the dignitary faked his
death hoping to drive his wife insane. For
the film's classic denouement, the wife's car
pulls up to the dignitary's Mercedes. He
glances over at her and then puts his hand
over his face, realizing that the man he just
let into his car is going to kill him. She
closes her window and drives away, avenged.
[from Alternative Press]
Geoff Barrow:
"When I look at To Kill a Dead Man, I
can't stand it. I think it was a dreadful
piece of film. Basically, it was done so that
we could write some film music. Not to put
down anyone involved with the film, but we
should have done it with pure images, rather
than having us in it. It was misunderstood,
what we wanted to get out of it. It created
an image, and the whole idea was for it not
to."
Still, Geoff's happy
Portishead made the film, since it was, after
all, a practical decision. "We made a
tenminute film, wrote a soundtrack to it, got
all the artwork for the album and used it as
a big promotional video all for the cost of
making a mediumpriced video... And all
without having to wear any trendy
clothes."
Film available
on the 'PNYC'
DVD.
Soundtrack
available on 'Sour Times'
and 'Glory
Times'.
