“We Were Once A Fairytale” finds a lightly fictionalized version of West drunk as hell and acting a fool up in the club. West’s ability to simultaneously self-aggrandize and self-efface has made him the polarizing figure the public loves to hate, and his films place that contradiction front and center. The three shorts’ main point of connection is West himself, as each burrows a little deeper into his lavish, fuming id. Each film is denser, darker, and more psychotically ambitious than the last-viewers can practically sense West’s boredom with the constraints of film as he evolves beyond character, dialogue, and the limits of a normal frame.
KANYE 808S AND HEARTBREAK MOVIE MOVIE
His third project was no pedestrian movie “Cruel Summer” was a 30-minute multi-screen cinematic experience that blew minds and eardrums at Cannes 2012.
After he and Spike Jonze collaborated for the “Flashing Lights” video, they co-directed a 14-minute short called “We Were Once A Fairytale” in 2009, as an expanded version of the video for the 808s & Heartbreak single “See You In My Nightmares.” A year later, West debuted “Runaway,” a 35-minute art film to accompany the release of his fifth studio record, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. West has been the guiding creative force behind three short films. All three West-directed short films represent a characteristically unapologetic, raw extension of their creator’s psyche. In other words, Ye’s doing Ye, and that extends to his experiments with film. Or eat up seven screens to create a once-in-a-lifetime event at Cannes. Or create an art picture so ravishingly opulent that Federico Fellini might call it a little much. When Kanye West decides to release an album, he does things like co-direct short films with exciting auteurs. Mere mortals release albums and shoot a few clips to accompany the singles. The sheer bigness of his ideas is too titanic to be constrained to a form as pedestrian as the music video.
His ambition has had a cinematic bent from day one. One surprisingly under-acknowledged aspect of West’s output is his small yet fascinating filmography. But there’s no denying that when a dude steps up during a telethon for hurricane relief and calls out the sitting president on charges of hardcore racism, he’s probably got more on his mind than making hits and playing nice. This isn’t some masturbatory, LaBeoufian exercise in performance art. Kanye is the text, and all the other stuff-the music, fashion line, interviews, headline-commanding public appearances, constant persona swaps-are just facets. Like David Bowie, Kanye West has made the act of being himself into his magnum opus.
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