Chris Cunningham & Aphex Twin (1080p HD) - Rubber Johnny

2005

Chris Cunningham & Aphex Twin (1080p HD) - Rubber Johnny (2005) Director: Chris Cunningham Era: Post-Millennium Electronic Avant-Garde (2005) - Peak era of IDM/glitch aesthetics merging with DIY experimental filmmaking; body horror and rave culture colliding in short-form digital video art. Rubber Johnny is an essential preservation artefact representing the apex of the Warp Records / IDM audiovisual tradition and one of the most culturally significant experimental music videos ever produced. As a DIY personal project shot over three and a half years, it documents an extreme model of auteur filmmaking that exists outside commercial production systems. Its quantitative fingerprint, near-black brightness, minimal contrast, strobe-pace editing, is wholly inseparable from its meaning, making it a critical case study for any research into the aesthetics of dread, body horror, and electronic music's visual grammar. Tier 1 curatorial priority. Context: Released in 2005 at the apex of Warp Records' cultural influence, Rubber Johnny sits at the intersection of IDM electronic music, British body horror cinema traditions (Cronenberg-influenced), and the rave generation's relationship with altered states and physical transformation. Shot between 2001–2004 on personal weekends, the film embodies a post-9/11, post-rave cultural anxiety, isolation, bodily distortion, and a figure confined to a dark basement resonated with an audience that had grown up on video nasties and drug-culture underground clubs. Cunningham's long-running creative partnership with Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) produced some of the most radical audiovisual art of the era, and Rubber Johnny is the most personal and uncompromising result of that collaboration. The film's horror-genre crossover influence has since been noted in relation to subsequent horror productions drawn to its hydrocephalic visual language. Director notes: Rubber Johnny was written, directed, produced, and performed in by Cunningham, who played the title character using prosthetics. The concept originated from Cunningham imagining a raver morphing as he danced, and the project was originally conceived as a 30-second TV commercial for Aphex Twin's album 'drukqs' using the track 'afx237 v7'. Cunningham expanded it into a six-minute short film over three and a half years of weekend shoots, between 2001 and 2004, on DV night-vision cameras in a single London basement location. The film was made with minimal budget and crew as a personal DIY project, with effects achieved through practical, low-tech methods including prosthetics and in-kitchen physical construction rather than CGI. The soundtrack is 'afx237 v7 (w19rhbasement remix)', remixed by Cunningham himself; credits music is 'gwarek2', also from 'drukqs'. The film was released on DVD by Warp Films on 20 June 2005 (standard) and 12 July 2005 (deluxe edition with a 42-page hardcover book of photographs and drawings). A public preview screening was held in London's West End on 22 March 2005.