Vincent Moon (real name Mathieu Saura, born 25 August 1979) is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and sound artist from Paris. He was the main director of the Blogotheque's Take Away Shows, a web-based project recording field work music videos of indie rock related musicians as well as some notable mainstream artists like Tom Jones, R.E.M., or Arcade Fire.
Vincent Moon is known for traveling around the globe with a camera in his backpack, documenting local folklores, sacred music and religious rituals, for his label Collection Petites Planètes. He works alone or with people he finds on the road, and most of the time without money involved in the projects. He shares much of his work, films and music recordings, for free on internet, under Creative Commons license. In 2009 his documentary on artist Kazuki Tomokawa, La Faute Des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, and his film Esperando el Tsunami was nominated for the same award in 2011.
Music career
Early Period (2000–2005) Growing up in Paris, Vincent Moon studied photography for 3 years at the Atelier Reflexe in Montreuil, where he met the photographers Michael Ackerman and Antoine d’Agata, who informed Vincent Moon's experiments of style//approach and visual experiments. Working as a photographer at the time, he used to put his photos in motion, using simple slideshow techniques and music to tell stories. In 2003, he started the photography blog Les Nuits de Fiume, documenting Parisian nightlife.
As a result of his encounter with the work of experimental filmmakers Peter Tscherkassky and Stephen Dwoskin, Vincent Moon started to move toward films in 2005. He made short films, mixing intimate storytelling experiment with various techniques, from super 8 to cellphone cameras. He was quick to grasp the various possibilities the internet offered for releasing and sharing his work online and freely. Getting closer and closer to the music world, he encountered the band The National in one of their shows in Paris. Their friendship gave birth to various projects, his photos being used on the cover of The National's third album, 'Alligator', and he made for them 2 music videos. At this time, he also initiated other projects related to music, directing lo-fi videos for Clogs, Sylvain Chauveau and Barzin.
The Take Away Shows (2006–2009)
In 2006, inspired by the film Step Across the Border on the English guitarist Fred Frith and pushed by its desire to record music in a more creative way, Vincent Moon created with Christophe 'Chryde' Abric the 'Concert à Emporter / Take Away Shows' project, La Blogotheque's popular video podcast. The Take Away Shows is a series of improvised outdoor video sessions with musicians, set in unexpected locations and broadcast freely on the web. In four years, they managed to shoot over two hundred videos with bands like REM, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Tom Jones, Beirut, Grizzly Bear, and Sigur Ros and many more, always in the field of rock and pop music, mostly focused on north-American music. Vincent Moon perfected his style: an immediately recognizable intimacy, always with fragile and dancing long shots, often filmed in one take without rehearsal.
The Take Away Shows quickly gathered a large online following and The New York Times presented its impact as 'Vincent Moon reinvented the music video'. An entire new generation of young filmmakers around the world recognized the influence of the whole concept, this natural organic approach to music. A study from 2010 showed that more than 100 online film projects were directly inspired by La Blogothèque's Take Away Shows.
The large amount of clips is the result of a very fast filming process with mostly one take recordings in a way comparable to the Dogme 95 concept. Comparable with the field recordings of Alan Lomax or the Peel Sessions of John Peel, Moon has set up a large collection of unique single take recordings enhanced with artistic filmed video footage. The fast filming process he uses is a form of guerrilla film making. The sessions are usually two or three tracks filmed improvised in an unusual environment and as such they often had a rough and ready, demo-like feel, somewhere between a live performance and a finished music video. These live, unusually staged performances differ from the artifice of traditional music videos in favor of single-take, organic and primarily acoustic sessions.
Other musical collaborations (2007–2010)