‘Dive’ by Saint Etienne – Music video directed, produced and edited by Professor Esther Johnson
The new Saint Etienne single is called Dive and is released today. Esther Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Arts and Sheffield Hallam University, was the director, producer and editor, and shot the video last month in Scarborough. Watch the video here.
“Dive is such a summery song, and when I first heard it I was reminded of days at the seaside, with fish & chips and milkshakes. I chose to shoot the video in Scarborough, because many of the locations and features I loved there as a child are still intact: the ice-cream parlours, the funicular railway, the (now derelict) Futurist theatre, the signs. These features also link with another of my loves as a filmmaker: French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s. The song’s immediacy and in-the-moment-ness suggested that the video’s story should take place in a single day. The boy visits the girl from across the sea; they spend the day together; they part. The various recurring motifs were inspired partly by my own memories, partly by the New Wave, and partly by the history and iconography of Saint Etienne.”
Esther Johnson
See the Facebook post announcing the release here, and further information about Esther’s video here.
Esther previously worked with members of Saint Etienne on Abstractions of Holderness, an audio-visual work inspired by Basil Kirchin’s 1970s residency in East Yorkshire. Kirchin, an English drummer and composer, is known as a pioneer of musique concrète and has been described by Brian Eno as, “a founding father of ambient”.
Esther Johnson works at the intersection of artist moving image and documentary. Her poetic portraits focus on marginal worlds, revealing resonant stories that may otherwise remain hidden or ignored. Work has been exhibited internationally in 40 countries, and has also featured on television and radio. In 2012 Johnson won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Performing and Visual Arts for young scholars. She is a Professor of Film & Media Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Find out more about Esther’s work here.