Hi! The scenes of the under pressure video, anyone knows of what films or sources they are? I know the scenes from Nosferatu.
Also I have another version of UP video, with differents scenes.
Sorry for my bad english.
The Under Pressure video that was made in the 80's was, I believe, taken from BBC stock news footage plus other odds & ends. Queen & Bowie were unavailable for Top of the Pops or some other BBC show so they made up the film themselves and Queen/Bowie liked it enough to allow it's use permanently with the song. At least that's what I heard. Maybe someone else knows better?
"Nosferatu" is definitely right, another one or two scenes in the video are from the 1931 horror film "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Paramount Pictures (the one where a sort of beast man looks into the camera).
<b><font color="red">Peter Cetera</b> wrote: "Nosferatu" is definitely right, another one or two scenes in the video are from the 1931 horror film "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Paramount Pictures (the one where a sort of beast man looks into the camera).
That's incorrect. That footage came from an earlier silent version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" starring John Barrymore, which you can see here: link
I assume its in the public domain.
The 1931 version was a talkie and starred Fredrick March, which you can see here: link
I believe Mr. March won an Academy Award for his performance in that film, which is still under copyright protection.
But a quick look at the stills from both movies evidences which was used in the "Under Pressure" video.
Drowse1 wrote: The Under Pressure video that was made in the 80's was, I believe, taken from BBC stock news footage plus other odds & ends. Queen & Bowie were unavailable for Top of the Pops or some other BBC show so they made up the film themselves and Queen/Bowie liked it enough to allow it's use permanently with the song. At least that's what I heard. Maybe someone else knows better?
I never heard it being done for Top Of The Pops, but I do remember reading somewhere that the video was done as it was because they couldn't get Bowie and Queen together in one place to shoot a video together.
Brian said it was banned in a lot of places because of the heavy use of newsreel footage (presumably, mainly refering to the riot footage they used). I remember MTV playing it a lot back in 82-83, but if what Brian says is true, they must have been one of the few to show it.
BTW, I remember back in the early 90's, seeing a really weird version of the video on VH-1, where they replaced all the silent movie footage with video footage with lots of weird video effects on them. You couldn't actually really see what it was that you were seeing because of the effects.
Oh my god, I hit a gold mine! Thanks cmsdrums! Your comment pointed me to Philip Jenkinson, who put together the archive footage montages for songs without videos at the Old Grey Whistle Test (He made an ersatz video for Queen's Keep Yourself Alive too).
While he didn't make the video for Under Pressure, the director David Mallet seems to have used his collection named Filmfinders for the video. I'm just digging into it. It looks like The Source for at least all the silent movie clips in Under Pressure.
Here are the subtitles for the OGWT special: link
This is when they talk about Philip Jenkinson's videos:
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Now, while live music was the backbone of Whistle Test, it wasn't always possible to get the artists we wanted actually into the studio. So how did we showcase tracks we liked in those pre-video days? Well, Tom Robinson explains …
By the mid-1960s, the music industry began producing short films to promote the upcoming record releases. Record companies could then send these to TV channels whenever their artists couldn't or wouldn't turn up in person. At the time, this still cost a considerable amount of money, so even as the 70s rolled into town, it was quite a rare occurrence and usually done only for singles. This created a problem for The Old Grey Whistle test, which had to come up with a way of illustrating music from important album releases if the band themselves weren't available. Step forward Philip Jenkinson.
I think that cinema is the only art form that actually had its beginnings in living memory ... Creator of The Old Grey Whistle test Mike Appleton had attended a lecture on vintage cinema, presented by Jenkinson. Mike was impressed and immediately offered him a job at the BBC. Jenkinson had amassed an enormous private collection of films, so Mike sent him some of the tracks they needed to cover and Jenkinson would trawl through his library to find a suitable match. Led Zeppelin, one of the major album bands of the late 60s and early 70s, by then way too big to show up and promote it in the studio themselves, so Philip Jenkinson managed to find in his archive some dancers who were just in the right movement with the shoulders rolling and the foot action, the tempo was just right. It is an extraordinary match.
You can see the real genius of what Jenkinson did when you take a track like High Roller which is fairly average rock and roll and he brings it to life in a way that makes you really look at the track in a completely different way. This footage is so silly, so funny and so entrancing, you just are drawn into it.
# Got to have your love... #.
One of the best-known combinations was the footage of skiers and Tubular Bells.
MTV launched in 1981 and music videos became essential to the success of any artist. They were a promotional tool for the band and so, even when there was a narrative, they still tended to feature the performance.
But as Philip Jenkinson had proved, if the band weren't available, some well chosen archive provided a useful alternative.
# This is our last dance
# This is our last dance
# This is ourselves under pressure
#
He was amazing. He was a kind of genius, I think, Philip Jenkinson, at finding exactly the right films are exactly the right piece of music and cutting it to the beats match the film. These animations in the films were very, very important right at the beginning of the history of the show.
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javielete, scenes from 'The Battleship Potemkin' are the one where the woman with black hair looks directly to the camera and then shouts, and the one where people run down the stairs
@Mercury Roadrunner: I don't think there's a black and white scene with stairs in Under Pressure. Have you visited my page? I have screenshots of all the clips.