Cindy Palmano | Through the Shattered Lens

My calendar says it’s the first day of Winter today, so I figured I would spotlight this Tori Amos song. I have only talked about one other music video of hers so far. That being Silent All These Years. Basically everything I said about that music video applies to this one too. The only difference is that this time director Cindy Palmano populated the music video with coming-of-age imagery. It is even as misleading in that it also primarily sells Amos as a the girl with a piano, which is how they marketed her at the beginning. It looks like it took till Cornflake Girl and/or God, depending on whether you look at mvdbase or IMVDb, before they hit on the kind of music videos that get across what you are in for with Tori Amos.

To my knowledge, they continued doing work together photo-wise into the mid-to-late-90s even though they stopped doing videos after 1994, according to mvdbase. It makes sense since while Palmano’s videos are certainly beautiful to look at, they really showcase her talents as a photographer rather than capturing Tori using the medium of a music video. To be fair, her first album is different from her subsequent stuff, so it is kind of like complaining that a writer isn’t describing Francois Truffaut correctly when the only movie of his they have seen is The 400 Blows (1959).

For whatever reason, IMVDb has quite different information about her early videos. IMVDb says 1991 for Silent All These Years while mvdbase says 1993. I am trusting IMVDb since Silent All These Years was released as a single in 1991. It makes more sense to me.

Enjoy!

Funny enough–I am pretty much at a loss for words to talk about this music video even though I’ve been a big fan of Tori Amos for more than decade and a half at least. You have the child that emerges from behind the piano to connect her childhood to her adulthood, which represents the years of silence. Then we see the child run past her adult-self that is in a box–whether by choice or not. It doesn’t matter. There are other similar framings of Tori that emphasize height and face. You also have the inclusion of the old-lady outfit and breast implants. They are all pressures and conformity that she is walking away from with this song, the album, and literally by getting out of the box in the music video. It’s clever to have her stop lip-syncing at the part of the song where you would do that if you were going to do it anywhere. Then it ends with an uncomfortably long shot of Tori’s face where she looks like she is going to tear-up. There are some other things going on such as the innocent child popping in and chasing her during the video at the right times lyric-wise. You could do more analysis of this music video if you wanted to.

Considering this was Tori’s debut solo album, you would think this would be the first song on that album, but it isn’t. It’s the third one after Crucify and Girl. It all builds to the last song on the album about when she was raped, which is sung a capppella. The music videos seem to have started with this song, then were followed by Winter before getting to Crucify.

It’s a powerful music video, but it’s also a little misleading. I can’t recall the program where I saw it. It was probably a Behind The Music type thing. Regardless, I remember Tori saying that they started off trying to sell her like she was the new Carole King. The girl and the piano thing, which is exactly how she is shown in this music video at the beginning.

It’s funny to think of that in retrospect seeing as I remember being introduced to Tori Amos via the video for Spark. You know, the one where she is bound, blindfolded, and left with rats in the woods. I remember when I fell in love with her music. It was with her album of covers called Strange Little Girls. That’s the one where she took Eminem’s ’97 Bonnie and Clyde and made it particularly disturbing.

All in all, the music video is well-made, and a decent introduction to Tori Amos. You have to start somewhere, and the song is there even if I don’t think the video quite captures the musician you are getting. Plus, take a look at Madonna’s video for her early song Burning Up. You’d swear they thought they were selling a solo female Duran Duran.

Cindy Palmano directed five music videos for Tori Amos. From what I can tell, she hasn’t done anything else in the area of film since that time. Wikipedia says she was a photographer at the time. She’s obviously still around since you can find stuff about her with a simple Google search.

George Tiffin worked as the cinematographer on the music video. He directed a couple of music videos for Morissey. He seems to have done some other work as well in film. He is related to the Fiennes family.