One of the great things about directing a music video is that, unless a song presents an extremely clear, point-by-point narrative, a director has all sorts of options in interpreting it visually. Apparently, when director Steven Soderbergh heard “Histoire seule,” from California duo DTCV’s latest album, Confusion Moderne, he thought of two things: split screen and the Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. DTCV singer Lola G., who performs the song entirely in French, maintains that the song itself was inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s ambitious ’80s/’90s video project Histoire(s) du cinéma and that the lyrics are about “how women tend to get erased from history.”
Soderbergh does not seem to have let the song’s origins constrict him creatively, though. The video, posted to Pitchfork’s YouTube channel, is a three-and-a-half-minute exercise in the power of split-screen to compare and contrast wildly different images. Half of the screen is occupied by badly decayed footage of what seems to be an educational film about the early life and formative years of Lincoln, and the other is taken up with colorful yet weirdly sterile and depopulated images of modern life: traffic, airports, wine bottles, etc. Pitchfork calls it “a slyly subversive but more iconographic and idiosyncratic take on history’s flux.” And who’s to say it isn’t?