This month, Le Cinéma Club presents the platform’s fifth annual Summer Music Festival, featuring films that celebrate iconic bands and trailblazing musicians.

In 1999, director Mike Mills hopped on tour with AIR, a then-new French electronic act made up of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Mills captures the band hot off the success of their debut album Moon Safari as they conduct live interviews on TV, talk to fans, and discuss their musical influences. In recent months, AIR has reworked Moon Safari in collaboration with electronic producer Vegyn and is now on tour across the world.

A Cooper Union graduate who’d studied under German conceptual artist Hans Haacke and was immersed in New York’s punk and skateboarding scene, Mills mixed his careful graphic design skills with a more relaxed, improvisational approach to filmmaking in AIR: Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing. With its street-style fan interviews and jaunty quick cuts, the film evokes D. A. Pennebaker’s Depeche Mode 101 and early-career Jean-Luc Godard. Mills’ breezy portrait of the band reflects their musical sensibilities, capturing that calculated, feathery feel that made them popular at such an early stage in their career.

“I wish I was a musician. Music is so inspiring for me. I write to music, I wish my films were like music. Music’s my thing.” MIKE MILLS

 

AIR was one of the first bands Mills collaborated with as a graphic designer and music video director, filming now-legendary videos for tracks like “Sexy Boy” and “All I Need.” Dunckel has said that working with Mills was always easy: “it was like we were forming one person.” Mills, who claims there was a period of two years in which he’d tell every band and record company he’d meet that he would film their videos for free, remembers this early period in his career with fondness. “Music videos are very personal to me — almost beyond words,” Mills told Index Magazine. After working with AIR, he went on to film music videos for artists like Pulp, Moby, and Yoko Ono.

Mike Mills was born in Berkeley, CA, in 1966. In the ‘90s and 00’s, he worked on album covers for bands such as Sonic Youth and Cibo Matto, in addition to brands like X-Girl and Marc Jacobs. He also co-founded The Directors Bureau, a catch-all production company, with Roman Coppola around the same time. In 2005, he directed his feature debut, the suburban dramedy Thumbsucker starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Tilda Swinton, and Vincent D’Onofrio. More recently, he’s directed autobiographical films like Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016), as well as the heartfelt uncle-nephew, cross-country drama C’mon C’mon (2021).

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Mike Mills.