I returned to Resfest at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center tonight, this time for a video retrospective of the Swedish design collective, Traktor.
The firm first wormed its way into the short attention span of the American television-viewing public in the mid-’90s by producing Miller Lite’s infamous “Dick” campaign and “Evil Beaver” commercial.
The theme in their work I appreciate is their oft-insistence on hiring actors locally, mostly non-professionals sometimes literally off the street. (The only place they don’t do this is where Traktor’s offices are based, in Los Angeles, where even the street people have agents, as one of the firm’s owners deadpanned.) The unprofessional acting is then complemented by the sets, costumes, and overall style of the ad.
The best in this style are from a series of commercials you may have seen in 2001 for Discovery.com. One features nerds dressed up in asteroid costumes that “burn up in Earth’s atmosphere,” and another where they’re dressed in mosquito costumes and one gets squashed by a giant foam hand.
Another example of the style can be seen in a set of commercials for Fox Sports Net’s Regional Sports Report that ran in 2001 with the tagline “Sports news from the only region you care about. Yours.” They depict made-up sportscasts from other countries for made-up sports, like Chinese tree catching, Turkish cliff diving and Russian strongmen in a face-slapping match. The video style and graphics, locations, actors, extras and dialogue (much of it native and not even translated) make you swear you’re watching televised sporting events in these countries, up until the point where, for example, the Chinese guy gets squashed by a falling tree.
While the Traktor commercials that ran in the U.S. are fresh and great, the collective gets even freer reign for its European ads. Their British spots for Pot Noodle turn the gunky treat into a sexual fetish, with the “Pot Noodle Horn” smuggled in a man’s pants resembling a rather large boner. A few Diesel Jeans ads have the story and scope of mini-movies. And the Axe Body Spray commercials begin like any other deodorant commercial, then literally degrade into a seduction scene from low-rent softcore porn, complete with smudgy VHS video, canned sound, visible boom mics and wooden line readings.
My only beef with the presentation was that there was no identification for any of the commercials, music videos, previously unseen “banned” ads, director’s cuts and other oddities that were screened, so it was difficult to determine what was what, exactly. I learned only afterwards, for instance, that the short film that closed the session, “Swedish Midsummer”, was a stab at an ad for the midsummer sales event held by the German subsidiary of Ikea. Maybe the housewear high-ups thought that by letting some fellow Swedes direct their ad that they’d be communicating on the same wavelength, but upon viewing the clip, that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s a happy mess well described by the company that handled the ad’s post-production:
In the spots, Traktor makes a parody of many of the Swedish Midsummer customs, by creating a surreal pastiche of the clichés about Sweden and exaggerating every detail. We see a group of Swedes dressed in national costume gathering to celebrate Midsummer at a summer house in the countryside. They feast on raw whole fish, have sex in the woods, get raucously drunk, have a fight and dance around a pole. Traktor shot the commercial on location in Sweden to achieve the authentic setting.
Slated to air on German TV in June, the ad was scrapped, likely for reasons other than the authentic setting. On its own, it’s certainly entertaining, but if it would have ran for Ikea as-is, I wouldn’t have forgotten the brand anytime soon.