Dark Love

Clemente Calvo


In order to negate the conventional video clip, Clemente Calvo stages a dark love through photocopies and other plastic interventions on fashion photographs.

Almost unedited, only shown once in public in 2000 and with an extract published as part of the sample CD Travesía: el Audiovisual Aragonés (2003), Dark Love is a piece developed with the artisanal techniques of domestic audiovisual creation. A waypoint in the author's evolution, it marks, similar to many others, the transition from analogue to digital, where the modification of the medium and the format is a constant. Filmed in Super8, invigorating in an unusual way photographs and photocopies of 1980s models, the celluloid was hand painted by the author. Because of the impossibility of editing the reel, it was conserved until the author himself converted it to VHS and, finally, to digital in 2000 “with a Miro DC-30”, format upon which he applied the definitive postproduction and added the sound, composed of appropriate and distorted images.

Women are converted into abstractions of themselves upon being confronted with their symmetry in a mirror effect. Super8 intervenes and a focused light delineates the image's blurry circular margin as if a dark room were observed. Irradiations of different orders coexist, both in the analogue as well as the digital. The resulting video asks for a determined music, the opposite of what habitually happens with video clips. In this way, the song is able to thread together the fragments and provide them with a coherence that circumstantially binds them, providing each image with ephemeral identities. The chaotic mix generates persuasive ambiances through the conversion processes. The sounds of the distinct technologies organically become one, satisfying a dark terrain of tragic love.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: Dark Love
  • Direction: Clemente Calvo
  • Production: Clemente Calvo. 1987.
  • Team:

    Script and Editing: Clemente Calvo
    Lyrics, Music, and Performance (guitar, drums, flute, and voice): Clemente Calvo

  • Duration: 00:02:05
  • Original format: Quicktime
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: NTSC - PAL
  • License: Creative Commons