Julien Clerc — La fille aux bas nylon (clip officiel)

JUL 01 1984 · 12:00

Julien Clerc — La fille aux bas nylon (clip officiel) (1984) Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Era: French Synth-Pop & Chanson Moderne (1984) - Mid-80s intersection of Anglo synth-pop production and French chanson tradition, released on Virgin France during the peak of the format's commercial dominance. High curatorial priority. This clip is a documented early work by Jean-Pierre Jeunet — one of France's most distinctive auteur directors — and constitutes rare evidence of his pre-feature visual vocabulary in a commercially released format. Its intersection of French chanson, Anglo synth-pop production, and theatrical cartoon aesthetics also makes it a definitive artifact of the 1984 French pop moment. The combination of its provenance (Jeunet), commercial performance (150,000+ singles sold, #1 in Quebec), and aesthetic distinctiveness places it at the intersection of multiple research frameworks. Context: Released in October 1984 as the lead single from Julien Clerc's album Aime-moi (produced by Christopher Neil between England and France on Virgin Records), 'La fille aux bas nylon' is a synth-pop reframing of the French chanson tradition. With lyrics by Luc Plamondon, the song became a significant commercial success, charting at #18 in France and reaching #1 in Quebec. The video was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet — then unknown — and represents an early-career experiment in short-form cinematic fantasy seven years before Delicatessen. The clip's theatrical artifice and cartoon pastiche place it within the broader European art-directed video movement responding to MTV's emergent visual culture, while remaining distinctly rooted in a French popular tradition of theatrical sensuality and ironic wit. Director notes: This 1984 clip is one of Jeunet's earliest confirmed solo music video commissions. Per IMDB other-works records and multiple corroborating sources, Jeunet directed the video, which is documented as featuring deliberately fake backdrops, a cartoony visual register, and animated inanimate objects evoking Fleischer Brothers and Tex Avery short-film aesthetics — a full city-world becoming attracted to the song's subject. Contemporary French pop journalism describes the clip direction being handed to 'a very young director' already demonstrating visual inventiveness. The video predates Jeunet's first feature by seven years and functions as an early exhibition of the fantastical, object-animating visual language that would define his feature career. He also directed the Jean-Michel Jarre 'Zoolook' video (1985, with Marc Caro) and a second Julien Clerc clip, 'Helene' (1987).