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When The Light Is Mine compiles the videos from R.E.M.’s years on IRS Records, and adds several live television performances from the same period. Many of these videos have never been released on DVD, having appeared only on the VHS compilation Succumbs. The band’s low-budget, experimental mentality – driven equally by former art student Michael Stipe’s interest in the medium and Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills’ near-complete lack thereof – is apparent throughout. (more…)

The concert film of R.E.M.’s first world arena tour is a deliberately low-tech affair. A group of filmmakers took Super 8 and 16mm cameras and a mixture of color and black and white film to the final shows of the Green tour in 1990. Longtime band associate Jim McKay then edited the footage together to produce Tourfilm, a 17-song film that creates its own unique atmosphere rather than try to exactly duplicate the concert experience. Frequent use of slow- or sped-up-motion, double exposures, cuts between color and black and white, and the incorporation of the somewhat abstract filmed images displayed on the huge screen behind the band give the film a dream-like tone which actually enhanced my enjoyment of the music. (more…)

Pop Screen, a collection of videos from Document and Green, is the earliest R.E.M. video collection available on DVD. (Succumbs, which collects the videos from the band’s first four albums, is still available as a VHS-only release.) It’s a relatively short disc, and the videos hail from the period where R.E.M. was still turning out videos that often lacked a close connection to the songs - there’s very little performance footage, no lip-syncing at all, and several clips where the band never appears at all. (more…)

This Film Is On is an unusual compilation for R.E.M. in that it only features videos from one album, the band’s breakthrough Out of Time. That gives it a cohesion not found on other releases, and with 10 clips it’s not a paltry set by any means.

This Film Is On is divided into three sections; each section is introduced by a snippet of silent black and white footage filmed by longtime band associate Jim McKay, while each video opens with a black screen that highlights a lyric in plain white text. The first section is made up of the four videos the band initially filmed at the time of the album’s release that generally feature high production values and all four band members. (more…)

Showing no fear of stylistic clashes whatsoever, R.E.M. compiled their videos for Automatic for the People and Monster onto one collection. Parallel features six videos from the former album and five from the latter, with interstitial footage drawn from the films that were projected as a backdrop during the Monster tour. (A sixth Monster video, “Tongue”, was not completed at the time of Parallel’s release and was included on the In View best-of collection as a bonus clip.) It’s a very interesting disc for no other reason than the vivid contrast it establishes between two periods of the band’s career. (more…)

The 1995 Monster tour was probably R.E.M.’s most anticipated; it was their first in five years, and the first after their multiplatinum smashes Out of Time and Automatic for the People. It was also by far their most tumultuous. Not only did Bill Berry have to undergo brain surgery due to two aneurysms, Mike Mills went under the knife to fix complications from his previous appendectomy and Michael Stipe had a hernia repaired. The official record of that tour is Road Movie, a film that made a few appearances in arthouse theaters before hitting video and eventually DVD. While there are several strong individual performances, the whole never quite clicks. (more…)

R.E.M.’s 2003 world tour was somewhat unusual in that the band had no new album to support; indeed, most of the tour took place before the Warner Bros. best-of In Time hit stores. With only a few new songs in their arsenal, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe mined their entire 23-year history and performed around 80 songs over the course of the tour. The band’s performance in Wiesbaden, Germany is the basis of R.E.M.’s third concert film, Perfect Square. (more…)

In View primarily serves as a collection of the videos for 16 tracks on the In Time CD, arranged in reverse chronological order. (”All The Right Friends” and “Animal” are video-less.) Given the ordering, and the fact that you can see the band get visibly younger as the clips progress, In View works much better as a sort of time capsule of the band. I had a lot of fun just watching Bill Berry show up, or seeing Mike Mills’ hair get darker and shorter while Michael Stipe’s reappeared and got longer. Beyond that, these are some great songs and some innovative, interesting videos. (more…)