Video: Lawrence Arabia - The Palest Of Them All

Lawrence Arabia has paid homage to the late great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick with his new video for Absolute Truth cut 'The Palest of Them All'. Shot in Christchurch's Commodore Hotel, the eerie video harks back to Kubrick's landmark films The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey, in both aesthetic and tone. In a statement Arabia (aka James Milne) elaborated on the clip's conception:

"The Commodore Hotel is out near the airport in Christchurch. One of the video’s directors, Stephen Ballantyne, and I often go there for an annual drink around Christmas time. When we first went there, around 2001, we really liked the weird limbo vibe of the airport hotel bar, plus there’s all sorts of US Antarctic Program ephemera up on the walls. Scientists and US military staff often pass through the bar there and it added a slightly cosmopolitan vibe to the place. In general it was just a much more pleasant location for a beer than most bars in Christchurch.

These places and images tend to resonate down the years, and thus it came to pass that Stephen Ballantyne and Carla Brereton proposed a treatment that basically threw together some of the atmosphere from both Kubrick’s “2001” and “The Shining” and turned the legendary (in our own minds at least) Commodore Hotel into an existential prison, a purgatory of my own creation, perhaps the ultimate endpoint of a life spent travelling, running away from genuine human contact."

Watch the video below...