Lunatic French savant director Michel Gondry is about to release his latest film ‘Be Kind Rewind‘, starring Jack Black and Mos Def. The film’s premise is that a pair of foolish but creative video store employees manage to accidentally erase their entire stock of tapes, and are forced to re-enact or ’swede’ them; in the process creating microbudget mini movies (which of course become hugely popular in their own right). Gondry has intentionally or otherwise - it’s intentional, there’s even a contest, laid the ground work for what could be one of the most creative user generated viral marketing campaigns in history. Check out this utterly wonderful (if overly slickly produced) retelling of Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova’s Oscar winning ‘Once’ - warning, if you haven’t already seen it, this basically ruins the whole movie.

Sweded trailers (short movies really), are springing forth fully formed from the juicy hip wombs of media types world wide. In the processes, Gondry has not only achieved massive free promotion for his film, but created in effect a new form of remix culture, as sudden and unexpectedly wonderful as the recut trailers phenomenon a couple of years ago.

Gareth Stack is the webmaster of Analogue. He is currently co-writing a novel, Jackdaw Fool.
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