Over the past few years, US singer Lana Del Rey has developed her own aesthetics in her video clips, marked by collaged scenes that look like they came from super-8 films from the sixties and seventies. It can happen that one thinks of these videos when watching the clip for "Born to Live", the new single by Marianne Faithfull from their album "Negative Capability".
But the 72-year-old Faithfull is not about a mere retro-aesthetics: The film sequences, which here by director John Maybury ("Nothing Compares 2 U", "West End Girls") were put together, show Anita Pallenberg, the 2017 deceased German Italian artist, with whom Marianne Faithfull claims to have a 54-year friendship.
Marianne Faithfull speaks in a deep voice about a melancholic piano theme "Born to live and Born to die / are not the same". In the song, she deals with the loss of the friend she really got to know when she was with Keith Richards and Faithfull with Mick Jagger. "I do not think we would have become friends without them," Faithfull wrote in an obituary for the Guardian: "The boys were so close together and spent so much time in the studio, which threw Anita and me together many drugs. "
Part of the video footage comes from a South American trip Pallenberg and Faithfull made. But also Pallenberg's son Marlon Richards released material from his mother's archives for it - in part, he is also seen as a child on it. The video from "Born to Live" is an unusual clip, a document of personal closeness and also a bit pop-historical source. Watch it here in the German video premiere: