How an Advertisement Essentializes a Filmmaker’s Style
Style
Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, The Neon Demon) is a Danish filmmaker known for his strong, atmospheric style. Refn described, in an interview with MUBI, the experience he had watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and finding what he wanted to accomplish as a filmmaker: “the whole film is just a total experience that goes beyond normality, sexuality, and it’s just a pure emotional ride of terror. It has no meaning, other than it is an experience. It’s very pure in that sense.”
Jas Hennessy & Co. is a French cognac distiller headquartered in Cognac, France. Originally founded in 1765 by Richard Hennessey, the distiller is now known worldwide for supplying more than 40% of the cognac sold in the world. In 2016, Hennessy debuted an advertising campaign and partnership with Refn to highlight the Seven Tasting Notes Hennessy uses to describe the distiller’s extra old product line: Hennessy X.O.
Refn is famous for his bold colors and aesthetic sensibility. Each of Hennessy’s seven tasting notes are visualized in seven vignettes in the advertisement that Refn refers to as a “90-second feature film.”
- Sweet Notes: The color of the background shifts from a cool blue, as with water, to a lavish orange tone signifying the candied fruit taste.
- Rising Heat: We look up at a gazing eye in the desert and transition to a man looking at himself in the mirror in a kaleidoscope image.
- Spicy Edge: A rough machine shop showing a group of men shrouded in the dark working on their motorcycles and riding off into the night.
- Flowing Flame: Transitioning between two red-hued individuals looking at the mouth of a Cave of Wonders as fire engulfs an arm.
- Chocolate Lull: A figure slowly descends into a bath of chocolate.
- Wood Crunches: A witch invites you into the woods only for them to explode as the intensity of the cognac’s aging process hits your palette.
- Infinite Echo: You look back at your drink, on the rocks, and still get faint reminders of that odyssey as the Flowing Flame individuals flicker into the fade out.
Each of these small ‘films within a film’ has its own unique arc that visualizes the sensation of each aspect of drinking Hennessy X.O. The ad is a microcosm of the magic and the experience of film, akin to that of a dream, with your own imagination being the glue that binds it together.
The Ad Campaign
According to NOWNESS, Hennessy allowed Refn to freely explore the experience of tasting Hennessy X.O. in his own style. Refn’s Chapters of Hennessy was a portion of the 2016 advertising campaign Odyssey for Hennessey’s acclaimed product. It was accompanied by different versions of the original commercial, a seven-visual print ad campaign orchestrated by photographer Dan Tobin Smith, an animated visual, and a making-of feature in 360° view. (Hennessy)
Hennessy ran a similar campaign more recently in 2019 through the Ridley Scott-directed spot, The Seven Worlds of Hennessy. Scott envisions each of the seven tasting notes as different worlds to be explored, as in a science fiction epic. Fitting for the acclaimed director of Alien and The Martian. In Scott’s words: “‘It’s more than an advertisement, it’s an art form.’” (Loh)
Final Thoughts
I nearly forgot Chapters of Hennessey was a commercial for cognac until the end. The commercial takes these evocative words from what is essentially a product description and makes them into something visceral and visual in a way that basic ad copy could not do. This is the value of Refn as a filmmaker: his ability to take you on a journey that is difficult to put to words, but impossible to forget.
Give Refn’s commercial a watch via NOWNESS here.
References and Further Reading
HENNESSY x.o. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2021, from https://www.hennessy.com/en-us/collection/hennessy-xo.
Loh, Lainey. (September 13, 2019). The Seven Worlds of Hennessy X.O.’s Odyssey Through the Eyes of Ridley Scott. Unreserved Media. https://www.unreservedmedia.com/the-seven-worlds-of-hennessy-x-os-odyssey-through-the-eyes-of-ridley-scott/.
MUBI. (July 1, 2016). Favorite Films: In Conversation with Nicholas Winding Refn. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMHcWDesUFc&t=133s.
The Chapters of Hennessy X.O. NOWNESS. Retrieved March 13, 2021 from https://www.nowness.com/story/hennessy-xo.