Jonathan Glazer recalls walking into the offices of Academy Films one day in the mid ’90s, showreel in hand. ‘Forget all that,’ producer Nick Morris told him after viewing the reel of short film clips. ‘What’s your voice?’ Writing in his brief foreword to the book Short Form, about the history of the London production company, Glazer claims that from that point on, everything he’s done – from music videos for Massive Attack and Radiohead to award-winning ads for Guinness and Stella Artois right up to groundbreaking feature films such as Under the Skin (2013) and The Zone of Interest (2023) – has been made with that question in mind: ‘What’s your voice?’

Now 60 years old, with an Oscar, two Baftas, a César and a Cannes Grand Prix under his belt, Glazer is one of the UK’s most acclaimed living directors. His films will routinely appear in critics’ lists of the best from their respective year, decade and even century.

I like all his films very much. And yet watching the four of them again recently, the thing that struck me is how unlike each other they all are. If, per André Bazin’s influential essay of 1957, the cinematic auteur is defined by the always perceptible trace of a ‘personal stamp’ no matter the material at hand, then Glazer – at least in comparison to peers such as Aki Kaurismäki, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, who have immediately identifiable stylistic quirks – would seem an unlikely candidate. There are no ‘director’s trademarks’ listed on his page at the Internet Movie Database. Glazer’s ‘voice’ is peculiarly difficult to pin down.

Even more peculiar: the imperative to develop his own distinctive style came from a producer at an advertising company. But Academy was no ordinary ad company. Although before Glazer’s arrival they produced nothing but commercials, they announced their ambition right from the award-hungry name. Short Form, a book about the company’s history edited by Claire Marie Healy, is as much a symptom of that ambition as a tool for its diagnosis. Essentially 300 pages of short adverts for other adverts, it is a volume whose appeal to anyone not mentioned in it by name is unfathomable. Throughout the book, producers talk of using cameras and film stock that only Christopher Nolan would ordinarily get his hands on. They speak of budgets for green screen work and other special effects far in excess of industry norms. At one point, producer Medb Riordan recalls phoning Academy boss Lizie Gower, worried her shoots might be losing money. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Gower shot back. ‘But you better win some awards.’ Academy seemed to be spearheading a new kind of prestige-industrial complex.

For all his esteem, Glazer’s reel of cinematic credits is short. It is a ratio perhaps comparable only to a pre-millennial Terrence Malick. But is it fair to so confine Glazer’s oeuvre? ‘There are no minor films,’ wrote Bazin, ‘as the worst of them will always be in the image of their creator’. In an essay from 1969 that might be read as a direct riposte to Bazin’s understanding of ‘auteur theory’, Michel Foucault pondered the limits of this line of thinking. ‘If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line?’ he asked. ‘What if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works?’ But it’s only by watching Glazer’s promo work that you start to recognise the contours of his style – and how that style feeds into his theatrical releases.

One thing that’s notable about Glazer’s movies is their willingness to subordinate story to a particular visual-technical conceit. Almost all his films can be reduced to one striking image that sums them up immediately. In The Zone of Interest it’s the Höss family’s suburban garden with the chimneys of Auschwitz looming over the fence. In Under the Skin it’s a naked Glaswegian wide boy sinking into the oily blackness as Scarlett Johansson struts off in her underwear. In Birth (2004) it’s Nicole Kidman sharing a bath with a ten-year-old boy. In Sexy Beast (2000) it’s a sunburnt Ray Winstone in yellow budgie-smugglers as a giant boulder comes tumbling towards him. One might equally point to the explosions of multicoloured paint over a Glasgow council block in his Sony Bravia ad (2006) or giant horses bursting from the waves in his near-legendary (1999) Guinness spot. It’s a mode that’s ideally suited to TV adverts, which have to get their message across immediately and memorably.

Almost all Glazer’s films (The Zone of Interest is the exception) are characterised by the juxtaposition of wide, glacially paced tracking shots and long lingering close-ups on the face of his lead actor (and Glazer is nothing if not a genius at finding just the right face). The template is set in his very first music video, for Massive Attack’s ‘Karmacoma’ (1995). Promo clip form more-or-less demands two things: a sense of movement and a relentless focus on the singing face of the frontperson. But Glazer was always adept at playing with the form, essentially combining both types of shot in one slinky take for Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’ and a series of languorous whip-pans in Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’, the latter an especially sinister video, turning (an unsinging) Thom Yorke into the prototype for Johansson’s murderous alien seductress in Under the Skin. In clips like this Glazer raises the music video into something far more than just an ad for a song.

A recent Guardian article (by Short Form contributor Shaad D’Souza) suggested that, with the demise of MTV, the era of music videos may be coming to an end. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today, the most popular media providing access to music is YouTube. All music is now audio-visual. The site’s dominance – not to mention its editorial agnosticism – has provided new opportunities for artists, in terms of new forms of intimacy and directness as well as ambitious new expansions of the form. Academy has pioneered both, making videos out of Skype calls with Jorja Smith and extended multi-song mini-movies with FKA Twigs. The only question is whether that means the music video has finally sloughed off the legacy of its commercial origins – or whether those commercial imperatives have now simply gobbled up the short-form video.

Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images by Academy Films is published by MACK.