mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

The work

The video for Kevin Shields' City Girl features outtakes from Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation. It shows a young girl making her way through Tokyo by night in an attempt to assuage her boredom. The lights, crowds and perpetual movement show a thoroughly modern city. The pace of life is fast and high buildings dominate yet sensations of loneliness, artificiality and a lack of connection are tangible too.

The film was criticized in some quarters for its series of hackneyed shots of the city, which it was suggested did little to assuage the viewer's boredom.

The artists

Kevin Shields is a singer and guitarist born into an Irish family living in New York in 1963. He followed his parents back to Ireland at the age of ten, where he began playing guitar. In 1984, he created the band My Bloody Valentine, which became known for its saturated guitar sound. The group recorded two albums, Isn't Anything and Loveless, before splitting up. Kevin Shields has since played with bands including Primal Scream and has composed songs for Sofia Coppola's last two films, Lost in Translation and Marie-Antoinette.

Sofia Coppola, an American film director, was born in New York in 1971. While studying art, she also began a career as an actress, mainly appearing in her father Francis Ford Coppola's movies. After exploring fashion and photography (working with Karl Lagerfeld), she shot her first film, The Virgin Suicides, which garnered both public and critical acclaim in 1999. She directed Lost in Translation in 2003, which won an Oscar for best screenplay. Her 2006 release, Marie-Antoinette, received both boos and applause at the Cannes Film Festival.