Kate Bush's Complicated Love Affair with Film

Published July 30 — Kate Bush's birthday

Kate Bush turns another year older today, and while most tributes will circle back to The Kick Inside, Hounds of Love, or her improbable 2022 chart resurgence, there's a quieter thread running through her career that rarely gets its own spotlight: her relationship with film.

It started early. As a child, she once said she'd dreamed of becoming a great actress — a throwaway line from an old fan-forum discussion, but one that turns out to be more prophetic than it sounds. Bush never became an actress in the conventional sense. Instead, she spent four decades treating the camera as an extension of the music, blurring the line between song and cinema in ways that were, depending on who you ask, either visionary or a little chaotic.

The Music Video as Mini-Film

Long before "cinematic music video" was a marketing buzzword, Bush was making the case for it herself. From the theatrical strangeness of "Wuthering Heights" to the surreal, Terry Gilliam-conceived dreamscape of "Cloudbusting" — starring Donald Sutherland as the psychologist Wilhelm Reich, with Bush herself playing his young son — her videos rarely settled for performance footage. They had characters, arcs, and a visual language that borrowed as much from dance and theatre as from pop promos. It's not a stretch to say Bush was making short films years before she ever called one that.

Her One Real Film: The Line, the Cross and the Curve

In 1993, that instinct became literal. To accompany her album The Red Shoes, Bush wrote, directed, and starred in a 50-minute short film of the same conceptual world, co-starring Miranda Richardson and her old dance mentor Lindsay Kemp. It premiered at the London Film Festival that November and stitched together six songs from the album into a loose, fairy-tale plot about a dancer cursed by a pair of magical shoes — a direct homage to the 1948 Powell and Pressburger classic she'd long admired, having hoped to work with Michael Powell himself before his death in 1990.

It's the closest Bush ever came to making an actual movie, and she's been famously hard on it ever since, later dismissing the result as rushed and not something she'd repeat. Commercially it was a modest affair — released direct-to-video in most territories, with contemporary reception described by fans since as lukewarm — though the film picked up a Grammy nomination for Long Form Music Video in 1996, and it's since found a strange second life as an arthouse curiosity, still occasionally screened alongside dance interpretations of her music.

Whatever its flaws, The Line, the Cross and the Curve is a fascinating artifact — the one time Bush's cinematic instincts got a full 50 minutes to breathe, unconstrained by the three-minute video format, and the one time she got to test whether "aspiring to be a great actress" actually suited her. Her verdict, essentially: not really. But she learned from it, and never made another film again.

The Second Life: Stranger Things and Beyond

Nearly three decades later, film and TV came back around for Bush in a way she couldn't have engineered herself. When Stranger Things used "Running Up That Hill" as a pivotal needle-drop in its 2022 season, the song shot back into the charts worldwide, introducing Bush to a generation who'd never heard of her. It's a neat, almost ironic bookend: an artist who spent years trying to build her own cinematic language ended up finding her biggest modern audience through someone else's.

A Filmmaker at Heart, Even Without the Films

Bush never became a working actress or a prolific director, and that's clearly by design. But look at the shape of her career — the theatrical staging, the self-directed videos, the one full-length film, the ongoing use of other people's screens to carry her music to new audiences — and it's hard not to see someone who's been making movies all along, just not in the way the label usually implies.

Happy birthday, Kate. Keep confusing the format.

Sources: Wikipedia, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, IMDb, Louder Sound, and Music Musings & Such.