· Street Spirit (Fade Out) – Radiohead (Jonathon Glazer)
· Into My Arms – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Jonathon Glazer)
· Frozen – Madonna (Chris Cunningham)
· Knives Out – Radiohead (Michel Gondry)
· Heaven - Unkle (Spike Jonze)
· Human – Carpark North (Martin de Thurah)
· Feeling A Moment – Feeder (Jonas Odell)
· Mad World – Gary Jules (Michel Gondry)
In depth analysis
- Street Spirit by Radiohead was directed by Jonathan Glazer who specialises in videos of immense emotional power. The video is in black and white to help heighten the emotional message within the video. The music is in a minor key, so the lack of colour reflects the sadness of the music. The band stated that this song is ‘no light at the end of a tunnel’, yet it shows the light moving around the person so it shows that all hope is not lost. This is heightened by the fact the last line of the song is “immerse your soul in love”.
- It has a variety of different interpretations, one of them could be a statement on the absolute despairs of depression where a person has the sense of disconnectedness where things happen around them; they’re uninvolved on what is going on. An example is when Thom Yorke (the lead singer of the band) is standing singing in the middle of the caravan park and the people around him are sitting down or running away from the caravan.
- There is also a sense that time is moving slowly around that person which is represented by the slow motion used by the people jumping. I think the band wanted to get inside the mind of a depressed person and show this in a literal sense, whether it is by the typical hands in the hair looking down or when Thom Yorke is screaming and reaching out when no-one around him is making any attempt to help.
- Another reading of this is that everyone in the video is trying their best to overcome a situation, whether it is the dog chasing the boy, but stops because of the chain that is holding it down. This can create empathy for the viewers because they could relate with trying their best at doing something, but failing. This is shown visually by people falling to the ground, so I think this video is amplifying because it creates creative interpretation for the audience, but some of the transitions in the video are a fade in and fade out which is an illustrative relationship between lyrics and visuals.
- Another example is when the lyrics say “this machine will not communicate”, a lady sitting down walks away briskly into the caravan, trying to avoid social interaction, so there is a clear distinction between lyrics and visuals rather than between music and visuals.
- A further reading of this is about our society as a whole, it could have a message about all the process that the world has made will fade into nothingness, old technologies are not used anymore because we have created better ones so the old ones are ‘faded out’. It shows a young boy taking a chair, the later in the video he watches the same chair being thrown past him. It then cuts to a shot of glass being smashed by a hammer. This could be a visual metaphor of dreams being destroyed. Again, it links to the whole idea about trying hard but not getting anywhere.
- The cutting rate is slow to match with the slow pace of the song, but near the end of the song the cutting rate becomes a lot faster which could represent his depression becoming out of control as it shows many close up shots of his face during the sequence, some where his head is buried in his hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment