Friday, 5 November 2010

Lady Gaga - Telephone


To start the (film) music video there is a series of establishing shots building up the mise-en-scene a convention of the narrative. An introduction is used to build up the narrative. In this music video the narrative and the video cross worlds, the performance in the narrative becomes the performance of the song in the video.
Quick edits are used such as jump cuts to draw in the audiences attention, there is rhythmic editing within the music video, both are used to build a montage and help tell the story. The music is parallel with the actions not contrapuntal which is shown through rhythmic editing. Close-ups in the music video are used, typical convention of music videos.
Lady Gaga's costumes used in the music video are iconic, we know it is her as she has a reputation for loud, in your face costumes. The costumes are codes for tough, dark and intimidating. The video is very stylized as its not naturalistic but this adds to the iconic nature of Gaga. The sausage roll is code for phallic as it gets eaten and thrown it represents their hatred for men. This is a presage as it gives us a clue to what might happen later in the video, where Beyonce poisons her partner. Diegetic sounds are used to merge the narrative with the music video. The video itself breaks conventions of a music video as the director breaks the 180 degree rule constantly which confuses the audience.
There is temporal continuity within the music video as the audience follow the narrative throughout the video. The 'pussy wagon' taken from the film 'Kill Bill' is a code for female strength as we associate the colors as feminine and the name but we associate the strength with the size of the car and the film 'Kill Bill'. The flames on the car code for danger as well as the color red used. The director uses a juxtaposition with the costumes and the mise-en-scene as the setting naturalistic whereas the costumes are stylistic, not realistic. Elements of Michael Jacksons 'Thriller' are used in the performance coding for danger as well as the props used i.e. the poison also coding for deadly.
The 30 degrees rule is used (jump cut) so that the edits are sharp and don't look clumsy maintaining continuity.

1 comment:

  1. You have made some excellent comments here. You need to consider the conventional use of camera in much more detail, the range of shots and the editing.

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