3. Key features of analysing music
videos
Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (pop, R&B, Indie
etc.)
There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals. The lyrics are
represented with images either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting.
There is a relationship between music and visuals. The tone and
atmosphere of the visual reflects that of the music.
The record label would want a lot of close ups of the artist and artists
may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style)
There is frequently reference to notion of looking such as mirrors
stages etc and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.
There are often intertextual reference to films, tv programmes and
other music videos.
5. Roland barthes was born n the 12th November 1915 and
die at the age of 64. He was a french literary theorist,
philospher, critic and semiotician (study of cultural signs
and symbols). He expolored a diverse range of fields and
he influenced the development of schools.
6. Roland barthes describes a text as: “a galaxy of signifiers,
not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is
reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none
of which can be authoritavely declared to be the main
one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can
read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning
can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number
is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of
language...”
7. In other words text is like a tangled ball of threads, the
thread needs to be unravelled, once unravelled, we
encounter an absolute wide range of potential meanings.
We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from
one viewpoint, one set of previous experience, and create
one meaning for that text. You can continue by
unravelling the narrative from a different angle and create
an entirely different meaning.
He said that texts may be ‘open’ or ‘closed’.
8. There are five codes that can be in any narrative:
The Hermeneutic Code: (the voice of truth) Is the way the story
avoids telling the truth or revealling all the facts, in order to drop
clues in through out to help create mystery.
The Enigma/ Proairetic Code: (empirical voice) The way the
tension is built up and the audience is left guessing what
happens next.
The Symbolic Code: (the voice of symbols) This is very similar to
the semantic code, but acts at a wider level, organising semantic
meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. This is
typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises
out of opposing and conflict ideas. (the voice of science) Looks
at the audiences wider cultural knowledge, morality and
ideology.
The Cultural Code:
The Semantic Code: (the voice of the person) The semantic code
points to any element in a text that suggests a particular, often
additional meaning by way of connotation which the story
suggests.
10. Laura Mulvey born August 15th 1941 is a British feminist
film theorist. She is currently a professor of film and
media studies at Birkbebk, University of London.
In 1975 she coined the term ‘Male Gaze’, she believes
that in film and other forms of media audiences have to
‘view’ characters from the perspective of a heterosexual
male.
The camera lingers on the curves of the female body , and
events which occur to women are presented largely in the
context of a man’s reaction t these events.
Gives women the status of objects.
11. There are criticisms to this theory that some women
enjoy being ‘looked’ at. The gaze can also be directed
toward members of the same gender, not at all of which
are sexual, such as comparison of body image or in
clothing.
