This video tells the story of a past romantic relationship between Florence and a man through a 55-second introduction with cross-cutting between them. Florence is portrayed differently than other women in the video who are dressed in underwear and portrayed as sexual objects conforming to the male gaze. Florence is instead portrayed through close-ups of her face as she empowers herself by removing her clothes, showing emotion and anger rather than being sexualized. The video depicts a dark world involving prostitution, drugs and violence through expected elements of pop music videos, though such elements are more common in genres like rap, questioning definitions of genre.

1. SWEET NOTHING
C A L V I N H A R R I S F T. F L O R E N C E W E L C H

2. The introduction of this video lasts 55 seconds which typical of a pop music video as
they like to have a backstory to a video, which makes it quite film like. Rick Altman’s
theory would state that this is a syntactic element of pop music videos as this is a theme
you would expect to see. This is emphasized by the fact that there seems to be some
kind of a past love story between Florence and a man. Additionally, there is a lot of cross
cutting between Florence and this man, which forges a strong link between them. These
shots are both of their backs, which again, shows that they are linked.
The colours are very representative and show that the man is quite sad about their
relationship break up, but Florence is angry which is shown with the red low key
lighting

3. Florence’s appears differs greatly to the representation of the rest of
the women in this video. She is wearing a suit and tie, whereas the
rest of the women are wearing black lace underwear, portraying
them as being sexual objects which plays in Shuker’s theory of the
male gaze. Women in their bras are the main focal point of the shots
due to them being quite central in the frame. The camera tilts down
on them which gives the illusion of someone checking them out,
whereas Florence has mainly close ups of her face and she is not
sexualized.

4. Florence’s representation changes when she starts to take of her clothes as she starts to
sing more powerfully. The nature of her taking of her clothes is not over sexualized like
you would expect to see in music video (no slow mo editing techniques are used and
there is no wind blowing her hair back). Instead, this process seems liberating and shows
a great deal of emotion and anger. Later on, there are slow mo’s of her, but they are of
her being angry and in emotional pain

5. OVERALL…
This video paints a very bad picture of what the world is like- prostitution, drugs and
violence are all heavily featured in this video. The are sematic elements of pop music
videos and we expect to see these sorts of things when watching a pop video. However,
you would expect to see these things in genres such as rap which illustrates Robert
Stam’s theory that genre is hard to define and is a concept made up by theorists and
critics.