rubyeye wrote:Why do you care if a video has (or does not have) a narrative structure or theme?
Should it matter?
What do you like about a "narrative" video versus one that does not seem to have one?
In my perspective, a music video does not strictly need a narrative structure, and many, particularly in the AMV world, are significantly damaged by having one (or, more accurately, attempting to have one), and the root cause of this is the presumption in AMV that narrative structures are always desirable or necessary.
When handled correctly, a music video
can have a narrative structure independent of or dependent on the music in the video, and
can profit by having such. The problem is that a lot of people in AMV see narrative as a pancaea for their creative problems, and since they
have an existing narrative and
know the existing narrative of their video source material, they use that one instead of creating and independently supporting their own (remember, we're talking about people with creative problems here). The result is intimately familiar to anyone who's watched a few bad Cowboy Bebop videos: all they "tell" the same "story", using basically the same scene selection, but rely significantly on the audience also being familiar with the narrative being scalped in order to fill in the blanks and make the video and its "story" significantly better than what is actually on the screen.
Absent narrrative, if narrative cannot be trusted to be handled correctly, what does short-form music video have left? How about
visual instantiation of the music? Of course, to arrive at that conclusion, you have to come in from a different perspective.
The great mass of amateur music video today is inspired not by the music source, but by the visuals. If you go back to the infamous Caldwell-stalking usenet logs from the early part of the last decade, you can see that these used to be called "anime fan videos", not "anime music videos". The emphasis is on the visuals, and accordingly seems to demand narrative. This is only one side of the coin, and those who approach it from the music side are less likely to say "what song can I use to say or show something about title X" and more likely to say "what title can I use to demonstrate or explicate something in song Y".
If the starting point is the music rather than the visuals, narrative is largely restricted to visually instantiating the existing narrative of the lyrics (discussion of the development of moderately related narrative from lyrical and musical/atmospheric sources, as done in most professional music videos, is somewhat out of scope as few people do this in the amateur ranks). The emphasis shifts from the video source as prime vehicle to the video as simply a visual expression of what's going on audially. If this is done well, there is no
need for a narrative to hold the video up, and the attempt to include one using conventional filmic techniques may end up conflicting with the visual presentation.
It can't be repeated enough:
short-form music video is not the same as conventional film. With conventional film, you are unrestricted in your use of images to construct whatever you want; in short-form music video, there is a hard constraint in the form of the audio track. Whatever form that ends up taking, that is going to be constant throughout the video, and a self-sufficient piece of work in its own right. The video must be consonant with the audio, and this is an ediorial requirement, much stronger than the conceptual requirement that the audio must be consonant with the visual source. We don't talk about editing AMV as a thoroughly synthetic process where something is made out of nothing; we talk about "editing to" some existing music piece. If we edit the audio at all, we do that first, then build the video track around it.
If we can accept musical primacy in short-form music video, the questions about narrative substantially go away. A given video
can have as much narrative as the music will allow, and
should have, at maximum, only as much as the music can support. A successful video is one in which the creator and the audience agree on these levels with respect to the song.
To sum up:
Narrative is not strictly necessary in short-form music video.
Narrative, if mishandled, can significantly damage a music video. Amateur music video is at significant risk for this.
The music, which remains constant and usually in the same self-sufficient shape that the artist released it in, is the backbone and superstructure of a short-form music video.
The music, through the vision of the creator, should dictate what elements at what weight will be present in the visual and conceptual levels.
Mandatory disclaimer:
The foregoing is written by a confirmed thrasher who takes the pure-performance genre of short-form music video as an ideal. He has only trivial prior experience in film criticism and, despite the ridiculous incidence of jargon, no academic qualifications in this area. If any of the foregoing made sense, it may well have been by accident.
--K