This video, for the track “Islands” off the xx’s newly-released debut album, isn’t easy to watch.  Obviously, the most dominating aspect of the music video is the persistent repetition in choreography.  For the majority of the video, a group of dancers perform the same seven-second routine repeatedly, complemented by a slow zoom out, while the three members of the band are shown in different positions each time.  With each repetition, the band members appear more and more helpless and trapped.  Also, the kiss that once began the choreography eventually transforms into detachment, and then the male dancer shown left alone.  At this point, the set of the video has become a chaotic mess, with various parts of the set actually in flame.

The painful repetition and the resulting breakdown shown in this music video can be interpreted in many different ways.  For one, the mindless repeated movements of the dancers can be seen as a criticism of mainstream music, whose videos are often characterized by this choreography.  More so, however, the video is making a statement about repetitions we experience in life in general.  The members of the band are surrounded by people doing the same things over and over.  This is a metaphor for the feeling that the things happening around us on a daily basis are almost choreographed, a feeling that we’re like Truman from The Truman Show.  Furthermore, the male and female dancer illustrate the danger of repetition over time within our own lives.  These two characters, who begin each sequence by kissing and then carrying out the routine, symbolize a long term relationship.  Because their relationship consists of the same thing over and over, they eventually lose interest, and it all falls apart.  The song’s lyrics depict this as well “I’m yours now, so I don’t ever have to leave.  I’ve been found out, so now I’ll never explore.  Basically, continuous repetition is something to avoid in life.

James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) is a high-budget film filled with special effects similar to many of Cameron’s other films.  Written and directed by Cameron, the film features aliens, but they are not the main focus of the film, unlike in Avatar (2009) and Aliens (1986).  The film is about the sinking of an American nuclear submarine after it comes in contact with an alien underwater spacecraft, and the subsequent rescue effort planned by the military involving Navy SEALS working with a civilian diving team, led by Bud Brigman (Ed Harris).  The rescue team is operating out of an underwater base that is connected to a much larger ship on the surface of the water.  A hurricane hits and the ship and underwater base lose contact from each other.  The diving team’s base is severely damaged and they are stranded underwater, all while one of the SEALS has developed High Pressure Nervous Syndrome and is acting erratically. Cameron depicts the chaos and fear of being stuck deep under the ocean very well, and multiple scenes leave the audience feeling claustrophobic.  The special effects used for the aliens are impressive considering the year the film was made, and the alien ship is an incredible sight.  There is a great deal of action between the people on board the underwater base, and the ocean itself, as the cold and pressure of the water become the enemy of the crew, in addition to the insane navy SEAL.  The sequences when the divers leave the underwater base in their scuba gear are particularly hectic and jarring.  These feelings are created by the darkness that surrounds the diver, which gets increasingly more dark the deeper they go.  Another aspect of the film that is anxiety producing is that the aliens remain a mystery for practically its entirety, the audience is mostly clueless as to what their intentions are.  Through these techniques, Cameron creates an edge of your seat film unlike any of his other work.

Chas Lennon

oldjewstellingjokes.com/

This is an interesting website I came across. It’s a whole site of, as it is complexly described, old jews telling jokes. It’s not just a YouTube of jews though, each joke is shot and framed professionally. It’s a very interesting project that I felt belonged on this blog. Also, who doesn’t love an old yiddish man telling a joke about hospitals? No One. In the words of Woodie Allen, “Not all comedy is Jewish, but all Jewish is comedy.”

Sia’s music video for “Clap Your Hands” from her upcoming album, “We Are Born”, is odd to say the least. Sia’s typical quirkiness and creativity can be seen through the video, which resembles a child’s art project. Sia’s head is placed on top of various puppets, which take the form of a dancer, a koala bear, a construction worker, and possibly a bird (it’s kind of difficult to tell). This reminiscence of the Muppets and Gumby, is partly creepy and partly nostalgic for me. The crazy puppet costumes, paired with the happy, soft-electronic pop music oddly enough create an exciting, upbeat video. It is difficult to connect the different segments of the music video, as they all seem unusual and unrelated, and even more challenging to determine the meaning of it. The segment where one of the puppets seems to die and turn into a frog hopping from one lily pad to the next confused me most, as I cannot figure out if there is any particular meaning behind that. I also found the main puppet, with long pink hair holding onto a flag and seemingly humping it, odd and confusing. The video caught my eye as it is definitely original, to say the least.

It is interesting to me how in a time when everything is electronically enhanced and technologically savvy, Sia has decided to stick to a simple-looking, aesthetically odd video, that totally goes against the grain of modern society. I suppose the fact that her face is placed on these odd play dough-looking bodies requires modern technology, but the way it comes across to the viewer is not in a particularly modern fashion. Compared to most music videos out there, Sia’s is largely different as well as typical of her peculiar style in today’s technology driven society.

There’s no synchronized dancing, Cristal, or any other music video clichés but M.I.A. has still managed to create what will surely be the most talked about music video of the year with her latest single “Born Free.” Released this past Monday “Born Free” comes in at a brisk 9:00 minutes. Directed by Romain Garvas, “Born Free” tells the story of the ethnic cleansing of redheads in a rather grotesque manner. The video starts off with guards in full riot gear rounding up the gingers in a depressing project of some nameless American city. The guards brutishly gather up a busload of redheads and take them out to a dessert, perhaps in the southwest, to be executed. The video is sprinkled with a visually unappealing sex scene and some very monstrous violence, highlighted by a young redheaded boy being shot point blank in the head. M.I.A. gets an A+ for shock value and while the message of the movie is all too clear some subtlety would not have hurt. The music video is a critique of modern day military violence, prejudice and genocide all of which M.I.A. has experienced first hand in her home nation of Sri Lanka.

While the concept of the cleansing of redheads seems down right absurd and straight out of a South Park episode, the video does seem all to real and that is the targeting and extermination of a minority group. MTV news drew real-life parallels to the ongoing issue of immigration in US boarder states, the treatment of prisoners by U.S. troops in military prisons and the overall brutal tactics used against minorities by government forces all over the world.

I personally always felt the point of a music video was to enhance a song and with “Born Free” I felt it was less about the music and more about this in your face message.  This is a shame because the song itself is well worth the listen even without the exploding body parts.

(Hopefully the video won’t be taken down as it has been banned from Youtube due to ” content like pornography or gratuitous violence.”

-Brad Anglum

Sufjan Steven’s 2007 creation The BQE is a film originally commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the New Wave Film Festival. Using the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Interstate 278) as its subject matter, The BQE is at heart a city symphony film similar to Man With a Movie Camera or Manhatta. However, while those films focus on the visual aspect, The BQE relies more on the accompanying music. Here, the images are choreographed to the composed symphony and not the other way around. The film is presented in 3 channels allowing for multiple images to be displayed at once side by side. This complexity of image reflected in the highly layered and intricate musical work. The result is an immersive film that makes one feel that they are dancing with the ebb and flow of traffic. Within the film there are also three interludes where super heroines with hula-hoops appear. While not explained in the film itself, they are part of a body of work that accompanies the film including a graphic novel and 3-D View Master reel. Their presentence reflects Steven’s whimsical side and notoriously off-beat sense of humor.

-David Pokorny

Bjork’s music video for her single Army of Me is strange and fantastical, and to me seemed very reminiscent of much of Tim Burton’s earlier works we saw at the Museum of Modern Art. The video starts with a slow pan in on Bjork lying in a glass tube, through the back of which we can see unidentifiable lights and shapes. This shot, along with the music behind it, sets the scene for the video as dark, out-of-this-world, and slightly confusing. The shot that starts at 13 seconds in is arguably my favorite in the video, and I see it as an exemplar showing of how framing, zooming out and an upward pan can be used in combination to quickly give the viewers a certain idea of what is happening, only to show them how misled they really were. At first it is just a faceless person in a plain car. Quickly, however, we see that we are actually in a scene involving a monstrous, unrealistic car and odd flying bugs the size of arms. The view of Bjork’s truck is our first real intuition on the costume and setting aspects of the mise-en-scene in the video. The car quite obviously looks fake: not just in its shape and bearing, but in that it seems to be made of Styrofoam. This follows for the rest of the video, emphasizing the idea that this is not supposed to be something we have seen before. Those familiar with Bjork’s music will understand how this idea is pertinent to her whole philosophy. She has done her best throughout her music career to never replicate anyone else, and beyond that to always do things no one else has even thought of. Again, I see a parallel to Tim Burton. As a director and film maker he is constantly changing things and doing things in ways no one else would have thought of, including writing a story about the king of Halloween town who wants to be Santa of all people, and changing the loving childrens movie Willy Wonka into a darker, creepier film.