Burn the witch - Radiohead

Question 1

Expressionist:

Answer 1

media language focuses on the artificiality of the music video - influence of post modernism

Question 2

Songs message:

Answer 2

very edgy with connotations about persecution

Question 3

Media language reflects these connotations:

Answer 3

Developing the theme of persecution placed in the context of normal society

Question 4

‘Normality’

Answer 4

• simple stop motion animation with cheerful lighting and saturated colours- reminiscent of childrens television and the safe world it protects
• emphasises a traditional setting whose mythical connotations of warmth and safety strikingly dress, such as smocks and folk costumes

Question 5

Stability and tradition:

Answer 5

• The set
• town squares
• white gates
• village fete laid out on tables

Question 6

The ‘hero’:

Answer 6

• arrives in a car from the 1950s
• bearing a clipboard - classic 50s signifier of bureaucracy

Question 6

Editing pace:

Answer 6

• slow

Question 7

Camera work:

Answer 7

• primarily static, connoting theatricality

Question 8

Video shot:

Answer 8

4:3 aspect radio of pre-widescreen television

Question 9

Narrative:

Answer 9

• a flawed protagonist being shown a series of events that become increasingly disturbing
• the climax is the burning of the wicker man, followed by a coda in which we find that he has escaped

Question 10

Mise-en-scene:

Answer 10

-cross painted door
- mini-doubles in a model village
- children playing on a ducking stool
- a group of ‘deer-men’ with swords
- a bloody cow pie
- flowered gallows
- a ‘happy’ group of exploited fruit pickers

Question 11

Narrative video:

Answer 11

-lacks performance to camera but constructs diegesis that either reflects or comments on the narrative of the song to which it runs parallel
- televisual narrative

Question 12

Intertextual reference - Blue Velvet:

Answer 12

-opening shot is a pastiche to blue velvet
- connotations from that films narrative of an apparently happy, stable and conformist world hiding disturbingly dangerous social and sexual elements under its surface

Question 13

Intertextual reference - The Wicker Man:

Answer 13

• narrative is a pastiche of the 1973 film
• starts in an apparent normality, becomes increasingly disturbing
• straight-laced anti-hero
• ends with his human sacrifice in a burning wicker man
• both film and video are implying that social solidarity and conformity can be based on horrific scapegoating of outsiders and this can happen in the most apparently safe and cosy communities

Question 14

Intertextual reference - Trumpton and Camberwick Green:

Answer 14

• animation style
• stop-motion programmes created a secure and predictable rural social world for small children
• this style and its concomitant connotations contrasts with the dark narrative and in doing so accentuates its darkness

Question 15

Viewpoints and ideologies:

Answer 15

a critical viewpoint opposed to enforcing community and solidarity by exclusion and exploitations

Question 16

Media contexts:

Answer 16

postmodernism
social anxieties about immigration and national identity

Question 17

Exclusion and exploitation:

Answer 17

highlighted by the representation of a rural utopia

Question 18

Traditional British village:

Answer 18

represented by the initial mise-en-scene

Question 19

The outsider:

Answer 19

Represented as a bureaucrat by his suit and clipboard , a man who represents urbanism and central authority in opposition to the ‘time-honoured ways’ of rural communities

Question 20

The insider:

Answer 20

represented by the mayor, a man of traditional authority

Question 21

Exploitation of foreign workers:

Answer 21

represented by the polytunnels full of tomato pickers who appear to be different and do not feature in the planning of the visit - instead they are made to wave cheerily by the drunken man with the stick

Question 22

Social exclusion:

Answer 22

represented by the painting of a red cross on a front door, the traditional sign of a plague victim, followed by a cheery wave to the person trapped inside, by the deliberate fooling of the man in the suit, by the reference to witch hunting in the ducking stool that the children play on, by the ominous gallows and by the final wicker man ceremony in which the community is brought together in harmony over a brutal attempted murder

Question 23

Exclusion:

Answer 23

represented as normalised in this community, suggesting the darkness that lies underneath traditional notions of white englishness

Question 24

Reality:

Answer 24

paranoid fictional reality that parallels and comments on real social issues

Question 25

Stereotyping, under and misrepresentations:

Answer 25

-uses positive stereotypes to create a false sense of security and safety, then counters these with negative stereotypes
-represents traditional signs of englishness and britishness
-touristic stereotypes of village life
-stereotypes undermined by revelations
- negative stereotypes of historic rural britain are evoked, as a place of plague and xenophobic violence
-eschews diversity in representing the dangers of a cohesive monoculture held together by xenophobia and social exclusion of others who are seen as a threat

Question 26

Ideologies and audience positioning:

Answer 26

-see the parallels between the fictional world and modern society, invoking a left-leaning ideology of concern about the social exclusion and exploitation of minorities and the powerless