Burn the witch - Radiohead Flashcards
Expressionist:
media language focuses on the artificiality of the music video - influence of post modernism
Songs message:
very edgy with connotations about persecution
Media language reflects these connotations:
Developing the theme of persecution placed in the context of normal society
‘Normality’
- 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
Stability and tradition:
- The set
- town squares
- white gates
- village fete laid out on tables
The ‘hero’:
- arrives in a car from the 1950s
- bearing a clipboard - classic 50s signifier of bureaucracy
Editing pace:
- slow
Camera work:
- primarily static, connoting theatricality
Video shot:
4:3 aspect radio of pre-widescreen television
Narrative:
- 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
Mise-en-scene:
-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
Narrative video:
-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
Intertextual reference - Blue Velvet:
-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
Intertextual reference - The Wicker Man:
- 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
Intertextual reference - Trumpton and Camberwick Green:
- 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
Viewpoints and ideologies:
a critical viewpoint opposed to enforcing community and solidarity by exclusion and exploitations
Media contexts:
postmodernism
social anxieties about immigration and national identity
Exclusion and exploitation:
highlighted by the representation of a rural utopia
Traditional British village:
represented by the initial mise-en-scene
The outsider:
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
The insider:
represented by the mayor, a man of traditional authority
Exploitation of foreign workers:
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
Social exclusion:
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
Exclusion:
represented as normalised in this community, suggesting the darkness that lies underneath traditional notions of white englishness
Reality:
paranoid fictional reality that parallels and comments on real social issues
Stereotyping, under and misrepresentations:
-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
Ideologies and audience positioning:
-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
