Riptide - C1 Flashcards
Singer of Riptide
Vance Joy
Year it was released
2013
Directors of the music video
Dimitri Basil and Laura Gorun
Record label he’s on
Atlantic records (owned by Warner)
genre of music
Indie folk-pop
number of views on YouTube
nearly 100 million
Name of debut EP which Riptide was released on
“God Loves You When You’re Dancing”
Debut LP it featured on
“Dream Your Life Away”
Eisenstein’s concept
“intellectual montage” where new ideas emerge from the collision of images and generate new meanings
Famous director who’s media language inspired the music video
Wes Anderson
What type of cinema does the music video use as an intertextual reference?
surrealist or avant-garde cinema
What is the surrealist movie intertextual referenced?
Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) which explores violence and sexual desire. The infamous eye cutting scene in Un Chien Andalou could be compared to the hand stabbing scene the music video. The exploration of the subconscious may explain the video’s sometimes dream-like logic.
What nationality is Vance Joy?
Australian
What type of music video is it?
concept
How does the video uphold codes and conventions of a music video?
- Upholds conventions of a music video by having song lyrics interpreted on screen
- But the lyrics are graphically represented such as “I was scared of dentists and the dark” is interpreted explicitly with a shot of a female looking “scared”
with a metallic contraption in her mouth
-The title is graphically similar to a “billing block”
which is often seen on film posters or in trailers which subverts conventions of a music video
How can Steve Neale’s genre theory be applied to Riptide?
- The video frequently references the Western and Thriller genres
- The hipster style of Wes Anderson films is also used in the camera angles and framing
- Horror genre iconography is used eg) females repeatedly dragged off-screen by unseen forces and a character going missing in a dark graveyard
- folk music video genre is dominated by low-fi videos with bands playing instruments
How can Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory be applied to Riptide?
- Signs are given meaning in the video by the lyrics eg) the piles of dollar bills which accompanies the line “Oh, all my friends are turning green”.
- This example of polysemy could be
interpreted in a variety of ways e.g. is it
implying that friends have “sold out” by giving into money or be turning green with envy at the success of Vance Joy?
How are women represented in the video?
- Women in the video are repeatedly presented as an object to be watched for example a woman with her back to the camera undresses out of her swimming
costume and we see disembodied,
isolated sections of women’s bodies - images of women are sexualised and offered to audiences for scopophilia
- the lip-synch sections are interesting as at first she has immaculate make-up and conforms to western beauty standards but she becomes increasingly dishevelled as she sings “the words wrong” perhaps a commentary on the industry
- a number of scenes show violence, such as a female
hand being stabbed by a knife and a gun being pointed off the screen. The lip-synching woman also clutches at her own neck. This is trivialising violence.
What does scopophilia mean?
The sexual pleasure derived from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.
What intertextual references can be discussed?
- David Lynch - Blue Velvet - singing
- ‘10’ film (1979) - a man falls in love with a woman he doesn’t know and stalks her
- Wes Anderson movies - symmetrical framing, camera angles such as tracking, and colour palette etc
- Un Chein Andalou - Buñuel and Dali - violence and scopophilia
