Form and intertextuality in movie music videos
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Date
2021-12-16
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Publisher
Ohio State University. Libraries
Abstract
This paper addresses a phenomenon I call the Movie Music Video (MMV henceforth). A MMV is a music video for a soundtrack song displaying intertextual relationships with its corresponding film, such as intercutting clips of the film in the mise en scene, using costumes from the film, or telling a film's narrative through lyrics. My primary goal in this paper is to calculate the frequency of certain intertextual relationships, or types between the music video and the film. For the secondary goal, I demonstrate a methodology for the analysis of this novel medium, focusing particularly on form and intertextuality. To do this, I create an analytical style borrowing from multi-domain form graphs to display song form aligned with visual information and types of intertextuality.
Most MMVs contain four independent texts in its mise en scene: its video diegesis, the corresponding film, its song and performing artist. Just as Lafrance and Burns (2017) emphasizes that the analysis of any music video should include visual, lyrical, and musical domains, my examples can be broken down into three categories based on whether the MMV references the corresponding film through visual, lyrical, or aural domains. My graphs highlight film references in the music video. Such references tighten intertextual bonds between multimedia, serving as tethers between texts. Using form graphs of MMVs, my paper demonstrates the rich interplay between texts executed through music form.
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Keywords
corpus study, music video, film, form, intertextuality
Citation
Future Directions of Music Cognition (2021), pp. 203-207