The third video I decided to analyse was Karmacoma, a video directed by Jonathan Glazer for the group Massive Attack. It promotes the band’s style of music, which seems to be a mix of alternative and easy listening music, with a touch of reggae in the beats of the song and a bit of trip-hop.
Visual Stylistics:
MES:
Right at the start, you are aware that the video is set inside a hotel. There is a strange man with long hair and a short-cut man holding a gun, counting room numbers on the doors of hotel rooms in the corridor. Two girls stand in the corridor in front of the man with the gun (the one with the short-cut haircut) and hold a letter stamp from a typewriter, the stamp for the letter ‘K’. This letter relates to the name of the song - Karmacoma. Also, there are strange people doing strange things within each hotel room.
Cinematography:
There are numerous extreme close-ups of the man in the hall, and an interesting high-angled shot on the smaller version of another character in a bath, the bigger version turning the taps and drowning the smaller version.
Editing:
The editing in this video reflects the slow pace and rhythm of the song. Long takes and long cuts reflect the weirdness of the video, and reflect how the song is mellow and seems to “drift along”. This editing technique results in a hypnotical, dreamlike and rhythmical song and video. The small and big versions of a character in the bath scene near to the end act as an on-screen Special Effect.
Relationship between Lyrics and Visuals
The lyrics are spoken by various characters and often the on-screen effects and visuals reflect the same pace, so that the video is continuous and at the correct pace.
Relationship between Music and Visuals
As already stated, the video mainly contains slow-cutting between each shot, but the images seem to respond to the beats in the rhythm of the song.
Intertextuality
The ‘K’ letter-stamp from the typewriter, the two girls standing in the corridor, the strange people in the hotel rooms and the kid going psycho come under intertextuality, and are a reference to the Stephen King horror film The Shining (directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson), where the little boy going psycho (or “shining”) sees two sisters from the past history of the hotel, and a river of blood crashing through the corridor and around them (in his imagination). The typewriter letter stamp refers to the typewriter that the Jack Nicholson character uses to write his story in the hotel lounge during the cold, isolating winter, the typewriter he eventually uses to type hundreds of pages with the same line repeated one each page - “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
Another form of intertextuality can be found with the girl in one of the rooms who looks familiar - she reminds me of beautiful Bond girl Gemma Arterton (from Quantum of Solace - 2008), but also a reference to the looks and sexual attractions of the girl from Noir classic Pulp Fiction with the short-cut hair. Therefore, this character is being portrayed as sexually attractive to attract more of a niche audience.
Is the narrative performance-based, narrative-based or concept-based?
The storyline of the video makes this video mainly narrative-based, with a few close-up shots of various characters speaking the lyrics and therefore adding a tiny bit of performance within the video.
Conclusion
Overall, I think this video is aimed at a niche audience and would be shown after nine o’clock on music video channels (such as MTV) to adults with knowledge and understanding of the strange things that can go on in the world. This video has been deliberately made with a strange, weird narrative to provoke the audience rather than embrace them. And rather than have an individual storyline with unique characters, Jonathan Glazer (director of video) has chosen to create a world within a hotel to show characters similar to other characters from Hollywood Blockbuster films and films from the smaller screens, bringing different characters together into a weird world inside a hotel.
14 years ago
