Immediately, the music video for Gerri Halliwell's 'It's Raining Men' strikes a resemblance to a well known movie, The songs video has been known to have created a strong resemblance to the famous films 'Footloose' and 'Flashdance'. The synergy created to these films helps the music video establish a narrative concept.
A particular image of Gerri is obviously trying to be shown in this video. Through her Spice Girls career, Gerri was known as 'the fat one' and so, when she stormed into the solo business, she wanted to be able to show off her new phyique with her intensely toned body and legs. This shot of her behind helps not only promote her new, fantastic image, but also helps to create The Male Gaze (Laura Mulvey), in which women are shown in a certain way to be provocative and attractive to males. However, this song is not mainly aimed at men, the lyrics are clealy aimed at women with the words 'girls' and 'women' being repeated throughout,
Intertextuality is continued here through the repeated references to Flashdance. The judges shown in a row here at a long table re-enacts the scene from the famous dance film, this adds narrative to the video.
This is the first shot in which we see Gerri's face. This has been left for a few shots to build up a little bit of tension until we finally see the new Gerri with her make over and new hair style through a close up shot.
An awful lot of the shots included in the first sequence of the video show off Gerri's body. She has clearly worked very hard on losing weight and toning up, even releasing fitness DVDs to help others achieve her image related success.
Voyeuristic bodyshots are repeated frequently throughout the music video as she is really trying to highlight her new, slimmer figure and show everyone that she has lost a lot of weight and is no longer the 'fat' spice girl.
This low angle shot shows Gerri looking down into the camera which gives her a sense of power and authority, the off the shoulder jumper is again showing a sexualised image, relating to Laura Mulvey's 'Male Gaze' theory as she is appealing to men with her feminine and attractive image.
The synchronised dance routine is a convention of pop music videos, especially when the video is so strongly intertextualised with films like Flashdance and Footloose.
This close up shot is highly sexualised and voyeuristic as it shows Gerri in a very tight fitting shirt and she is running her hands through her wet hair and over her body.
How This Research Has Influenced My Planning
This kind of voyeuristic and sexualised artist is very post modern, as effective as it is, it is not suitable for the type of indie music we have chosen to make a video for. The shots in this video are really effective, especially in the close ups and extreme close ups as they are conventions of pretty much every type of music videos.
No comments:
Post a Comment