Thursday 29 September 2011




The visuals respond to the music in a very different way to that the lyrics might suggest. The visuals, like the Florence and the machine video, have nothing to do with the song what so ever. In this case, a mob of gangsters go to battle with a group of clowns. The idea is random, wacky, and makes the video fun to watch and receives a wide variety of emotions and feedback. Personally, I think the video is genius, how they can come up with such a random idea and create it into a fitting music video from the song is very clever.


The video follows the narrative of a mob of clowns attacking a gang of criminals in an abandoned warehouse. The visuals suggest that the clowns grew up with the gangsters, but as they grew up they grew apart and became enemies. The narrative is completely disjunctive to the story the lyrics might suggest, but instead they make up their own story to compliment the style of the music and the beat of the song.


The Arctic Monkeys don't appear in the video, however they wrote it and directed it. They have made their video very violent and angry to capture the attention of a very large male audience. Also, this video is different to all their other videos, so they could of given it a violent image to step away from the crowd and do something creative and different.


The video uses very quick editing to time it with the beat of the music, also I have noticed that the camera is hand held so its shaky and connotes the fear of the visuals. The director has also used a lot of close ups of the action, using a lot of continuity editing and match on action to emphasise the power of the punches and anger. The mise en scene is very different as the costumes for the clowns have been very delicately designed as well as the make up, to make them look angry, instead of happy. there have also been a lot of reactions shots used to connote the emotion caused by the violence, for example, when the clown sets the car on fire at the end, we then get a reaction show of him looking in despair as the car is alight with his old childhood friend (turned enemy) burns to death.

I think that the video is disjunctive, as the visuals don't correspond to the music and lyrics. The idea of the clowns attacking the gangsters was a very individual and creative idea, edited in a way to connote the violence, and to tell a story of childhood friend growing up to hate each other, instead of the meaning the lyrics connote. However I also think the video is amplifying as the editing is in time to the beat of the music, also, the music is very energetic and almost connotes a meaning of violence and anger in the tone and style of the music.

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