SH: Music video deconstruction: Genre and narrative

Alt-J - Breezeblocks

• The video is in the style of a concept based video. there is a story but this is not based around the actually lyrics. Because of this, there is no link between the lyrics and visuals however there is some form of link between the music and visuals as generally the cutting rate is in sync with the beat of the music. It could be argued that the video is narrative, however for a video to be narrative there has to be a basis around the lyrics in connection with the story that the video is telling.

• The video also seems to be of an amplification style as it is based around the concept of the video, and the clever editing of reversing the video is what helps to amplify or enhance this concept. However the video does not amplify the artists image directly.

• In my opinion, the video is more artistic than it is about promoting the artist. There is no performance element of the video which would include a large amount of meat shots, so the video can be seen as less as a promotional tool for the band themselves. The video has been reversed and individual actions that would otherwise have seemed insignificant are now much more prominent because the audience actually has to link in the actions and sequence the story together rather than it being put straight in front of them how it is. Playing the video backwards seems to be artistic because it challenges the conventions of many modern music videos of the narrative or conceptual genre into a less two dimensional 'simple' product.

• Because the video is not played how the audience expects it, the enigma code (from Barthes' narrative codes) is very prominent in such a way that the audience know the ending to the story as it is played first, but they are actually questioning what it is that brought about the ending to this narrative rather than what is the result of the narrative as would usually be the way in a music video.
• This is similar to the action code, although the more immediate actions, for example the bottle smashing on the wall reveals why this action has actually occurred rather than what the action leads to.