Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

Dylan Cave ♦ British Landmark Music Videos and the BFI Archive 11:1 Spring 17 MSMI image industry, neither wholly integrated nor fully recognised by the larger film and television sectors. Despite providing employment for many in the moving image industry across several decades, and regardless of the cultural influence that the aesthetics of pop promos have had on other forms of moving image production, music video has yet to achieve extensive critical appreciation as a valid moving image art form. Academically, the body of scholarly work engaging with music video is relatively small. The first wave of academic writing came in response to the MTV phenomenon (

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2020

This report evaluates the significance of the AHRC-funded “Fifty Years of British Music Video” research project and its written and digital outputs on existing knowledge of the UK screen industries. It notes that heretofore music video, like advertising, has been a neglected domain of research commissioned by the British Film Institute and of work archived by the BFI’s National Film Archive. It has also been overlooked in reports commissioned by the Government into the UK’s creative industries. Yet the project’s research findings, taken in collaboration with other past and present research on British film and television, suggest that the sector has played a crucial role in talent development and innovation. The report urges the need for further research in this area.

This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video’s dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of “music television”. Author Bios: Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College in Washington. Daniel Cookney is Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Salford, UK. Kirsty Fairclough is Director of International and Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK. Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK.

The Chart Show was a weekly UK TV programme showcasing music videos from the Media Research Information Bureau (MRIB) Network Chart and a range of independent and specialist pop music charts. It began broadcasting on Friday evenings on Channel 4 in April 1986 and ran for three series until September 1988. Its production company, Video Visuals, subsequently found a new home for The Chart Show with Yorkshire Television on ITV, where it went out on Saturday mornings between January 1989 and August 1998. What made the show unique in the British broadcasting context was that it was the first presenter-less pop chart programme that showcased popular music exclusively in video form. Beginning at a time when MTV was still unavailable in the UK, The Chart Show was innovatory in consolidating music video as the lingua franca of the pop singles market. Drawing on archival sources from Channel 4, and the trade and popular music presses, this article shows how The Chart Show helped shape the form of music video, contributed to its commercial status, boosted singles sales, and drove industry demand and production schedules. It argues that an appreciation of music video is dependent upon the historical specificity of its broadcast context.

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2009

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