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athelindEarlier, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
normanrafferty made a post that discussed how the "low attention span" style of recent movies doesn't really resemble video games at all, despite the wisdom of the critics and reveiwers.
I agree. That rapid-cut style has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with Sesame Street.
Sesame Street brought the rapid-flash, short-vignette jumping from scene to scene to scene of television comedies like Laugh-In to a much yonger audience -- and packaged it as educational television.
Don't get me wrong -- I was five when Sesame Street debuted. I was part of that first wave of Muppet-educated children, and I know that the show had a tremendous positive impact on kids of my generation. I have the greatest of respect for the Children's Television Workshop and the Henson crew who have worked with them for three and a half decades.
But it's had a stylistic influence on popular entertainment, as well -- one that encompassed wider and wider regions of the mass media as Sesame Street viewers entered new demographic categories.
I was five when Sesame Street debuted -- and I was 17 or so when MTV fired up The Buggles's "Video Killed the Radio Star" for the first time. I was right in their target demographic, just as I was in Educational Television's target demo eleven years before -- and you know what? That classic era of early MTV was exactly the same visual style. Rapid-fire jump-cuts for a generation with no attention span. A generation educated to have no attention span, taught to read by a program that flashed them with rapid-fire bursts of imagery.
MTV didn't invent the music video. Something of the sort had been around since at least the '60s. Most of those proto-videos, however, consisted of little more than footage of the band playing, with "creative" camera effects and the occasional SFX embellishment. In the classic period of MTV -- the early to mid-'80s -- the music video was a storytelling medium: impressionistic works like Billy Joel's "Pressure" or three-minute action flicks like "Smuggler's Blues". The reason ZZ Top's album Eliminator became a classic while Afterburner was largely forgettable is in no small part because the Eliminator videos -- "Legs", "Sharp Dressed Man", all those -- told stories, while the ones from Afterburner were just odd surrealist imagery.
If you look at the new videos on MTV today -- on one of those rare hours when they actually deign to show them -- you'll find that the medium has reverted back to the '60s. Lots of shots of the band playing -- usually interspersed with clips of whatever movie they're pushing.
The music video as a storytelling medium died as the really good music video directors jumped first to network television and then to movies -- and they made those jumps as the trailing edge of the Baby Boom and the leading edge of Gen X got older and entered more lucrative demographic zones. They took their distinctive style with them.
I first noted this trend 20 years ago, during the heyday of MTV. Since then, I've watched the MTV -- the Sesame Street -- style of directing, editing and pacing gain a foothold on television and in the movies. Unlike the critics and reviewers aghast at the "short attention span" of modern audiences, I don't find this style a universally bad thing. Like any technique, tt can be quite effective when done well. I would in fact submit that, when it's done well, the critics aren't actually cognizant of the mislabled "video game" influences.
I also submit that a movie like Memento simply could not have been made before these stylistic influences settled into the cultural mainstream.
Next on Athelind's Culture Corner: "From Bewitched to Charmed: The Magical Girl in American Pop Culture"
normanrafferty made a post that discussed how the "low attention span" style of recent movies doesn't really resemble video games at all, despite the wisdom of the critics and reveiwers.I agree. That rapid-cut style has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with Sesame Street.
Sesame Street brought the rapid-flash, short-vignette jumping from scene to scene to scene of television comedies like Laugh-In to a much yonger audience -- and packaged it as educational television.
Don't get me wrong -- I was five when Sesame Street debuted. I was part of that first wave of Muppet-educated children, and I know that the show had a tremendous positive impact on kids of my generation. I have the greatest of respect for the Children's Television Workshop and the Henson crew who have worked with them for three and a half decades.
But it's had a stylistic influence on popular entertainment, as well -- one that encompassed wider and wider regions of the mass media as Sesame Street viewers entered new demographic categories.
I was five when Sesame Street debuted -- and I was 17 or so when MTV fired up The Buggles's "Video Killed the Radio Star" for the first time. I was right in their target demographic, just as I was in Educational Television's target demo eleven years before -- and you know what? That classic era of early MTV was exactly the same visual style. Rapid-fire jump-cuts for a generation with no attention span. A generation educated to have no attention span, taught to read by a program that flashed them with rapid-fire bursts of imagery.
MTV didn't invent the music video. Something of the sort had been around since at least the '60s. Most of those proto-videos, however, consisted of little more than footage of the band playing, with "creative" camera effects and the occasional SFX embellishment. In the classic period of MTV -- the early to mid-'80s -- the music video was a storytelling medium: impressionistic works like Billy Joel's "Pressure" or three-minute action flicks like "Smuggler's Blues". The reason ZZ Top's album Eliminator became a classic while Afterburner was largely forgettable is in no small part because the Eliminator videos -- "Legs", "Sharp Dressed Man", all those -- told stories, while the ones from Afterburner were just odd surrealist imagery.
If you look at the new videos on MTV today -- on one of those rare hours when they actually deign to show them -- you'll find that the medium has reverted back to the '60s. Lots of shots of the band playing -- usually interspersed with clips of whatever movie they're pushing.
The music video as a storytelling medium died as the really good music video directors jumped first to network television and then to movies -- and they made those jumps as the trailing edge of the Baby Boom and the leading edge of Gen X got older and entered more lucrative demographic zones. They took their distinctive style with them.
I first noted this trend 20 years ago, during the heyday of MTV. Since then, I've watched the MTV -- the Sesame Street -- style of directing, editing and pacing gain a foothold on television and in the movies. Unlike the critics and reviewers aghast at the "short attention span" of modern audiences, I don't find this style a universally bad thing. Like any technique, tt can be quite effective when done well. I would in fact submit that, when it's done well, the critics aren't actually cognizant of the mislabled "video game" influences.
I also submit that a movie like Memento simply could not have been made before these stylistic influences settled into the cultural mainstream.
Next on Athelind's Culture Corner: "From Bewitched to Charmed: The Magical Girl in American Pop Culture"
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 04:46 am (UTC)Do you think the objective in producing an "instant" generation who expect their stimuli to flash past like the bursts from a machine gun was to allow the development of politics that don't bear any closer scrutiny than the "quick peek" variety?
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 04:48 am (UTC)There are a number of albums ("Tarkus" for one) that are memorable because of the pix on the sleeve...indeed sometimes the sleeve is the memory that triggers the curiosity into looking then buying....
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 07:54 am (UTC)*snicker*
Date: 2004-05-09 08:43 am (UTC)What possible better cover could there be, for the Evil Right Wing Conspiracy, than to package itself within the Leftist Ideology?
Hmm...given that conservatism IS something of a viral meme...
Dammit, I shouldn't be thinking such things before my morning coffee.
Re: *snicker*
Date: 2004-05-09 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 06:04 am (UTC)YOU'RE 91 YEARS OLD!?!?!?!?!
Fraggle O.O
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 07:50 am (UTC)Stick to surface-area-to-volume calculations, Frags.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 12:09 pm (UTC)Fraggle