Riptide - C1

Question 1

Singer of Riptide

Answer 1

Vance Joy

Question 2

Year it was released

Answer 2

2013

Question 3

Directors of the music video

Answer 3

Dimitri Basil and Laura Gorun

Question 4

Record label he’s on

Answer 4

Atlantic records (owned by Warner)

Question 5

genre of music

Answer 5

Indie folk-pop

Question 6

number of views on YouTube

Answer 6

nearly 100 million

Question 7

Name of debut EP which Riptide was released on

Answer 7

“God Loves You When You’re Dancing”

Question 8

Debut LP it featured on

Answer 8

“Dream Your Life Away”

Question 9

Eisenstein’s concept

Answer 9

“intellectual montage” where new ideas emerge from the collision of images and generate new meanings

Question 10

Famous director who’s media language inspired the music video

Answer 10

Wes Anderson

Question 11

What type of cinema does the music video use as an intertextual reference?

Answer 11

surrealist or avant-garde cinema

Question 12

What is the surrealist movie intertextual referenced?

Answer 12

Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) which explores violence and sexual desire. The infamous eye cutting scene in Un Chien Andalou could be compared to the hand stabbing scene the music video. The exploration of the subconscious may explain the video’s sometimes dream-like logic.

Question 13

What nationality is Vance Joy?

Answer 13

Australian

Question 14

What type of music video is it?

Answer 14

concept

Question 15

How does the video uphold codes and conventions of a music video?

Answer 15

• Upholds conventions of a music video by having song lyrics interpreted on screen
• But the lyrics are graphically represented such as “I was scared of dentists and the dark” is interpreted explicitly with a shot of a female looking “scared”
  with a metallic contraption in her mouth

-The title is graphically similar to a “billing block”
which is often seen on film posters or in trailers which subverts conventions of a music video

Question 16

How can Steve Neale’s genre theory be applied to Riptide?

Answer 16

• The video frequently references the Western and Thriller genres
• The hipster style of Wes Anderson films is also used in the camera angles and framing
• Horror genre iconography is used eg) females repeatedly dragged off-screen by unseen forces and a character going missing in a dark graveyard
• folk music video genre is dominated by low-fi videos with bands playing instruments

Question 17

How can Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory be applied to Riptide?

Answer 17

• Signs are given meaning in the video by the lyrics eg) the piles of dollar bills which accompanies the line “Oh, all my friends are turning green”.
• This example of polysemy could be
  interpreted in a variety of ways e.g. is it
  implying that friends have “sold out” by giving into money or be turning green with envy at the success of Vance Joy?

Question 18

How are women represented in the video?

Answer 18

• Women in the video are repeatedly presented as an object to be watched for example a woman with her back to the camera undresses out of her swimming
  costume and we see disembodied,
  isolated sections of women’s bodies
• images of women are sexualised and offered to audiences for scopophilia
• the lip-synch sections are interesting as at first she has immaculate make-up and conforms to western beauty standards but she becomes increasingly dishevelled as she sings “the words wrong” perhaps a commentary on the industry
• a number of scenes show violence, such as a female
  hand being stabbed by a knife and a gun being pointed off the screen. The lip-synching woman also clutches at her own neck. This is trivialising violence.

Question 19

What does scopophilia mean?

Answer 19

The sexual pleasure derived from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.

Question 20

What intertextual references can be discussed?

Answer 20

• David Lynch - Blue Velvet - singing
• ‘10’ film (1979) - a man falls in love with a woman he doesn’t know and stalks her
• Wes Anderson movies - symmetrical framing, camera angles such as tracking, and colour palette etc
• Un Chein Andalou - Buñuel and Dali - violence and scopophilia