The audience always expects a beginning middle and an end and by having this: the audience can build meaning by using real life event and memories. So the narrative will help the audience to describe the situation and is the way to understand and relate to the telling of the story. This does not mean that music videos, in our case, have to be complicated but instead simple and straight forward to make the audience able to relate to the story.
This is a very old quote from Aristotle which still applies to the industry:
the most important is the plot, the ordering of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life – and happiness and unhappiness are bound up with action. …it is their characters indeed, that make the men what they are, but it is by reason of their actions that they are happy of the reverse.
So to fins the meaning we have to take the codes and conventions into consideration such as genre, character, form and time.
To show an example I have chosen Madonna’s video “prayer”
This video follows the narrative of the song and emphasizes this by using a well created mise en scene. The song sings about religion and God and is therefore using crosses and other religious elements but is at the same time bringing up political questions about racism which was a big topic during the time of the video. To attract the audience that is not interested or willing to deconstruct the video Madonna uses sexual elements as well such as light clothing.
So by looking at the video and also knowing that Madonna had a religious upbringing, you will by deconstruction the video understand that she is questioning her religion. She is bringing up the issue about real life being more important than the religion she has been brought up with. But she does therefore also include political and moral issues that were big and important topics during the time the video was released.
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