Music Video

Catalog description

The Music Video: Cinematic Perspectives explores the complicated and fruitful marriage of moving images and popular sound, from early twentieth-century experiments in “visual music” to today’s algorithmic platforms and self-directed pop auteurs. The course asks how the music video became both a laboratory for cinematic experimentation, a form of advertising, and a global medium used for expressing self, rhythm, and desire. Beginning with visual music and mid-century avant-garde experiments, we will follow how technologies of synchronization, editing, and performance evolved into the aesthetics of MTV and the visual album. In the second half, we turn to filmmakers like David Fincher, Hype Williams, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Melina Matsoukas, whose work moves fluidly between cinema and the music video What happens when rhythm becomes montage? How do editing, gesture, and fashion produce meaning? What does it mean for an artist to direct their own image in a post-MTV, streaming era? By combining historical study, aesthetic analysis, and theoretical reflection, The Music Video: Cinematic Perspectives offers students a framework for understanding how cinema’s past continues to reverberate through contemporary popular media, and how the short, musical image remains one of the most inventive forms of visual expression today.