Christian Metz (1974) - Language and Cinema

Christian Metz wrote a book titled “Language And Cinema.” In it he said that media types and genres go through four stages or periods. These are the experimental stage, the classic stage, the parody stage and the deconstruction stage. An example of a genre going through these stages is horror.

The film “The cabinet of Dr. Cagliari” is the experimental stage where people began to experiment with different ideas. Dracula is the classic stage, Scary Movie is the parody stage and Se7en is the deconstuctional stage, this means that the film contains elements of different genres.

Music videos also go through Metz’s model. Examples are Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen at the experimental stage, Thriller by Michael Jackson at the classic stage, Eat it by Weird Al Yankovic in the parody stage and Man, I feel like a woman by Shania Twain as a deconstruction. In the music video section, deconstruction is where a previous video is paid homage or respect to by another video. In this case Shania Twain pays homage to Rob Palmer’s Addicted to love.

  

 

From the experimental stage of Christian Metz’s model of genre development music videos were born. Rather than appearing on TV multiple times to promote or showcase themselves, bands began to create their own “mini movies” to distribute, these are the very first music videos.

MTV was the first ever all music television channel and it launched on Saturday 1^st August 1981. The first music video the broadcasted was the first music video ever broadcasted and it was “Video killed the radio star” by The Buggles. Here music videos began to move from static shots, e.g.; long shots, medium shots, close ups, etc to other techniques. Other techniques that were incorporated included fades, zoom ins and outs, match on actions, cross cutting, effects and a range of others.

The earlier music videos began with The Beatles in their film of their album “A hard days night.” A hard days night was released in 1964 and is a black and white British comedy starring The Beatles and directed by Richard Lester. Richard Lester later went on to direct the early Superman films.