7. Street Spirit

I really should be analysing Fujiya & Miyagi's "Ankle Injuries", but I already did The White Stripes' video "Fell In Love With A Girl", which was much better, so I consider myself excused. Anyway, this leads me to a much more complex, interesting, and entertaining video, Radiohead's Street Spirit.

There is a lot of controversy over the meaning to both the song and the highly successful video, which is directed by Jonathan Glazer. The video, like the song, is a random assortment of images, some positive, some negative, some neutral. Each, however, uses time-warping effects on selective parts of the clip, which is very disorientation. As well as this, the film uses a high contrast monochrome filter combined with soft, precise lighting to cast powerful light and shadows across the subject, clearly illuminating the darkness like daytime, just another of the video’s strange attributes.

The combined audio and video convey both calm and intense depression simultaneously, in a way so that the two emotions combine effortlessly. The song is cited by Radiohead singer Thom Yorke as their darkest, most hopeless song “All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end.” The constant stream of minor chords and endless, out-of-tune vocals certainly suggest this, singing lyrics such as:
“Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under” and
”Cracked eggs, dead birds
Scream as they fight for life”; unconnected stories, filling the listeners head with images of however they interpret the vague, despairing poem. “That's why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning.” Yorke states. The video does the same, as a series of short clips which tell no story alone, or narrative combined, but convey intensely powerful emotions, amplifying the spirit of the song. This is an unusual way to plan a music video, but Glazer pulls it off perfectly with his incredible talent with visuals.

The video opens with a close up of Yorke, who slowly turns his head around to look at the floor. Thunder can be heard overhead – the only diegetic sound the video has to offer before fading out as the song begins. The camera moves back, and Yorke opens his arms in a biblical pose, and begins to fall. The camera moves back again, revealing the height Yorke stands over, and we watch him fall hopelessly towards the ground, inevitability sustained by slow motion as lightning crackles silently in the background. Cut to Yorke lying on a crumpled car roof. This is the first hint at the dream world setting of the video. As with a dream, the brain often skips the most traumatic parts to avoid waking – such as falling and appearing on the ground without memory of hitting it. Glazer uses the idea of the film being a dream repeatedly throughout, allowing for scenes which would otherwise be seen as irrelevant or unfitting, and how a dream fits in with the melancholic style of the mise-en-scene. The dreamworld shown to us is achieved in several ways, which will become apparent as I progress, and the effect of each scene throws powerful imagery as us, made dark by Glazer's use of camera work, lighting and general mise-en-scene. In time, the viewer starts to see the world the video is set in as a nightmare, trapping us in the harrowing metaphors.

The use of shot types helps the location get the maximum impact, as well as further adding to the mood of the video. For starters, there is no establishing shot in the entire film, or even any long shots to present the setting to the viewer. This has the effect of making the film seem more surreal and unnatural, making us unsure where we are looking at, whether we have seen it before, and even if we are seeing it at another time. This is partly achieved by the setting, a seemingly desolate caravan park, who's only inhabitants seem unlikely at best. Each caravan looks alike, metal crates which seem to serve no real purpose in the video. The setting strikes the viewer as weird because of its commonness – a popular cheap holiday home for the lower classes in society. It is so out of place and random that it seems almost as weird as some of the time warping clips, and yet it serves its purpose beautifully, filling space in the mise-en-scene, and showing off the powerful lighting used against the black backdrop. The background is an important aspect of the video, effectively hiding the outside world from the viewer, enclosing the world into a box of unsure proportions. The darkness could go on forever, or be only a few meters from the last focal point. The clarity it provides us with is stunningly vague, and continues to play with the viewer's head. Next is the lighting, which is cleverly set up to avoid the video being an emo-y mess of blacks and greys, throwing bold whites into the equation, which shine off the sides of faces and caravans like the full sun – and yet the video detaches itself from this simple explanation/definition by throwing the lights over specific spots, like in a play – look at 3.53, where a spotlight is thrown across the ground for the nun to perform over.

The harsh lighting is also used to throw deep shadows across the landscape and faces, notably in Thom's close ups, where his depressed face has a dynamic light show thrown across it, like an epic battle between light and dark. Of course which is winning is hidden by the crossfades used around these shots, blending tones and shapes in a confusing, powerful way, sending mixed images of his broken down face into out minds. This ambient lighting contributes to the illusionary effect of the production.

The camera angles used throughout the film are highly unconventional. Almost every shot is mathematically precise, positioned at right angles to the action, giving us a plain view of the action. Shots such as these are mainly avoided by filmmakers, as they are too plain and quickly become boring to watch, as opposed to a video with hundreds of different angles which add different perspectives to each scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sbqIyeed4g – this video is completely different in terms of pace, due to shot types and fast editing). This is done for many reasons. The first is to mix with the strange sense of nervous calm that comes from the action, created by the slow motion effect and the lack of sound, presenting us with scenes such as two Thom Yorkes, one jumping over a stick held by the other while in slow motion to make it look like the most normal thing in the world, which it does, shown to us with complete clarity, leaving nothing to the imagination or to confuse the viewer. The next reason is that the precise angles and refusal to zoom or move the camera at any point clearly defines boundaries for the scene – this is taken advantage of throughout the video, such as the scene with three nuns who jump to form a complex shape in the air. They enter the scene from the sides of the screen, jump, and then leave. The entering and leaving is made very clear to the viewer. The nuns do not attempt to leave by running towards or away from the camera, but at a precise 90 degrees to it. Meticulous planning on the director's part, adding to the mood slowly being built up.

Running away from the scene is a common theme in the video, as if the characters are trying to escape from the dreamworld. And yet there are some who seem perfectly content to sit in deckchairs late at night by their caravan, or stare in the face of danger, relying on the use of time warping as though they know that there is no danger. In this sense the world is portrayed as a form of purgatory. The characters are never shown in any physical pain, even after falling from a caravan, or risking their lives at the hands of a vicious looking dog. This always seem to be because of the time warping, which saves Yorke from hitting the ground with any speed, or being covered with what looks like tar. However, the peace shown extends only to the physical – the characters often shown themselves to be in mental pain, with Yorke almost always shown in a state of apparent despair. To the point where we almost never see his eyes, clenched shut against the world, which is another of the videos more unusual aspects. This removes the link between the viewer and Yorke, as if he does not want us to be a part of what he is burdened with “I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there.”, which fits in very well with this quote from Yorke during an interview about the song. This also explains why he never looks directly at the camera during his close ups(or at all), which is often the time in music videos where a link between artist and viewer is established. He often seems to be trying to escape, perhaps more than any body else in the video, who seem melancholy at most at the 1.16 point, where they sit around the caravan looking more bored than anything else, as if they miss the point, or have accepted it. That said, at the 1.00 point, a member of the band stands up and runs away, for apparently no reason. Yorke tries to leave the nightmare or break a metaphorical boundary at numerous points in the video, such as at the opening, where he spreads his arms and falls, or at 2.40, where he tries to run away, but is held back by the force of time, which slows him to a near standstill, or at 3.00, where he is seen fighting against the wind, reaching forward to reach the other side, but again the time slows down and he gets nowhere. 3.42, and Yorke is smashing panes of glass with a hammer, apparently without much success, as he repeats the action several times, and the broken glass is slows down, floating slowly away from him, a clear metaphor for escaping the box he is trapped in, but also symbolising the camera work, shot at an exact 90 degrees to the subject again, rendering him unable to leave for the sides of his cage. Right at the end of the video, however, Yorke throws himself back into the air in the same biblical pose as at the start, as if trying to mimic the same religious affinity as the nuns, who are shown running away (shown by the use of a Z axis a few seconds prior to the last shot), and partially succeeds, and is left hanging in the air with the last note of the song.