A sentence caught my eye and I just had to mention it here. This is an excerpt from the Dec 2009 issue of Videography magazine. In his description of a new music video produced for the song, “Heaven Can Wait”, a duet between Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Director Keith Scofield is describing his goal and techniques for the music video.
The author says that Scofield’s “…biggest concern for the project was to maintain for the viewer a sense of complete randomness and meaninglessness.” Later, while editing, the Director says that, “…he had to make sure that viewers would not be able to accidentally find meaning or a narrative thread…”
Those comments just struck me as funny, or sad, or something. Not that I don’t understand the purpose of deliberately disorienting visual styles and editing and such, but I guess I prefer to think that they do serve to communicate something as part of a greater narrative thread – meaninglessness as an observation or feeling within a greater story – rather than as ends in themselves.
I have been through enough seasons in my life that felt random, futile, and meaningless to have discovered that those needn’t be the end of our stories, no matter how real or final or all-defining they may seem while we are in the midst of them.
MindSoulStory 