The Fine Art of Commercial Freedom: British Music Videos and Film Culture

An outline and analysis of the British music video industry and its impact on film culture in the 1990s and 2000s

‘The first cut is the deepest’: excerpts from a focus group on editing music videos, with explanatory historical and theoretical notes

From a film-making perspective music video is arguably foremost an editor’s medium. Yet the development and diversity of the editor’s craft has been obscured in academic discourse by reductive arguments about the impact of MTV (chiefly about pace). This excerpt from our research focus group on editing demonstrates that a more nuanced thesis about the influence, exchange and refinement of creative practices, the relationship of editing styles to genres, the impact of changes in editing technology, and the political economy of the music video industry is needed. The editors who participated in the focus group were Tony Kearns, Tom Lindsay, Art Jones, Dawn Shadforth, Julia Knight and Adam Dunlop

The dancing eyes of the director: choreographers, dance cultures, and film genres in British music video 1979–2016

This article looks at the work of choreographers in British music video from Arlene Phillips (founder of Hot Gossip), to FKA Twigs and Wayne McGregor. The first section presents an overview of the development of genres of dance and choreography in music videos from the late 1970s to the present day, covering genres such as the loosely-choreographed pop act video, to the formal, tightly-choreographed routines of videos drawing on the Hollywood musical tradition, to the street dance video ushered in following Malcolm McLaren's breakthrough 'Buffalo Gals' video (1983). The article argues that British music videos should not be negatively compared to their bigger budget US counterparts but should instead be appreciated on their own merits – and those merits include the greater creative exchange with ballet and contemporary dance, and the use of techniques from experimental film and narrative film; and it argues that these features make dance in British music videos an exciting and critically acclaimed cultural form today. The author draws attention to the importance of 'social realism' within British choreographed music videos, and points out that the recent work of Matthew Bourne and FKA Twigs overrides the traditional distinction between 'dance film' and commercial music dance film

Power to the people: fifty years of British music video 1966-2016

This collection of 200 of the most influential music videos in Britain 1966 to 2016 is the result of a three-year University research project run in partnership with the British Film Institute and the British Library. The collection has been curated by Professor Caston on the basis of extensive archival research and interviews with directors, producers, cinematographers, editors, choreographers, colourists and video commissioners from the industry since 1966. Each video has been selected because it represents a landmark in music video history - a new genre, film technique, post-production method, distribution channel, or other landmark. Along with the 6 discs comes a booklet explaining the history of British music videos since 1966 and rare production credits: using archives, callsheets, interviews and trade press listings the researchers have identified credits for directors, producers, executive producers, directors of photography, editors, colourists, production companies and choreographers as well as information about the source material on which the video was shot where available. In order to protect the artistic integrity of each, the videos are presented in their original native aspect aspect ratio. The videos for Manfred Mann’s ‘Mighty Quinn’ and Flowered Up’s ‘Weekender’ have been digitally re-mastered for this collection from the original film prints dating back to 1967 and 1992

Music videos in the British screen industries and screen heritage: From innovation to curation. Introduction

In December 2019, Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece on the best videos of the year which began by asking, “What even counts as a music video now?” (Shaffer). Vevo, Tiktok and Instagram TV have blurred the lines. Videos can be an hour long. They can be events on YouTube Premiere. They can be virtual reality. The idea that the world of the earliest creators of pop promos was simple in comparison to today subtends this dossier. In 2015, I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to investigate the history of music videos in Britain since 1966. At the end of the grant, I curated a collection of the most significant of those videos into a limited-edition box set (Power). Selecting them involved very detailed discussions with our interviewees and industry consultants about just what a “music video”—known as a “promo” until the mid 1980s—is. The term “music video” arose in the 1980s. It was used in record labels to describe visual products mastered on physical videotapes for television broadcast. In fact, almost all of those products were shot on celluloid (16mm or 35mm) until digital technologies allowed HD to become the norm in the 2000s. For the purposes of this dossier, I define music videos and pop promos as a type of musical short film for mass audiences commissioned and released by record labels (usually) at the same time as the release of a synchronised audio “single”; the shorts comprise a copyrighted synchronised picture and audio track in which a percentage of the royalties accrue to the recording artist and/or record label. This dossier is a collection of core materials emerging from the AHRC project

Georgia Hudson: Interview

Interview with filmmaker Georgia Hudson about her career in screen advertising

Conservation and curation: Theoretical and practical issues in the making of a national collection of British Music Videos 1966­–2016

This article identifies and examines the research methods involved in curating a national collection of British music videos for the British Film Institute and British Library in relation to existing scholarship about the role of the curator, the function of canons in the humanities, and the concept of a hierarchy of screen arts. It outlines the process by which a theoretical definition of “landmarks” guided the selection of works alongside a commitment to include a regionally and socially diverse selection of videos to reflect the variations in film style of different music genres. The article also assesses the existing condition of British music video archives: rushes, masters, as well as documents and digital files, and the issues presenting academics and students wishing to study them. It identifies the fact that music video exists in the gaps between two disciplines and industries (popular music studies / the music industry and film and television studies / the screen industries) as an additional challenge to curators of the cultural form, alongside complex matters of licensing and formats

Danny Kleinman interview

Interview with film director Danny Kleinman about his career in screen advertising

The pioneers get shot: music video, independent production and cultural hierarchy in Britain

This article identifies and summarises the main findings of the AHRC research project ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video, 1966–2016’. It contextualises the history of music video as a film practice within an unspoken cultural hierarchy of screen arts widely shared in universities, policy circles and the British Film Institute. The article documents the main stages in the development of the music video industry and highlights the extent to which the pioneers served as early adopters of new technologies in videotape, telecine and digital film-making. The ACTT consistently lobbied against music video producers, as did the Musicians’ Union, and consequently music video producers emerged from the 1980s with virtually no protection of their rights. The ACTT's issue was new video technology which it opposed. It also opposed offline editing on video tape because it would lead to redundancies of film editors and potentially required fewer post-production crew. The MU's issue was royalty payments to session musicians and lip synch. The music video industry has functioned as a crucial R&D sector and incubator for new talent and new technologies in the British film and television industries as a whole, without experiencing any of the financial rewards, cultural status or copyright protections of the more esteemed ‘screen arts’